Recently there's been a lot of changes in my life. Mostly extraordinarily good ones, but a few clunkers along the way which is to be expected I suppose. In any case this has led me to reevaluate a lot of my priorities and one of them is this site. Oh, to be sure, we're not going away. Not any time soon. However, there will be changes.

Part of the reason for that is I want to expand on and develop my own writing further and thus I'd like to reduce the time overhead this site requires. Drupal has evolved into a fascinating and powerful platform but at this stage in my life I'm looking more and more for things that "just work". So while I'd wholeheartedly recommend Drupal as a tool to build your next feature-rich web application, I have to say that right now, on the whole, it's kinda overkill as a blogging platform. What I'm looking for is something with a little more simplicity and ease of use to it. Something where you don't have to spend days and weeks building the site up from scratch; where you don't feel as if you're constantly reinventing the wheel. Something that already has beautiful and stylish themes developed for it in droves. And to that end I'll be moving this site to a Wordpress install in a few weeks time.

But even though I'm valuing simplicity and ease of use these days over gee-whiz technowizardy, I am at heart a technophiliac. I love technology, that will never change, and I'm always looking to try or learn something new. Now, when something combines both those elements into one, when something strokes my love of  technology, is simple to use, and it just happens to be free! I can't help but to gush over it. Such is the case with XAMPP for Windows.

I'm currently working on a small database driven PHP programming project that is a bit of a pain in the arse. It also requires a web based front end. As such I end up writing a line or two of code, then uploading it to the server to test, writing another line or two and uploading again. Repeat ad nauseam. It just gets to be a little tiresome after a while.

So today I finally got it into my head that I was going to have a full-fledged Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl (AMPP) web server environment on my home machine. For those of you who don't know, a web server is the piece of software that sits and listens for incoming requests for web pages and then delivers them to whomever or whatever (you'd be surprised at what reads websites these days) requested them. That would be the Apache part of the equation. MySQL is the same thing, except for databases and PHP and Perl are scripting languages that allow you to add programmable functionality to your website.

Now, I had done this at various points in the past, but not recently. It's always been a great big chore. Primarily because while these programs appear to do exceedingly simple tasks, the reality is that over time they've grown to become great big glowering monstrosities. Sort of like a very angry, genetically modified Swiss Army knife on steroids with a full arsenal of advanced alien technology at its' disposal. They are, to be frank, a fucking torture to install and configure properly.

XAMPP changes all that. It literally makes installing a full fledged web server and development environment on your machine a one-step, point-and-click affair. Oh, OK, there might have been four or five steps involved but my point is, anyone can do this (anyone twisted enough to want such a thing of course). And true, I did have to edit one line in each of two text files and then restart Apache in order to get libcurl support (don't ask) but that was a small price to pay for having XAMPP installed and running on my home Windows box inside of 10 minutes. It even comes with a FTP server (Filezilla) but I've had that one my machine for years so I didn't bother with it.

And administering it is just as easy. Just browsing to http://localhost will bring up a webpage where you can get the status of all your services, administer your databases, etc. quickly and easily. When it comes to starting and stopping the various services there's a nice graphical client that lives in your system tray. Should you have problems or questions there's copious documentation and an active forum (don't let the German scare you -- English is spoken there). As an added bonus, XAMPP isn't just for Windows, but has installers for Linux, OS X and even Solaris!

In short, XAMPP makes this technophiliac sing with simple joy.

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