Sandman
In article <ec2aca2a-9a65-4e5c-9429-d7bdfd264a58@d36g2000prb.googlegroups.com>, Steve Carroll <fretwizz@comcast.net>wrote:

Snit
[0096] Not sure what you mean, by the way, by getting "points" for [0096] having automatically validating CSS.

Sandman
I'm sure Steve understood perfectly though. You know, the person I was responding to.

Steve Carroll
I did. I've learned a bit since I started in on this stuff (you may remember my questions about php awhile back). I've fiddled with creating a simple php based CMS. I rolled my own with a Ruby on Rails install. I've taken a website that I created for someone and ported the same look and feel to Wordpress. I've worked with MySQL in a terminal window, in phpMyAdmin and in some other OSX apps designed for it. I haven't gotten my hands nearly as dirty as a professional like you but I'm no longer a clueless newb about this stuff... the way a certain self professed "IT teacher" obviously is.

Sandman
Yeah, as I said - this isn't hard stuff really, and anyone determined to make a dynamic page would learn about php, or ruby, in a couple of weeks enough to make something that works, which always leads to a sense of satisfaction and further determination to build upon it.

I'm a schooled graphics artist and was employed by ICA F?rlaget, one of sweden largests publishers in 1993 as an Art Director for a magazine. I moved within the company to the newly formed Internet Department which was meant to make home pages for all publications. I was still the graphics artist and knew nothing about perl (the SSI/CGI programming language of choice back then). My collegue back then who were a programmer was unfortunately very lazy, so over the years I taught myself perl to pick up the slack between us, and soon I built my first CMS, entirely with RXML and Pike, the markup-parsing language and the scripting language used by Roxen.

In fact, Roxen themselves have built a XML-based CMS on top of their web server foudnation that they once came over and tried to sell us - but it turned out that they left us and were more impressed with what I had done with their base than they had themselves. I didn't know it at the time, but years later another associate had heard from them about "that cool CMS system at ICA F?rlaget built using our tools", so we had become a reference for them. Funny :)

Oh, I'm getting carried away here. Anyway, when PHP became more and more popular it was a pretty natural for my perl-background to move to it and I started to build Atlas back in 2001, right around when the dotcom bubble burst and layoffs were everywhere. In 2003, with me being the only one left on the Internet Department, I was also let go and started my own business and took the base for Atlas with me, and I've developed it ever since.

I've glanced at Ruby on Rails, and it looks sweet for someone starting from scratch, but as it is, most of the sweet functionality of Ruby on Rails are already present in Atlas, so I've pretty much built my own PHP Framework that works exactly how I want it.

You won't be able to understand what I'm saying, but you can watch these two videos on how I'm building applications in Atlas:

http://sandman.net/pages/Skapa_Moduler_I_Atlas This is a video about me creating an atlas "module", which in this case is a product catalog. A very basic one of course, but you would probably get the idea. A module is a set of rules for how to edit and insert data into one or several databases, so you'll see me set up the DB, set up the rules for how it's edited and so forth.

http://sandman.net/pages/Skapa_Applikationer_I_Atlas And this video is me creating a Atlas application, based on the aforementioned module. It's very easy and the time to result is very short.

This became a very long post, hope you didn't fell asleep :)