Trials and Tribulations

Okay so this week I decided after working on my sister's website, that I really should setup a local testing server, so that I can test amendments more effectively before putting them on the main server. Because I hadn't been doing much, I just setup a folder temporarily and used that, but technically this has security flaws since it was in a public area.

I still use Dreamweaver on my Windows 10 installations, which is a really difficult product to replace with open source, because it does literally everything in one place - or most things. I used it for both mark-up / scripting and for file management, but have in the past also used it to check db tables as well. I'm going to miss the bit where I press Ctrl+Shift+U, because it really sped up the workflow when developing on a remote web server.

So I decided to do it anyway and give web development a go on Ubuntu and to be fair, once I got over the teething problems of getting setup, it is really great how you can just run a LAMP setup on your computer with comparative ease. My main problem was actually with setting up PhpMyAdmin and in particular with Ubuntu 20.04, but a great tutorial finally set me straight with a little work around.

Unfortunately I have also run into some issues with my wifi adapter, usb, which has meant I am having to run on the previous kernel rather than the updated one; very frustrating. Also engaging with the community on Ask Ubuntu hasn't really helped, it seems a very daunting setup for a learner, but is still a vast resource with the answers to most problems. It is clearly rooted in the ethos of learning to help yourself, but it's barriers to entry are pretty high. You can ask questions, provided they have to be formatted in the correct way, which is pretty difficult as a newcomer and even moreso when trying to use a mobile device, devoid of the markup tools. You can edit and you can also answer, but frustratingly you can't comment like a fully fledged member of the community, so you have to know the answer, absolutely know it, to be able to climb the ladder. No small feat when the questions are pretty technical and could have any number of solutions. Having the ability to probe and discuss, pick people's brains has to be one of the key ways to learning, but this is essentially cut off in this community. Be an expert or don't take part...