9 Making Websites with a.i. 5
If you have a small business, you need a website. If you are willing to pay GoDaddy or Squarespace or Network Solutions etc..., buy a domain from them & point that domain to your Bluehost.com, Hostgator.com or Angry Hosting nameservers! and start FTPing with the Notepad++ FTP Plug-in! All these things i do on Notepad++: Column Editors, Macros, Multi-Editing, bookmarking lines, removing bookmarked lines, & FTP-plugins... they are all waiting for ye!
If you dont have a Windows_11 computer & cant run PHP on IIS; or if you lack Apache or Nginx dont worry, it doesnt mean you are falling behind. AWS, Lighttpd, HAProxy, are other
options for TLS. Thats all for servers to serve files over ports & coms; For programming your own server, you could start with C++ or Swift, Objective-C or Java, but if that is too advanced, expensive or alien for your company then nodeJS or Python is probably all you need. With npm & pip you can install more than a server module or GPIO library, and get to writing scripts or webpages right away! If you want the kernel stuck in your teeth, take a bite out of regular old C or C# & WebAssembly. Apple is a great alternative to windows but more expensive; however i can say all programming languages are the same, & as a self taught programmer, i would agree most people use Microsoft Windows. If you dont have a business but still feel left out of the
hackerNews circle &
Tech Industry or are tired of social-networks & royalty-free internet, try spending more time looking on
Codepen or
JSfiddle &
OpenGameArt,
Freecodecamp, & of course
Github. If all you have is an android phone, get a bluetooth gamepad or joystick from
8bitdo! Or try the
Microbit. It's how i would start my career as a web designer or Android hacker. Visit the
Video Game Music website &
Deviant Art for some ideas. Lace up your sneakers, call someone collect & start a 'Design Group' with your friends! The
coffee shops &
internet cafes are your friends. This is where art & science collide. Download the
prisma3D app or Sign-up for
Thingiverse & order metal parts like an F1 racing team, or SLA print like a dentist's office! Sometimes regular old PLA & ABS will do. This isn't an Industrial Design course. Its worth noting there are free online classes like
MIT's OCW &
Udacity,
EDX etc...
Khan Academy is another one. They can teach you more than just
HTML,
CSS,
JS,
PHP &
SQL, however making a dark-factory with Powershell to sync the machines or designing a system with sensors is just something that cant be taught. Much like teaching morals & ethics to war-adjacent people. Whether we choose to be war-adjacent, or cannibals, or whatever is beyond the scope of this post.
The first Universities were in Europe, and after 2000 years of arguing, chatting, & networking, Europe & the rest of the science world has given us the RaspberryPi Computer, complete with Linux & Python! Take a moment to appreciate this solid-state technology, it is quite revolutionary! this is about as good as it gets. I urge you to write software & programs & scripts that save people time and money, and make life easier for all of us. So if you dont have a windows or apple machine, Buy the RaspberryPi. If you want to make a robot with wifi & webcams, buy the RaspberryPi. But if you just want a few GPIO pins, or an ADC data logger, you will probably have a better time with just an
Arduino. You dont even need
NodeJS or
Python really, you can just use the Arduino R3 as an HID device! The browsers just added
WebUSB &
Bluetooth APIs so you can do quite a lot with Chromebooks, OTG cables, or the Arduino BT, a Bluetooth Arduino that doesnt need a USB Cable... Work Smarter, not harder. Buy some scripts from
Codester, or
Hotscripts, Envato, CodeCanyon etc...
Maybe you only have an Android phone, and couldn't quite figure out how to get beyond running a local unsecured server. You see, getting your public website running on a mobile device has become almost impossible, let alone securing it & installing that 3rd party certificate that creates the https magic. Even if you ask for a static-IP address, run your own nameservers, & use the script from
ZeroSSL or
LetsEncrypt to get your own public keys, you still need every page secured & things like permutating session tokens. You can create local self-signed certificates for your in-house network, create your own 3rd party certificate authority, webring, DNS server, etc... Good luck with that! Also beyond scope. I expect i will write a blog post on security at some point in the near future. As i understand it, the public internet exists as a few DNS servers that are the gateway to all of us, and my browser uses Google's 8.8.8.8 webring. They mostly agree on what can be served publically. Webrings are for the priveledged few. If i have a second server, i can be my own 3rd party verifying the data with checksums on both client and server, i think. To be honest, its a bit beyond me. I know that all starts with good
encryption & ends for me at permutating certificates & deconstructing purple, floating point elliptical cryptographies, constant centers of masses; custom preambles, hashing, symmetric vs. asymmetric, block/stream ciphers etc... I said Good Day! Good security is using really long passwords & not talking to strangers. The
OWASP TOP 10 is the industry standard.
So, with only an android phone, you can still do some hacking without unlocking or jailbreaking your phone. The CMD Command-Line is where to start; if you get as far as port forwarding with connectBot or Termux or whatever the newest hacker app is, congratulations. you are a hacker! If you dont have internet, a mini-router will do. and if you dont have a mini-router, you still have the browser
webAPIs direct to the raspi server & browser. Buy that model train and start listening on port 80 for http. Some Mobile Providers only allow port 80 to be forwarded, when configuring your home 192.168.xx router. For https, it's port 443. New websocket ports open when a connection is established even if that port 80 has closed; i.e. close your tabs first! new tabs are secure. This might be where cross-site scripting security applies. Not Sure.
You need to send emails if you want people signing up for a newsletter. Or you might buy a login script that creates a profile page for people who sign up, but that also requires sending emails. If you want to send an email to new subscibers, i.e. send them a link to verify their account, Your php smtp server probably uses port 587 these days, at least thats what worked for my paid hosting server. It used to be port 22 explicitly, or there is even inexplicit port 20 & 21; SFTP is 990 and possibly 989 explicitly. If this is Bad information, then i'm sorry. I'm pretty sure if you are looking for information about sending UDP packets to port 53 for DNS servers then you have gone too far. Even Noah couldn't save you. With a http-server running you dont have to SSH into your raspi server remotely anymore; not to be confused with SSL, more crypto than security. In security, security is always right. Cryptographically, they may be wrong. Ahem. You can finally turn on the Christmas lights with a javascript button & a solid-state relay! 120VAC solid-state relays are the coolest thing since the
Personal Computer i think, but it takes years to understand the difference between relays, npn, pnp, mosfets, IGBTs, darlingtons, H-bridges, opto-isolators, signal-switches, & TRIACs. Welcome to the madness that is DC, AC, & RF! Its about sacrifice & being grounded in realty, really... FUF! If you dont want to use the browser or http protocols, you can just use Python, TKinter & websockets to route data to Serial, GPIO or Bluetooth, and respond with whatever you want! who needs rules!? city folk maybe, but i'll tell all of you the same: Don't forget to open new threads & close your websocket ports! So after the websockets & ports, port-forwarding & reverse proxying, netcatting & nmapping, you finally realize you just want to get some webpages on the public internet, that is the google DNS 8.8.8.8 webring. And so it begins, the long winding road that starts with
PHP echo & ends with
Content Security Policy... I say it ends there because you got into programming for fun; maybe you should have spent more time entertaining yourself with thought alone, or perhaps pondering the universe. Try joining
Hackaday, or perusing
Sparkfun &
Adafruit...
I usually begin building a website with a
fontList page. Did i need to use
Microsoft's Co-Pilot to make a quick HTML page with some
PHP code to glob() all the fonts? not really. But it helped get the template started because staring at a blank page & making things from scratch takes practice, like anything else.