Podcast 1: Introduction

Web Development Tutorials, Web Design Tutorials, Content Management Systems, and more. My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-4c16cfbae122c38c9e8ad25e2ca824a3} My Odeo Channel (odeo/bf2a27753a7bc904)

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Topics

Client: Web design ( HTML, CSS, Images ), Interactivity / Browser Objects ( Flash, Flex, Laszlo, Silverlight, Java Applets / Webstart), Client-side scripting ( JavaScript, AJAX)

Server: Server-side scripting( PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, J2EE, CGI, Python, Perl, Ruby), Database, Systems Administration

Internet marketing: SEO, Accessibility, Marketing, Monitization

Extras: WYSIWYG tools, Web Frameworks ( Django, Rails ), Blogging & CMS ( WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal)

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Transcripts

BIG thanks to Tian TAN (Tim) from Shanghai & the University of Warwick, UK for providing these! Also, give me feedback on the format, if you'd prefer them just as attachments rather than in the body.

For Dec 17th 2007, this is the OCDevel Web Development Podcast, and this is episode one - Introduction.

This is the first episode in the OCDevel Web Development Podcast series, so this is going to be an introduction on this podcast as a whole. So first, let's talk about what this podcast is going to be all about, who my target audience is, and why I am doing this podcast.

This podcast is going to be an introduction to the topic of web development. It is going to start from the ground up, with a definition of all of the key terms like “Client”, “Server”, “Internet Marketing”, “Blog”, “CMS” (Content Management System), “Web Frameworks” and all those things. And this is targeted towards complete newbies in the Web Development space.

And the reason I am doing this is because I haven’t found any really good introductory material in the podcasting space on Web Development. I found a lot really good podcasts on Web Development, but none of them were introductory, none of them were tutorial-oriented. And that would have really helped me when I was getting started with Web Development. In fact that was what I was searching for, for the longest time getting started with Web Development, couldn’t find anything so I had to resort to text resources, which is good. But for people who are commuting to and from work or school all day long, putting in an hour of driving time, it’ll be nice to have audio resources.

Obviously there’s a lot of things you can’t cover in audio. For example, you can’t really teach syntax, like HTML and CSS syntax. I can brush up on some of the quick snippets of syntax, but you can’t really teach entire tutorial on CSS or entire tutorial on HTML, so for that, I recommend that you go to w3schools.com, from which you can learn any of the syntax in any of the topics essentially covered in this podcast series for HTML CSS JavaScript PHP and whatnot. Alright so that is what this podcast is going to be about, it’s going to be the introductory material to Web Development. So let’s talk about an overview of this podcast series. Ok, we are going to be talking about in episode two ? the next episode ? we’re going to be introducing the concept of the “server”, in episode three we’re going to be introducing the concept of the “client”. And these will all be definitions. And then in episode four, for example, we will go with “Internet Marketing” and then episode five we’ll go with blog, CMS Web frameworks, WYSIWYG tools all those things. So the first set of episodes will going to be defining concepts, very very generally. And then from there I don’t have a schedule planned yet, but we are going to be getting in depth into all of these various concepts whether it will be client-side scripting technologies, server-side scripting technologies, and then will be comparing some of the technologies available. And then we will probably end up like in the end talking a lot about “Content Management System”, which is my favorite topic in all of web development.

So let’s first get started, this is going kind of “table of contents” episode, where I am going to very very briefly introduce all of these concepts. And then in the next set of episodes, we’re going to defining all of the concepts. And then in the set of episodes after that, we’re going to in depth into all of these concepts. So let’s first introduce these topics. When you’re dealing with “Web Development”, you’re going to be dealing with, I would say, two very fundamental things, and this will be the “Server” and the “Client”. On the “Server”, there is system administration, which includes administering the operating system, whether it will be Linux or Windows Server 2003 or BSD or whatnot. There’s going to be database administration, and this is where you administering the MySQL database or the Oracle database or SQLServer. Ok, so there is system administration, database administration and then server-side scripting. And this is where you’re writing scripts to dynamically generate contents. It’s going to be viewed in the client’s browser, using languages like PHP, ASP, ASP.net, J2EE, CGI, which includes Python, Perl, Ruby, etc. So there you have the server, the server is again, there are a bunch of different facets of server side development, but I would say the three fundamental components are system administration, database administration, and server-side scripting. Ok. So that’s one very core component of web development.

The other piece you might call, actually, web design. A lot people will argue that the client ? client side development ? is not in fact web development, but is called web design. And a lot of people make a distinction between these two concepts. Well, that may be the case but in this episode I need more material to cover, so we are going to go by one of the other definitions for “Web Development” which is all inclusive, and includes client side development. Now client side development is the design aspect of web development, and this includes designing the HTML pages, the CSS, which stands for “Cascading Style Sheets”. And the CSS is which styles and HTML document, if an HTML document is the content and the structure of the page being viewed in the browser, and CSS is the style, like bold, underline, and blue font and black background, etc. This is also where you’re producing images whether it’ll be in Photoshop or GIMP or something like that. So there is web design under the client-side development. And again that includes HTML, CSS and images.

