The Technical Bit

The site was put together in November and December 2005 to January 2006. This included sorting out all the programming and technical side of things. Although I had some experience with programming languages such as VBA, and databases, such as Microsoft Access, I had to learn a whole lot more. I sat down with several programming books, and learnt relational databases and the programming language PHP, and how to get databases to do things for you, automatically. This site is basically one big database interface. You put your information in, others pull it out and respond to it. It runs on an Apache server 1.3, with PHP 4 and MySQL 4. All of these products are free, and I ran them first on my home machine before uploading the website.

I worked through it, bit by bit, programming each page at a time, and overscoming the problems of image processing, creating an messaging system, establising the database and writing SQL queries. I paid a freind of mine to come up with the basic HTML design (his only brief was "make it warm!") and images while I concentrated on the programming side of things. At the end of January 2006, the site went live, I registered with the search engines. The original URL of the site, and name, was AfroDatingDirect.com. This caused problems.

Next >> The Problems Start.