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Just do it! – (yea I know its cliché.) If you don’t have at least some understanding of PHP and its syntax, you really need to get your act together.

After several months of asking other people of help with my PHP problems I finally realized that PHP wasn’t the problem, it was my Lack of PHP knowledge. So finally I broke down and cried decided to learn it. I’ve never programmed before, if I can do it, You can do it!

- Get a Jump Start

If there is any advice I can offer to learning PHP, its gotta be find a good book / tutorial to learn from. There are a lot of free tutorials (some of which are quite good) to learn php, but it just won’t cut it if you really want to get down and dirty.

Some excellent Video tutorials can be found here:

• PHPVideotutorials
• KILLERPHP

Notes:
PHPVideoTutorials, is awesome, the guy is a bit of a kook but its well worth a visit, just to hear him say URL. (earl - its gotta be the accent.)

KillerPHP, is a bit slow to begin with, I would suggest watching the basics at PHPVideoTutorials and get into the heavy stuff with KillerPHP. It looks like they have a great OOP (Object Oriented Programming) section, but I have yet to look at it, still a lil bit over my head.

- Get a Book

If your serious about learning PHP, pick up a book at Barns and Noble, it will be well worth it, just in the time you will save by using it as a quick reference.

Story time:

So I was in Barns and Noble standing in the programming isle, in awe of the vast amount of PHP & MySQL books they have. When this European guy (older) standing next to me picks up “PHP for Teens” book sitting on the shelve right in front of me. I snicker, he snickers, we exchange wise comments about the books’ title.

Then he looks at the book I was holding, “PHP and MySQL something or other”, and says “You might as well be reading ‘PHP for Teens’ what your really looking for is it.” He hands me a book. After about 15 minutes of talking to him I find out he is the Head of the Computer Science Department at Oxford. (he was visiting UCF) At this point I am in awe, and need to pick my jaw up off the floor.

The book turns out to be exactly what I was looking for it is “Beginning PHP and MySQL 5” published by Apress. Link. (non aff)

- How this Makes you Dangerous

Since .php is free and it is the most widely used server side language, its nearly a must to know a little something about it. After all, many great applications such as wordpress are written using it. If you ever want to modify your layout you need to at least be able to understand its syntax. Even if you are just a web designer and primarily work with HTML and CSS, the day is going to come (or already has) when someone is going to need you to design a layout around a .php framework. Just cut the excuses and do it, it is at least one more thing that you will know a little bit about. After all don’t forget, we aren’t striving to be the best at .php we are looking to at least understand how it works and what can be accomplished with it. This is one more thing that we can add to the breadth of our knowledge base.

- Conclusion

After about 2 days of messing with PHP, I’m working on my first lil script. It has a little to do with RSS parsing, I’ll keep you updated on how its going!

Ps. Professor, if you reading this. Thanks Again!

So after a short break from blogging, which turned into a little more than a 1/2 of a year, I’m back.

Time Management

Time management is everything in life. All to often we focus to closely on the trees and miss the forest. - This was my case, I needed to take a step back and get my priorities reorganized. (College, Work, Social Life, Blogging) more less in that order. I haven’t been totally out of the loop, I been keeping up on my reading on whats happening in the SEO community. However the RSS feed list has been cut back to nearly 1/10 of what it was several months ago (too much to keep up with and not enough time for my own projects). I have a feeling a lot of us are guilty of reading blogs when you should(could) be executing your own projects.

New Interests

During this time away I have grown a lot as a web designer/SEO. My interests have expanded to encompass everything it takes to become a successful web entrepreneur. These interests include more than SEO, because in nearly all cases, successful websites are functional and user friendly, after all it takes a functional site to get any search engine traffic at all.

Be T-Shaped

I’m sure many of you have encountered the term T-shaped people somewhere in your internet travels, it was coined by Tim Brown CEO of IDEO. It refers to the breadth and depth of a person’s knowledge base. Someone is considered to be T-shaped if they know a lot about a little and a little about a lot. This should be the goal of every web entrepreneur. By knowing a lot about a little, you have become specialized, but if you take this a step further and learn a little about a lot you become dangerous (in a good way).

Future Oriented

One of my main future goals, is to become T-Shaped and Dangerous(this is the main one), though I will continue to focus on SEO and Internet Marketing, expect to see more topics in the realms of Web Design and Programming included in this blog.

To keep me future oriented I created this motivational background:


You can download the .psd file , if you wish to add your own motivational quotes.

T Shaped Challenge

In closing I offer you this challenge:

1. Take 30 seconds and write down a list of things that would make you a better X (SEO, Internet Marketer, Designer, Etc). Everything that comes to your mind.
2. Now during this next week figure out you need to do to become more well versed in that field and make a plan to accomplish it.
3. Don’t stop there, take this plan and execute it over the next month.

Imagine if each of us did this once a quarter, we would be a pretty dangerous bunch eh?