The other aspect of client-side development is interactivity component. And this is for like Rich Internet Application (RIA) for example. There are two pieces of the interactivity piece of client-side development. These are browser objects, and client-side scripting, or DHTML. Browser objects include Flash, Flex, Lasso, Silverlight, Java Applets, Java Web Start or these components that are embedded pieces of binary code that can be executed on the client-side, rendered in the browser. So like a Flash banner ad, for example, is a browser object. And then there is DHTML, in which the client-side scripting language, like JavaScript for example, re-constructs the HTML document on the client-side so that interactivity is possible. Really fast snappy interactivity on the client is possible such that, say for example you hover over a menu tab on a web page you immediately get a dropdown list of items. Well that’s client-side scripting. The big thing in client-side scripting is Java Script.

And another very very cool piece that we’re going to be talking about in future episodes, and spending multiple episode probably is AJAX. AJAX is basically just the interfacing of client-side scripting with server-side scripting. So server-side scripting is scripting on the remote server for accessing server resources like databases and server-side script. Client-side does these all on the client, and there are reasons where you use client-side scripting instead of server-side scripting and vice versa. We will be going over that in episodes two and three. And AJAX is interfacing the two. Ok, so now we went over the server, we went over the client.

And the rest of web development is kind of miscellaneous hodgepodge information. Internet marketing for example is a very hot topic in web development. Internet marketing includes, I would say, maybe four core pieces. The first piece of Internet marketing is marketing itself, you know, marketing you web page ? making sure it’s getting attention, and monetization, which means adding ads to your site, etc. if you add Google AdSense making money off of your website. Accessibility, making sure it meets accessibility standards, which is a very very hot topic, because accessibility standards are actually legal legislation you actually have to abide by these rules or else the law will be against you. So we are going to talk about all of these pieces very in depth in future episodes. And the last piece being search engine optimization, now search engine optimization is very very in depth concept. There are a lot of tricks in search engine optimization. And search engine optimization is making your site is seen by Google, and it is highly ranked in other search engines, but who cares about other search engine, everybody is all about Google. And there are a lot tricks, I will have maybe one episode devoted to the search engine optimization. I will probably just direct my listeners to different podcasts. There’re so many podcasts out there on search engine optimization. It’s definitely a very core piece of web development but not something I want to devote lot resources to. So I will just direct my readers to a different podcast.

The other things we are going to be talking about WYSIWYG tools or non-WYSIWYG tools for developing your server-side and client-side scripts, your CSS, HTML, your PHP and Java Script, all these things. These will include things like Eclipse, or Visual Studio. And then we will talk about web frameworks like Django and Rails, and these basically utilize server-side scripting technologies to achieve kind of very common goal so that a lot people aren’t reinventing the wheel so that there is agile development processes happening on the backend. So people can dish out web application websites a lot faster.

And then finally we will be talking about blogging and CMS-type tools, which will include probably the three most popular ones at least according to my book. There are Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla!. And CMS stands for Content Management System. This is my favorite topic in all of web development. So I probably going to be settle here, after we cover the basics, which will spend a lot of episodes, it will take a while before we get to content management system. So if you’re not new to web development, if you yourself are a web developer, well this podcast may not be for you, this is geared towards the newbie. But come back in content management systems. Because I know content management system’s kind of like one of the upper topics in web development. And I am going to be talking a lot on content management system. So you’re going to enjoy that series, I promise you that. But if you are new to web development, then stick with this podcast, because we’re going to be introducing very thing from the grounds up. Send me any questions you have via email go to OCDevel.com and fill out the contact us web form. And because I really want to be addressing my audience I want to answer any question that newbie is having. I want to teach effectively, so I need your help I need your feedback.

As far as this episode is concerned, if you don’t feel like you understood anything that we’ve said. That’s because this is very very overview-oriented, listen to episodes two and three coming up. And we will be diving a little bit more in depth into the aspects of the client and the server. Those are kind of acronyms soup there, so if you feel like you got lost in this episode, and all of the acronyms, because you haven’t been introduced to any of the acronyms, so listen to episodes two and three, and we will be talking about all of these concepts, defining them. And then in later episodes we will be going much more in depth into all of these various components and then comparing them sometimes.

Alright, so that is the introduction to the OC web development podcasts. Again if you have any questions, fill out the web form on OCDevel.com/contact or you can send an email directly to tylerrenelle@gmail.com. Alright, that’s a wrap!

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