This is a guest post from the Xavier Media site LearnPHPFree.com.

Welcome to Beginning PHP!

So you have decided to start learning one of the most powerful Internet programming languages there is - Congratulations! Welcome to Beginning PHP, My name’s David and together we will start discovering why over 22 million websites use PHP to generate amazing dynamic pages.

So what is PHP?

PHP was created in 1995 by an independent software developer named Rasmus Lerdorf. His first PHP script was a Perl/CGI program that kept a log of each visitor that came to his site. The script then displayed how many visits he had received on each page. He soon started receiving emails from other web masters across the Internet asking how he did this (a “Counter” as this is called, were very rare back then.) Because of the interest in his script he started to develop PHP into a new language, by adding more and more features to his script. Eventually, he decided to stop programming PHP in Perl/CGI, and start constructing it with a more powerful language, “C”. Thus the interest in PHP keep growing as more features were added and soon other people started writing code for it. It is now one of the most popular languages on the Internet, with contributing programmers across the world.

Should I learn PHP?

As long as you want to…YES! There is not a person I can think of that would not benefit from the ability to post their own dynamic resume online, or have the capability to list their products or services on the World Wide Web (www). With knowledge of PHP you could do everything from running an Ebay Clone, to managing a Photography site, to building the next Xanga. Don’t get me wrong though, you don’t have to start the next Hotmail to find a use for PHP! It is just as important for giving small sites the leverage to succeed online.

Anything I should know before I start this course?

Yes - HTML. HTML (Hypertext markup Language) is the simplest formatting language on the web. While PHP, Perl, ASP, and others transfer and process information, HTML makes it look good. For example, think of Microsoft Word. What you type into Word is similar to the function that PHP serves - it supplies the data. But just typing text into MS Word doesn’t look very good. That is where the formatting features of Word come in. You can change the size, color, position, and look of the text in your document with the features of MS Word. That is what HTML does.HTML makes the information that you output from PHP look good.
So that is why I recommend having a basic knowledge of HTML. If you don’t know it already here are some good sites to help you learn this basic language.

What do I need?

This is a big question and mostly depends on how skilled you are with other aspects of the computer. PHP requires the core interpreter and function libraries that you have to get from www.php.net. No, window’s does NOT come ready for PHP programming. (Some Linux distributions do however.) This leaves you with four choices when it comes to setting up the PHP language so that you can start programming.

Install and compile the binary distributions for PHP and/or “Apache” web server on your machine. (Advanced) visit php.net for more information.

Install EasyPHP from EasyPHP.org. (Easy, but only features PHP 4 and has some problems with Advanced Programs/scripts.)

Install WAMP (Windows Apache MySQL PHP) or LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) on your own machine, or better yet, on some OTHER machine on YOUR network. If you are on windows you can visit wampserver.com and download the newest release. (Intermediate)

The way I Recommend: Buy some web space on a server that supports PHP and MySQL. (about $5-10 dollars a month). I highly recommend 1and1.com. They are like the “walmart” of hosting companies. (The largest in the world) they offer hosting for as low as $2.99 a month for 5 Gigabytes of space and 10 MySQL Databases!!! Don’t worry they don’t skimp on features ether! (Free Domain and “.htaccess” support!)

After all, if you are learning PHP you are going to be using it anyway… so you might as well buy hosting space and a domain now before the name is taken. If you already have a web site your hosting company may already have PHP install on your server. (Call/Email them to be sure.)
If you don’t want to pay for web space but want to put a site online I recommend that you look into some free hosting options like 100webspace.com or Dot Geek - or just choose the one that fits you from these lists: PHP Free Hosting List and PHP MySQL Free Hosting List.

But be cautious - they all have their non-monetary price!
Personally… I started out with Easyphp. It is a snap to install (it’s an .exe file) and will get you running fast. It worked great while I was learning PHP and coding small scripts. Then I shopped around and after looking at many different hosting companies like “BlueHost” and “godaddy” I finally chose 1and1.com for a place on the internet to host my first site. Recently I deleted Easyphp as I needed more power for my advanced scripts and took an old computer and installed XP and WAMP on it so that I can build and test my sites on my own personal network and then upload the files to 1and1. So the choice is yours, just remember that if you install a web server, you need to SECURE it BEFORE YOU GO ONLINE! Otherwise someone might use it to gain control of your PC!

