My friend wants to create a blog website... from scratch
 

ok, here is the deal. My friend wants to start a blog about electronics (he is doing a degree in electronics). I recommended he finds a blogging website and start there. He said no, he wants to put adsense on it and make money. I tell him that in the beginning his blog isn't going to have many visitors and he may well lose money due to hosting costs, at which point he looks at me funny like he doesn't know what hosting costs are... Anyway I tell him then it might be worth looking on the internet for blogging software since some has probably been already written. He says he wants to write it himself, only thing I can think to tell him then is to check out dreamweaver which I know nothing about but think its some kind of website creation software... or something.

The thing is that today he came up to me and said he had decided to write his website in php and he wants me to help him install linux on his computer "because i've heard it's better for that kind of stuff". I'm gonna help him install ubuntu anyway, but... i'm pretty sure that installing linux is not going to give you magical programming skills and using a blogging website or blogging software would be much better. The thing is I know nothing about blogging or creating websites myself so I'm not really sure whether it really is as stupid as I think it is. What should my advice to him be?

Install linux for him, and whenever he asks for more help say, 'sorry I don't know anything about it'. Which is what you should say to cheeky buggers that want to get rich while expecting you to do all the work for free.

He thinks the OS will effect the way he writes PHP? [rofl]

Use one of the 100's of blogging websites that are already out there, or you can look for a blogging skin/template to use.

Sounds to me like your friends knows jack all about programming a website "from scratch" as he puts it. Honestly, if he doesn't use a blogging template/website to start with, he will go and use one pretty quickly once he tries to make his own.

[rofl]

There is no way in hell he's going to be able to program a website for blogging from scratch. It would literally take hundreds and hundreds of hours of development time to complete.

If he wants to host a blog on his own server, have him use this:

http://wordpress.org/

Open-source blogging software. You still need some knowledge of mySQL, CSS, php, etc. to get it all set up how you want it, but you can do whatever you want with it.

Writing the code from scratch is really stupid and doesn't make sense

Sometimes I think it would be better to just keep quiet and not let anybody we know that we know about computers. [rolleyes] On Friday night I'm out at a bar with my wifes colleague and her extended family. Anyway near the end of the night her husband kinda calls me to one side and says, "you know about computers right?" and he proceed to tell me about how they are taking away his PC at work and he wants to buy a PC for under $100 so he can still check his e-mail. Anyway he calls me up tonight and says he's picked up a PC, etc. from a Yard Sale and can I check this stuff out.

So I boot up the computer and check it out, it's a AMD K6 with Windows 98. He wants to know whether this will do the job and I said, "Well I don't know if it will run XP, I'm not even sure what Operating System you use at work. Do you know what you use there?". "Er, I think it's, er, Microsoft something.", "Well you probably use XP I would imagine, this PC doesn't have that on it", "No, no I think it's 03, I saw 03 on it somewhere.". Which was also what he said when I opened up the case and said it's kind of and old computer, "Yeah it's '03, I know, they said it was '03"

I don't know whether to laugh and cry. The guy has so little clue that he doesn't understand I can't just magically tell him whether a computer is going to work with his companies network if I don't have any information about their computers and their network. Oh well good luck.