Thoughts from the front of the back of my mind

Does anyone on my fList have any digital art talent, insofar as branding goes? I'm looking for someone to help me design lots of buttons, logos and general site imagery - it's my weakest part when it comes to site development.

The site I'm looking to get worked on is Band Track. Have a nosy over it. It's still WIP but most of the front end is now done. If you think you'd be up for it, let me know.

As an extra incentive, I may be able to pay you, but it will have to come from revenue (commission) the site generates so won't be up-front.

As I mentioned in my last post, I also spent a lot of this weekend working on my pet PHP project, BandTrack.

This started Wednesday evening, when I decided to get a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) set-up running on my laptop, Rover. After failing to get anywhere using WAMP Server (incidentally, why is so much of this stuff in French?) I got my hands on EasyPHP thursday evening. This proved much more successful and, after a few false starts, I finally happened across the VirtualDomain node and was able to get my websites up and running on Rover. A bit more tweaking on the train ride to Winchester during Friday evening, and everything was good to go.

If anyone is interested in setting up a WAMP server and would like my config files, feel free to ask and I will provide as well as an explanation for how/why they work.

I must have looked like a right pro, in my suit and everything, tapping away at my laptop all the way there. Book, cover and judgements based thereon springs to mind.

Saturday morning I decided I was going to get my head around this whole Model-View-Controller concept and so set about going through the tutorial detailed here. It's not perfect, particularly when it comes to getting all the code to work properly, but it only needed a bit of walking through the code to see where bits had been missed or where something had changed name mid-tutorial. As tutorials go, this was definitely in the category of "Best".

So with MVC finally set up and working nicely, I was able to retire from using the Internet and set about building BandTrack. This was my second build, having sold my first attempt just over a year ago, and I must admit I'm much happier with it so far. No more "bands.php?action=detail&name=nightwish", instead it's a much slicker "/bands/nightwish".

Progress was pretty rapid over the weekend and users can now register, login, and add and remove bands. Whilst still a long way from finished, I'm feeling really good about it already.

The only remaining nightmare was getting the site to work on my actual web host, rather than just Rover. After over an hour of tearing my hair out in frustration with getting .htaccess to work, I finally fixed the problem (incidentally, it was the QSA in the rewrite rule that was causing the problems). I then copied the file to the 000webhost forum so if I ever need it again I know where to find it!