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Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2018 12:54:32 +0000
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Subject: Personal Home Page
From: lester@lsces.co.uk (Lester Caine)

At what point did 'Personal Home Page' become 'Professional Home Page'?

I sat down this morning to look at the sites that are still on the
'TODO' list with a view to just what I can do with them and if the
clients could do anything to help. The short answer is NO since the
reason I'm nursing many of them is because the error messages when
trying to run them on a later version of PHP does require some level of
professional programming skill. Gone are the days one could simply
'google' a quick fix! In many cases the sites simply give white screen
and a 'personal' user has little chance to recover so one moves the site
back to an older version of PHP until one can get around to looking at
it ...

So how to proceed? Well I think it is time I cut many of these clients
loose, and to be honest they will be better off with one of the 'free'
hosting options that flood the market these days. They just reload the
content and change things like contact forms to what the hosting is
offering. That will get rid of all the .ASP sites that I've never had
time to convert to PHP, and all the static sites that probably never
needed PHP in the first place. The problem is I'm not the sort of person
who can say 'sod off' but I think I am going to have to a lot less
helpful in future :( But even saying no takes time ...

A lot of the recent threads have been on a basis of 'Then you should
learn to program properly'. But PHP had a very short learning curve
years ago and one did not need to be a 'programmer' to write and
maintain simple dynamic sites? Admittedly today the infrastructure we
have to live with is a hell of a lot more complex than it was, but PHP
used to isolate that. Today there seems to be so many different
frameworks all of which compete with one another, and nothing that
supports the 'personal' user at all? Even MySQL code is being messed up
with MariaDB variations and very basic hosting gets problematic. Even
the claim that 'one does not have to use this new code' neatly sidesteps
the simple fact that the key libraries we rely on bring that very new
code into the framework and then one has to understand why things that
worked last update no longer work. That is not necessarily because 'the
code was faulty previously' and more likely because of the
'improvements' to the library. Checking everything for every update of
browser, OS, PHP version, library change, urgent security fix, all take
time many of us don't have.

Back in 1982 I earned a Masters Degree in 'Digital System', a fore
runner to 'Computer Science'. I've tried to keep up with the new bits,
but much of what is being loaded into PHP today has no use to a
'Personal Home Page' user and should be in a separate library of tools
for the professional under the hood users ... YES a personal user needs
to know that they have a variable that stores a number, but they also
need to know the limits on the number perhaps depending on other
variables, simply requiring that an unbounded string is restrained to an
'int' thing is of little practical use to many users ... they still need
the validation library whether they understand 'strict typing' or not.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact
L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk
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Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk
Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk