It was a bit of a challenge for me to make this site without using too many prefabricated elements. I wanted to start from scratch, and build it step for step.
I have created the graphical part of this website in Adobe Photoshop (a photo editing program). I tried to do it sober. Sometimes it was difficult to match colors, that's why I used the color matching calculator that I found on the website of
easyrgb. The map of Belgium (see personal information) is made in Adobe Illustrator. If you'd like to know which equipment I used to make my photos, you can click
here.
While making this website, I used several times the programming language PHP. PHP stands for "Hypertext PreProcessor", and is a "server side scripting language". If someone visits the website, the following steps will take place:
- a user enters the address of a PHP-page.
- the web server receives the request from the browser to interpret the page.
- the server runs through the PHP-code and generates subsequently a HTML-page. Depending on the situation the code will be executed in another way, and the result (in HTML) will be different.
- the browser receives the HTML-content from the server, and will show it so the user.
This technique makes it possible to make a "dynamic" website. Pages can change depending on certain variables.
An example is the sentence on the start page, where the visitors will be addressed with "goodmorning" as long as it has not been noon.
I have used much of the PHP-functionality in my photo album: although it uses only 1 PHP-file (album.php), it seems to consist of much more pages.
This is an example of such a page:
In PHP, variables can be passed through the address. That's additional information that you can find after the ?-sign. You can give these variables a randomly chosen name, so there are no real limitations.
I have used for instance a variable "pid". The first "0" of pid 0023 means that an English page without details has to be loaded. The next "0" indicates that a small sized photo has to be shown. "23" is the unique number of the photo itself.
If there were no dynamic pages, for every combination a new page would be needed: small photo without details in English, small photo with details in Dutch, medium photo without details in Dutch,...
MySQL
I use a MySQL-database for my album. The PHP-MySQL combination is very well-known. The server executes a PHP page, and concludes for instance that photo no 23 must be shown in medium format with details (see the example above). In the database will be looked up were photo no 23 can be found, and which details are available. That way, the additional table can be filled in with the correct data.
Testing the site
Before putting the site online, I have run it on my own PC for a while. While I wanted to test the PHP-code, that has to be executed on a server, a web server had to be installed. When I used Windows 2000 Professional, the built-in web server was IIS (Internet Information Services). Now that I'm using Windows XP Home, which contains no IIS, I have a free Apache server installed. The server allows to visit the off line website as if it is online on the Internet.
