Learning PHP - Part 1
Woo hoo! My first entry in my projects page.
Anyways, I know I've shared interest in starting to learn PHP in my blog, though I didn't really go in depth on the actual steps I was taking and things like that, so that's why I'm here.
To make a long story short, at the risk of reiteraing what I said in my initial blog post, I began to become interested in PHP as a language when I was doing research regarding self-hosting. I'll go more in-depth on the self-hosting aspect of things later, as I feel that is a whole other project for myself, though I'll go over the basic definition of PHP and why it piqued my interest below. In the meantime, before I get my own domain and VPS up, (which I will definitely write about here once I get to it) I'll share about what I'm doing to make steps towards actually learning and getting experience with PHP.
What is PHP?
PHP stands for "Hypertext Preprocessor". It used to stand for "Personal Home Page", but that's the past. PHP basically functions as a server-side script. You may be wondering, what is a server-side scripting language? Well, I'll tell you!
A server-side scripting language is basically a coding language which, instead of altering your webpage on a visitor by visitor basis, it alters your site as a whole. For example, JS is a client-side scripting language, which means how things change due to JS is determined solely by the visitor on your page. Like, when you clicked on this post from the left navbar to open this, no one else will see that change, only you and the others who do the same action to get those results. Meanwhile with PHP, it allows for easy uploading, updating, and sorting of items hosted within your website's server instead of having to manually change your HTML every time.
This means, to properly use PHP, you need to have access to your website's server. This is not possible through static site hosts like Neocities, as we cannot access the server that our respective sites are hosted on. This also means, if your website uses PHP, it is no longer considered a static site, it's now a dynamic site.
I'll go more in-depth regarding the full capabilities of PHP both later in this post and with my future posts, but for now, this is the bare bones explaination of what PHP is.
Now, onto what I actually use to learn and put my learnings into practice.
What I Use
So, you may have pieced together that I don't have my own VPS (Virtual Private Server) yet. So, how am I even doing anything? We'll I'm using a different free site host with server-side access. I am currently using Altervista to practice PHP and to work on building what will become my self-hosted site. Altervista has worked very well for me so far, which I can appreciate.
I've also been using FileZilla to upload/update documents so I don't need to access my dashboard constantly, which has been a lifesaver. I also code in VSCodium. I also use this to work on my Neocities webpages, and I highly recommend for folks to use VSCode (Windows, Mac)/VSCodium (Linux) to edit their sites, it's so much more convenient and streamlined than working in the Neocities editor. I can get into my extensions at a later point, but I'm honestly a little lazy right now LOL.
Lastly, what I use to actually learn. I have a... strange yet effective way of teaching myself how to code. I've been using W3Schools' course on PHP, along with fucking with random scripts I could find online. If I don't like how something works, or if it's straight up broken, I'll force myself to fix it. This may be a little unorthodox, however I learned HTML & CSS in this way and I think it's super effective for me. This may be a bit of a tangent, but I think learning coding and memorizing everything is a fool's errand. Even now I don't fully know all of the capabilites of HTML and CSS, let alone have it all committed to memory, but I think that's fine. As long as I understand what I can do, the basics, and things like that, I can generally trudge through perfectly fine haha.
Humble Beginnings
So, to begin my journey, I got my Altervista site all set up, and I began my search for PHP snippets. I snatched this relatively simple RSS updater and this much more complex blog script from ophanimkei.com. I higly recommend checking out this site, it's super cool and very helpful if you're interested in self-hosting at all.
Anyways, I'm unsure if it's because I'm not on my own VPS, but the log in function for both scripts just. Does not work for me. At all. I've been tinkering with it for the past few weeks now to no avail. After many days of frantic Google searches and many, MANY tinkerings, I wasn't able to really get anywhere. So, I started the W3Schools PHP course to see if I could understand what the fuck was going on and why it was not working. I haven't gotten to that point yet, but I feel like the more this frustrates me, the more excited I am to learn how to fix it.
So, ultimately, I haven't made much progress at this point. I'm hoping with my next update regarding this, I'll finally get the log in working and move on the other things. Who knows when that'll be. Wish me luck!
Written on 5/8/2026
