Yay Purdue!

So it turns out Purdue has really embraced php already. My website is hosted through our ICS webspace, which I can easily access through Windows when I'm at a lab computer. It turns out that the entire ICS system already has PHP installed! All I have to do is write the scripts, and they work. I'm spoiled, it seems, which for now I can live with. I've also set up a mySQL account, which I'm not sure yet if I'll need, because I'm not sure how all this is going to work yet. For now though it's a good start.

EDIT (9:20am): It turns out Purdue DOESN'T actually have it pre-installed. Or at least something isn't working, because there's only one line of a two line conversation showing up here.

EDIT (9:47am): I tried downloading php from the main downloads page, and got a .tar file, which windows has been unable to open, even using the command prompt. So I went back and finally found a second page with a windows version, so it's extracting now. Just to give credit where it's due, whoever compressed it did a great job, 80 MB down to 20. It's slowly extracting, so we'll see if I can get it working after it finishes.

EDIT (10:08am): Well I just got it extracted and .... damn. The folder contains 14,747 files. Very few seem to have extensions. There's a test.html file, which gives a long list of errors. 2 other html files which don't even work. The problem with these tutorials is that all of them assume I know how to install the damn thing in the first place.

EDIT (10:20am): Progress! Okay, so lets go back to step one ... Purdue DOES have php installed already! I just had to make my file have a .php extension, which I didn't know, because no one felt like mentioning it. The inside is still the same, starting with html brackets. But w/e, it works!