While it takes months to come around, it is all over in a mater of hours, the latest Page Rank review from Google and the affects which it has on you, your site and your profitability. But has it actually made a difference to your sites? Have you seen any changes in activity, traffic or profitability?

The chances are that you will have seen some changes over the last few days although these vary widely across the board. This is the time when some of those “useless” backlinks that you attracted can actually have a real impact upon your site, with any change in their Page Rank filtering through to your site – and hopefully giving you more power!

But is the Page Review as vital as it once was? Can it still make or break a business?

While there is no doubt that the Page Rank review is vital and can have a real impact upon the power and profitability of your site, the value of the review has diminished over the years. In years gone by it was in many ways a case of the “tail wagging the dog” in that Google was the be all and end all of life on the internet, and the Page Rank review was vital.

Over the last few years we have seen the introduction of other sites, other promotional strategies and other ways of attracting traffic. We have also seen Google completely change the algorithms which update the Page Rank system, meaning that a PR7 site of today may bear no comparison to a PR7 site of yesteryear.

Webmasters are taking some power back from Google and while it would be foolish to suggest that Google are not vital to your success, they are not “as vital” as they once were. The more Google pushes for dominance, the more new and exciting promotional techniques we see appearing. Google is not dead, but the webmaster world is fighting back!

In the last few days I’ve noticed some weird blog spam in some of my blogs. The thing with this spam is that Akismet is not reacting and marking the comments as spam. They go directly to the approve comment queue.

It’s easy to see that the comment is a spam comment, but it’s a little bit annoying that Akismet can’t see it’s spam

Anyway, the weird part of these spam comments are the URL field because it’s just http://url as web site and not a wokring web site Since the comments don’t contain any links or other contact information these spam comments are completely useless if they somehow should get approved and not marked as spam. They are simply just words Since the spam is coming from everywhere (different networks, IPs and users) it must be some kind of trojan infecting peoples computers and sending the spam.

As you can see on this sample comment, it’s just words and a non-working URL:

I get a feeling that someone did a poor job programming this spam bot/trojan

Have you also seen this kind of poor spam comments lately?

Since Clickbooth hasn’t been able to approve my site in time for this review I’m just publishing my review of the signup process. Since I still after several days waiting don’t have access to the publisher functions I have decided to ignore that part of their site.

I’ve been trying to earn some money from Clickbooth Affiliate Network and I have to say that their registration process almost lost me to someone else since it’s over-kill in annoying. For example you have to fill in your phone number to receive a call with a PIN code before you can complete the registration process. They claim it’s for preventing fraud, but I can’t really see how that can prevent any fraud

Next step in the registration are the categories. Unfortunately they didn’t have that many good categories for a webmaster related web site like this so I had to go for “Business/B2B”. What surprised me where all the “Email Submit” categories they had…..

They claim they approve sites within 72 hours, but that’s not the case when I signed up. I sent an email to their support too to speed up the approval process without success. They didn’t even answer my email

From what I can see their just another publisher network for ads, but if you want to earn some extra cash you could try them out (if they approve you that is).

I decided to update my list of Pagerank 10 websites I posted earlier since Google is said to have updated their pagerank. So here’s the updated list:

• validator.w3.org Downgraded to PR9
• web.mit.edu
• www.adobe.com
• www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/index.html New on the list
• www.adobe.com/downloads/ New on the list
• www.adobe.com/products/index.html New on the list
• www.adobe.com/downloads/ New on the list
• www.apple.com/quicktime/download Downgraded to PR9
• www.doe.gov New on the list
• www.energy.gov
• www.google.com
• www.keio.ac.jp Downgraded to PR9
• www.mac.com Downgraded to PR9
• www.macromedia.com (redirected to adobe.com)
• www.microsoft.com Downgraded to PR9 (could be because I was redirected to www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx)
• www.nasa.gov
• www.nsf.gov
• www.real.com
• www.usa.gov/index.shtml New on the list
• www.w3.org
• www.whitehouse.gov
• www.yahoo.com Downgraded to PR9

One of the more funny things about the update of pagerank is that both Yahoo and Microsoft got downgraded. Could it be because of the proposed merger between the two?

I used the Google toolbar in Firefox to check these sites so I may have missed someone . In that case, please let me know and I’ll update the list.