homewardbound

Customer reviews on Amazon.com for Serif’s Webplus complain that if you know how to use html that Serif won’t let you use code you write yourself. So that alone means I may never be able to use Serif to run the game I want to design. But since I don’t know a thing about setting up a web forum or anything like Paypal and Amazon has webplus 4 for less than $20 I figure if I buy it and can never get my website up and running I won’t be out anything. Between congestive heart failure and my family’s crippling arthritis I am housebound quite a bit and since I don’t really watch TV I spend a lot of time on the computer. I can risk my time trying to set up a website, but I never know from one day to the next if the weather or the blood pressure drugs I am on will keep me in bed so I can’t risk spending a lot of money to do it.

I tried for several hours this morning to figure out some way to use php. I eventually gave up on php because I simply don’t know enough about the net to figure out how to deal with webservers. But I have managed to download a compiler for python that is useable with my Windows XP without having to configure anything. And I have Michael Dwawson’s book Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner (but without the disk) and I have managed to write a few lines of code. But the book doesn’t explain how to deal with numeric variables so I am stuck again.

I was born in 1968. I know enough HTML to design simple websites but otherwise my computer knowledge stopped with the Commodore Amiga. However, I want to set up a website with a forum, some ecommerce and maybe a blog. A company called Serif has a software package that will let me do this. But I also want to have a presidential election game that I design myself to work on this website. I know AppleIIc/Commodore BASIC- essentially QuickBasic but if QuickBasic will work with Serif I don’t know enough to make it do it. I’ve included php scripts on my webpages before and all I had to do was download pre-existing scripts and modify them and put them within my html code. I have used such webpages on free web hosting without having to do anything but upload the pages to the web host. But any book I get that is supposed to teach you how to use the php language starts out by saying you have to configure your web server. I don’t have a webserver so I have no webserver to configure and I wouldn’t know how to configure a webserver even if I had one. And of course my computer never does what the how-books say it is supposed to do. So just how am I supposed to learn the php language let alone make it work? Does anyone who works cheap want a programming job?