For about the past month I’ve started learning PHP. This may not sound very remarkable, but it’s kind of important to me; I never really clicked with programming bar managing some basic arithmetical stuff in QBasic, and this disappointed me, as I was rather interested in it.

Anyhow, whilst my XHTML/CSS skills are germinating nicely, I felt it time to add another string to my bow, so settled down with a local PHP install (thank heavens for local Apache!) and started learning from a book.

I’ve steered well clear of MySQL stuff purely because the current book is terrible on it, and am going to devote myself to learning about MySQL app development when I’ve finished the basics – all I have left on my current course are session variables, cookies, and regular expressions.

But I’ve now acquired enough to start being able to use it, and it’s enormously satisfying. This morning, over breakfast, a big idea hit me around the head. So I whipped up a Basecamp setup for the project (in part to test Basecamp out, and it’s proving to be an excellent app, and really useful for tracking progress and info) and started hammering out some notes on the train to work.

Fast-forward to tonight, where I settled down to work. I found a suitable library online and installed that into the working directory, and have slowly been working my towards goal after goal and ticking them off.

And it’s going well. It’s going really, really well. I’m quite excited. There will in due course be a seperate site about the project, but for now, it’s still under wraps. Still, I’m doing things I never thought I could, and the glow inside it’s generating is quite something.

So more on this later. I’m slowly edging my way to becoming a more rounded web-person.

What does this application do? All I’m saying is: Halo 2, RSS, PHP.