web server – Graphic & Web Design

Basic BASH Terminal commands for Web Designers

The moment you choose to get into web design and development, you choose to enter a universe of endless connections in between machines scattered across the globe.

mother — Louise Bourgeois’s Maman spider sculpture and the web it cast in shadows at dawn. National Gallery of Canada. Ottawa, Ontario Canada. Photo ©Eric Girouard.

There is you at your computer, and then there is everything else on the internet. By definition, the rest of the internet is “remote” to you dear reader of this post.

So, once again by definition, web design is a career where all the important stuff happens on other machines – on “remote web servers” usually – and being able to connect to such a machine to create and edit files and folders as well as manage transfers of data from machine to machine is a valuable skill.

The most efficient tool for logging into any remote computer is the CLI (“command-line interface“) which you gain access to when you start an application called the Terminal.

Create a valid HTML 5 template using PHP Includes

This is an old video I posted many years ago to my own web site. It is – I believe – the most popular post I have ever created. At last count, the video has over twenty-five thousand hits. I had the step-by-step written tutorial on my site back then and I lost track of how many times it was the most popular thing on my web site each month.

This is a beginner’s tutorial on how to create a valid HTML 5 template that uses PHP includes (“require” actually) that assembles the code on the server. This gives designers the opportunity to build a theme (or “skin”) that can manage the look of an entire web site – large or small.

This type of coding is a stepping-stone exercise in between coding HTML by hand and having a fully dynamic database-driven site, such as WordPress, or a custom content management system (“CMS”).

Enjoy.

Installing & Configuring the LAMP Virtualbox web server

Note

The screenshots in this tutorial were created on both an iMac (macOS 10.13.6) and a Ubuntu 18.04 Linux machine. When you configuring your instance of Virtualbox the appearance of the interface and the location of some controls may be different. The functionality remains the same on every platform (macOS, Windows or Linux).

Case-sensitivity

Please note that Linux is a case-sensitive filesystem. This means that “file.html” and “File.html” (different capitalization of the letter F) are understood by the computer as two different files!

So, in web design, please standardize your file or folder naming to:

lowercase letter and/or numbers only
periods reserved for use as the last character before the file name extension ex: .html, .css, etc.
no spaces in file/folder names

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