Whether you are a hosting guru, web developer, or client, it's always interesting and valuable to pick the brain of someone who has successfully made his or her mark on the industry. After all, we all want to gain as much insight as we can into why some business ventures make it while others don't.

If you attended HostingCon.2005, you probably had the chance to meet Chris Wells and his associates at the InterWorx booth. As president and CEO of both NEXCESS.NET and InterWorx, he is in the unique position of having a role in both the hosting and development fields.

Any web developer, designer, or webmaster can benefit from having a local web server. Even if that developer has no interest in securing and maintaining the server his or her websites live on, a local server can act as a convenient mirror for testing updates, trying new designs, and other general sand-boxing activities.

Web developers whose hosts utilize the popular LAMP platform (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) are frequently hit with a dilemma. Since understanding Linux is not a prerequisite for website administrators, many of them lack the knowledge necessary for setting up a LAMP server from scratch (or at least they may think so). But thanks to the improved package management on Linux distributions like Debian, installing a functional web server is not nearly the chore it was just a couple years ago.

Any programmer will tell you how important it is to maintain readable code. Not only does this make updating easier for the original coder and anyone that follows, but it makes commenting much more sparsely needed.

Naturally, this is all easier said than done. That's never truer than when your code consists of two different languages intertwined. For instance, adding just a few PHP features to HTML can quickly have your entire file looking more like PHP than HTML.

Fortunately, PHP offers us a way around this when it comes to control structures like if, for, and switch. Using a bit of alternative syntax can make your code more easily readable regardless of whether you are a PHP programmer dabbling in web design or a web designer dabbling in programming.

Wildcard subdomains are useful for a variety of reasons. If you want to host blogs or forums for multiple users, they are handy because they can get username.domain.tld working no matter what username is without any administrative work. It can also be used by content management platforms like Drupal to handle multiple subdomains with a single installation. If nothing else, it can be used to make sure links that start with misspellings like ww and wwww go where they were intended to.

So how does one set this up?

Those of us in the web development business are more than familiar with PHP. In fact, most of us are crazy about it (except for those of us stuck using ASP).

But maybe you haven't used it yet because you aren't a programmer. Even if that's the case, there is still plenty of PHP that you could be using. If you do any sort of web design and would be willing to learn to use a single PHP function, make it include().

This tutorial is going to walk you through the basic setups of Apache HTTP Server (web server) and PHP on a Windows workstation/server. The installations will utilize the automatic installation and configuration of Apache, using the MSI executable, and the manual installation of PHP. The versions of Apache and PHP given in this tutorial are the latest stable releases as of this writing.

The Web is a realm of pure capitalism the likes of which has never existed before. More than any particular industry or field, it is truly a consumer's market. While just having a website was once enough to stand out in the crowd, it is now a world overpopulated not just with legitimate competition but a countless number of charlatans and inexperienced teenagers posing as service providers. With so many fly-by-night sites acting as background noise, a soft spoken website is easily drowned out.

There is already a vast array of material available on how to use your website as a marketing tool, both on the Web and in publications like Ping! Zine. Rather than rehash all the tips you've already seen countless times, I want to help you look at development in a slightly different manner. While most web developers see their craft as a matter of coding and graphics design, psychology is an under-appreciated element that will help you gain an edge on the competition.

Pouring through code and help documents in order to theme your favorite blog, forum, or web site software can be a huge chore. Things are particularly tough when you have multiple packages used to create one, cohesive web site. Fortunately, theming doesn't always need to be this difficult. There is a faster, simpler way through the use of CSS.

If you are running your own domain, there's a good chance users can access it using more than one URL. For example, one domain is often linkable using yourdomain.tld, www.yourdomain.tld, yourdomain.yourhost.tld, an IP address, and so on.

Why, you may ask, could this be a problem?

Whether you design websites for a living or just for fun, PHP can be a powerful tool. For those unfamiliar with it, PHP is a programming language that has made its mark primarily as a scripting tool for generating dynamic Web content. In addition to its ability to create interactive Web pages, PHP can be a useful time-saver when used to create a templating system for websites.

PHP templating can be done using one of three general methods: pulling the template into your content, pulling your content into the template, or pulling both content and templating into and single file. Even if you are a complete novice to programming, just a few short snippets of code can make your development life easier.