So, I’ve got my first tiny little hiccup in my learning of PHP through Symfony… I’m used to running Debian web servers and having the convenience of apt-get to install and magically configure a basic LAMP stack for me. But, I’m going to be doing my development on OS X Lion which doesn’t have that. Luckily, Lion does have Apache and PHP included (but not MySQL) they just need to be configured and in the case of MySQL, installed.

So, I’ve decided it was time to learn some PHP. I mean, phpinfo() and include() are all I really need to know right? Wrong.

Thus, I have decided it is time to sit down and learn a bit of PHP. Now that I’ve reached that decision, where to start? What better place than a framework that I hear good things about, is supposedly similar to Rails, and I know a lot of my friends use?

And so it begins…

I’ll try to track my success/failure here, but no promises. Because everyone knows how frequently I actually post, not to mention the fine quality of said posts. [sic]

So, I’ve decided that I should branch out a little bit and… actually start posting things. Anyways, on with the post!

In my best game show host voice:

What’s new this time? Food! That’s right, food. Everyone’s favorite thing to eat! Fresh from your kitchen in approximately 45 minutes, you too can enjoy this treat with your whole family. Why with food you won’t have to worry about that nasty rumble in your stomach, and thanks to our unique patent-pending design it’s both healthy and delicious!

How do we do it? Well let’s see!

What’s this RVM thing?

Simply: RVM is Ruby Version Manager.

There you go all done, see you back here next week!

Ok, in all seriousness RVM is a fantastic tool when you are working with multiple ruby projects. It allows you to install multiple versions (and implementations) of the ruby interpreter and use different ones for different projects. It also extends all the way down to your gems, allowing you to have completely different sets of gems installed for different projects.

I’m not going to go into deep technical details here. If you want to go in depth, check out the RVM website.

Ok, but why do I need it?

RVM sounds kinda interesting and maybe it might conceivably be useful, but you don’t see how you could ever have an actual use for it right? Wrong!

I’ve relaunched using Octopress to power this new site. If you haven’t checked it out before, I highly recommend that you do. Now that things are simpler than ever to post, I’m hoping to get to posting more tips, tricks, and tutorials than ever before. So be sure to check back and see what I’m up to.