I’ll admit in the past that I haven’t been the biggest supporter of this type of thing, but I’ve changed my view. If you’re unfamiliar with a server side programming language, it is basically something that is executed on the server to produce the page, rather than some static HTML page. For example, this blog works that way. There are no static pages, they’re all produced when requested by a visitor.
There are a lot of different options you can choose from that are server side programming.
CGI/PERL: When I got my first webpage in the 90′s, this was the language of choice. Pretty much all hosting will have this because it’s just so old. Personally I’ve never known how to program in perl, but you can still do it.
Server Side Includes (SSI): I’ve done very basic programming with this in the past. You can tell pages that use it by the extension. They typically are listed as .shtml. I’m not exactly sure how versatile, but it’s definitely an example.
Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP): This is the language of today basically. It’s the one that I sat down and learned. It’s like a lot of the other languages out there like java, C, C++, etc. That made it pretty easy for me to learn in a relatively short period of time. Go with PHP if you’re looking for something to learn because it has the most free information available online to learn and the most community forums with active people.
I thought it was important for me to explain to you why you should be learning this. Like I said with my very first post, this is an advanced blog. I want to talk about advanced topics. In this case, PHP gives us a lot more power to automate. This is the only reason that I want to use it.
The problem you’re going to run into is that you’re going to have too many websites at one point. You’re just going to run out of time every single day because there is just too much to do. When you can automate a 1000 page website instantly, than you’re rockin’ the shit.
This is why you have to learn server side programming because that’s exactly where we’re going with this blog and I’m definitely not going to give you a copy of the language you’ll need to do things.
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