As a few of you may know I have started to create my own website which I plan to host on one of my old computers. I currently have the URL thestorm.homelinux.net and plan to put a site online soon. The issue is I have little to no web scripting experience. I figure the best way for me to learn was to have my own site hence why I'm doing this. I already have XAMPP set up for it and a basic home page up along with having all the correct ports forwarded through my router to the computer. Currently I'm debating on what my next step should be and was hoping you guys could help. My current options are.

1. Use WordPress or any better suggestions?
2.1 Learn php or some other web scripting lang and do it all from scratch
2.2 learn more html and do it all in html
3. Find free hosting somewhere that already has it all setup fr me to go from there

I already have basic knowledge of HTML though would love suggestions on where I can find good tutorials along with ones on php and other scripting languages. I am planting to have the site just be a basic setup with news an online resume, and a section for my current projects.

P.S. My server is currently offline until I decide what I am going to do but I can put it online for a short time if you guys wish to see what is there so far

If you're interested in getting some content up fast, your best bet is to use a premade package or CMS like wordpress, then you'll have the leisure to learn PHP and HTML and [My]SQL and build some more specific to your needs.

Is this a Lamp server? I can tell you are using DynDns do you have you server set up to notify dyndns of ip changes. I myself have set up a nice webserver using a similar setup.

Yes it is a lampp server and I have a basic understanding of how to work it so far. I think I will use a prebuilt system like wordpress for now I am just wondering if you guys have tutorial suggestions for learning more php and html, or suggestions of a prebuilt system other than wordpress that would better suit my needs.

You haven't mentioned what kind of content you want to put on the site, which will very much influence what kind of CMS / pre-built script you want to use. Is it a personal website? Blog? Forum?

For learning html, w3schools is a good resource, and php's own website has several resources.

What will the website be used for? That may determine what prebuilt stiff you put on it.

edit: Kerm beat me to it.

Hmm I thought I had mentioned content but I guess not, I intend to maybe have a blog or web journal, along with an online resume and pages for some of my projects. I also may host on of my friends political blog though depending on how popular it becomes I may have to kick him off to save bandwidth. (He has actually risen pretty high in the ranks of different political blog sites so bandwidth may or may not be an issue.)

If you're going to be having a lot of different pages, go with something like Drupal. Avoid Joomla at all costs; it's difficulty and obfuscation level is >9000. If it's going to be relatively few pages, probably a blog-like format, then go with Wordpress or the equivalnt.

ok thanks I'll look into drupal, I just put a larger HD into this comp and changed the HD configurations so I'm doing a fresh install of XP and xubuntu on it and then I'll go from there. I also Just upgraded my linksys wrt54gs to ddwrt from the official firmware though It doesn't seem top be port forwarding correctly. so I'll have to look into that before I can get the site viewable by the outside world.

Well as those of you who visit IRC may have noticed I have restarted from scratch the process of making my own website. Thanks to all I learned working on the website for work I was able to get something thrown together pretty quickly. You can view my current progress at [url]thestorm.is-a-geek.com[/url]. I know I misspelled "the" in the banner and originally it was done on purpose but I will fix it as soon I get more done on the rest of the site. Look around and enjoy and post any comments you may have here. I thank you in advance for any feedback or help you can give.

Ok I've been debating something, to help save on bandwidth I was considering using imageshack.us to host some of my larger images. Do you guys think that is a good idea or should I keep it all self hosted? The other reason I was considering this is because I can have them generate thumbnails for me which would allow for decreased loading time and less load on my server. I still need to check the terms of use at image shack but I don't see this being a problem.

Edit: As long as the files aren't porn, copyrighted, or used promote commercial profit imageshack's ToS allows it so that isn't an issue.

I still don't really like that idea for long-term image storage; it's generally best if all your files and scripts are self-hosted.

Ok that's what I figured, now to go and find a gimp plugin that will create thumbnails for all of my images.

use PHP and GD (I think?) or ImageMagick to do it on the fly.

well I found a good batch processor for the gimp and have been using that for now, I'd rather not use a server side program since the comp isn't very powerful.