There is a saying (I think of Chinese origin) that says, "A conversation across a table with a wise man is worth a thousand books."

I had a short conversation with a web developer friend of mine about page layout and positioning of cells or tableless tables using CSS. He encouraged me to really get up to speed with DreamWeaver which I have been avoiding. I am doing mainly hand coding now with some text editors. So I mentioned the time taken to upload stuff to the web so that I could see the PHP pages with all the includes and he said that he used IIS first and just puts stuff in his local www folder.

Now I had previously had Apache, PHP, MySQL (AMP) set up on my PC but wasn't using it. Now I reinstalled an AMP set-up available as phpdev and installed the Nucleus weblog to that. Already (set up time aside) I am saving tons of time. Why? Well when I am using included files and I need to edit that I have to upload that file. If I tweak the layout on the PHP file I need to upload that and if I tweak the layout using CSS then I need to upload the external CSS file.

In some instances I am making changes to all three files because they are all interdependent and all affect the browser display.

Now let's consider the local AMP set up. I have my web files in the www folder of the phpdev installation and when I make a change to any of the dependent files (included files, web pages or style sheet) and *save* the file, it is as though I have already uploaded it - no World Wide Wait. To check the effect of the current changes I just refresh the web page...a matter of seconds.

Cool, don't you think?

This is excellent for checking minor adjustments to layout and formatting, where you may be needing to make many changes and check the effect.

From the programmer's point of view (and that is not me ~grin~ ) this set up will speed development time also.

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