My Stack Overflow journey begins

So In an attempt to become more visible within the web development community and to try and learn new things off more experienced people and help out people that are less experienced than myself I have joined Stack Overflow

I have been a member for a couple of days and I'm already gaining respect. I think the badges system is cool, its nice to see you are earning respect and other awards for helping out other developers.

Check out my flair in the right hand bar.

The importance of PHP Coding Standards... (how I roll)

I remember very well how appalling my first few lines of PHP were. I was just getting stuck into learning PHP and I felt like I already knew all there was to know, how wrong I was.

When I first began coding I didn't give a second thought to what my code looked like, as long as when I ran it, it worked (kinda) I was happy. In the beginning everything was simple. I generally worked alone and the tasks that I worked on were fairly basic. The problems came when I began coding my first major project, with 4/5 other coders and they had to be able to read my code and vice versa.

Coming up......

Here are the things that I am hoping to write about in the upcoming weeks.

• MVC Frameworks (Zend Framework, PHPCake, Code Igniter, Kohana)
• Dojo
• Coding Standards
• Lazy/Eager Loading object properties
• DVCS (git)
• Optimization Techniques

If anyone has any preference on what they would like to see first then post a comment and I'll see what's most in demand.

Setting up virtual hosts for your web projects

Right so I know I said I was going to write about how to set up your local development environment and that tutorial may come along sometime in the future but today I'm going to write about setting up sub-domains in your local test environment.

It begins.

This is my first post. This is going to be my most concerted effort at doing something I've been meaning to do properly for a long time. Its time to blog.

I will be blogging regularly mostly on web development. My postings will mainly consist of short tutorials. These will serve to:

a) Help me remember stuff I've done (problems solved etc).
b) Help other people out, hopefully so they don't do the dumb stuff I do.

I would class myself as an intermediate web developer specialising in PHP, MySQL, CSS, HTML, Javascript and some other abbreviations. My first few posts will walk through setting up a local development environment and completing the beautifully cliche "Hello World" tutorial.

Beautiful.

//index.php
<?php 

echo "hello world"; 

?>