In my quest to make my wishlist more dynamic and easier to update, I had an epiphany in the middle of the day today at work.
Amazon has a lot of extra features that many people don’t even realize. My thought was that they may offer as RSS/XML style version of their wishlist. If this was the case, I could then use CSS to manipulate it and make it look like every other page on this site.
Sadly though, this is not an option in Amazon. Leaving me to still manually update this list as best I can.
I had mentioned to one of the guys at work how I was trying to setup a testing region for this blog on my server at home last Thursday. I also said how I was having trouble getting everything setup properly. Right away he told me to check out XAMPP.
Here’s a brief description from their site:
Many people know from their own experience that it’s not easy to install an Apache web server and it gets harder if you want to add MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use – just download, extract and start.
In all seriousness, it really was that easy. I’ve never had an installation for any type of server/database software as smooth, easy, and fast. Once it was installed, it has its own control panel that can start and stop each of the services, in addition to, I believe, a couple other things.
The installation itself took under 10 minutes and the setup for my testing region took maybe another 20 since all I needed to do was import my database and move my web folder to the server.
If your interested in playing with Apache webserver, PHP scripting, or MySQL databases, I highly recommend giving this a go.
I never finished setting up my server to be a web host, so I could test new layouts for my webpage, because I couldn’t get anything to connect to the database.
Funny how I start all over again and come to the same result.
>_<