David Herron .com

MAMP makes it pretty darn simple to do web development on a Mac. While Mac OS X comes bundled with Apache and PHP, MAMP bundles together the latest versions of both along with MySQL. It "installs a local server environment in a matter of seconds on your Mac OS X computer" and is completely self-contained. You can run MAMP alongside the Apache that's built-in to Mac OS X, you can remove MAMP at any time, etc. It's very convenient and flexible.

One of the chores which comes with running a Drupal website is keeping the drupal install and contributed modules up to date. Prior to the Available Updates feature (itself a contributed module in Drupal 5 and core drupal in Drupal 6) this was a manual process. You'd occasionally browse the contributed modules list on drupal.org and hopefully you remember all the installed modules. With the Available Updates feature the system notifies you when your modules are out of date, and it tells you which one. But you still need to do a few things.

I had some code which wasn't working:

mysql_query("UPDATE pracs SET name='{$name}', email='{$email}', webaddr='{$webaddr}', phone='{$phone}', level='{$level}', lineages='{$lineages}', description='{$desc}', password='{$password}' WHERE id={$id}");

In debugging the code I found that the correct values were reaching this statement, but the database wasn't being updated with the new values. Huh?

Well, the official documentation at http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-query.php says

// Formulate Query
// This is the best way to perform a SQL query

You want to put advertising on your web site, and one easy simple way is to sign up for affiliate programs. In many cases affiliate programs offer some kind of banner advertisement you can display, and rather than paying out per pageview the affiliate programs of course pay if the user does something like click on an ad and then buy something. It's easy to become signed up with dozens of programs and if so it then becomes tricky to manage the advertisements.