Ted Ulle gets up at the podium and welcomes every body.
Adam Young is first up, WMW PHP mod forum. He explains that you can do anything with scripting. It is more important to know what you want done, versus saying you need scripting. You can really do anything with scripting. What do you need to know first? First ask your host what they support. Figure out what is best for your server. Do you have someone working for you that knows this stuff? Figure out what you are trying to achieve. Look at available ready made scripts, also. Tips for better Scripts; you need a test environment, make sure to test everything, find the authoritative resources such as PHP.net, again - you need to understand the problem before writing the script, find scripts that do most of what you want to do and modify those, understand what those scripts do in detail (how they write, security issues, can they be hacked, XSS issues, etc.). Some common pitfalls, security (analyzing user input (SEL injection, XSS), auto form submission, research), misinformation, inadequate testing, not understanding that there are multiple ways to do the same thing. In summary, do the research and test.
Todd something was next, he seems to be a last minute addition. He said some notes from his note pad... Know how your servers work. With proper setup you can save a ton of development time. Look at Apache directives. It beats the RFCs he said. You can prevent duplicate content. He rarely uses mod_rewrite because you don't always need it. He said other solutions make it easier for your server. Server security.
Dan Kramer is next up to give a live demo of an install of WordPress. I cannot write this info, I am sorry. He then showed a PERL script off.
Brian Gmyrek from Traffic Programming is now up. To be a developer, you want to be a problem solvers. Then just get started using LAMP (linux, apache, mysql, php, perl, python). A lot of webmasters are half way there. So then start solving smaller problems. Then install linux on a box. Also, make sure to read code and examples and resources. Most devs he said have a huge book library. Make sure to read the right books (use amazon reviews), PHP, PERL books, PHP & MySQL books, Orielly are good. If you are really serious, he said learn C. PHP is easy to integrate into web pages. He showed some code examples. Perl is not as plug as play like PHP. It is more mature and still very good for web applications. It is good for sysadmin tasks. It is also good for text processing. And there are tons of modules out there already. He showed a Perl script that makes a Froogle feed. Then he goes over Shell scripts, aka the linux command line. Showed some examples of that, including rsync. Then he moved over to MySQL, he uses phpMyAdmin, he uses Apache .htpasswd and ssl. He showed a shell script to do a quick back up of your db. He talks about database design. He then shows an example of MySQL an ad system database, showing a database design for a typical solution.
Final speaker is Ted Ulle who is not a scripter, he said. He is talking about .NET potholes. IIS knows corporate business systems. IIS is not case sensitive. Must be aware of duplicate URLs, just because of case sensitivity. Just try to always use lower case. HTTP Status Codes, a typical problem is that coders don't use an http header with a 404, instead they just make a custom page that shows 404 in the title. Microsoft hides 301 and 302 redirects, he said. ISAPI Rewrite is the savior for IIS, it is like mod_rewrite but designed for IIS. He shows resources like seoconsultants.com/tools/ and xoc.net.
