₦airaland Forum

Hey - I can setup the a PHP CMS for you for $400 - I will use limbo, mambo or joomla, they are run on the same engine and well supported, pretty stable and rocks well. I built a similar project for one of the biggest management schools in Ghana http://www.gimpa.edu.gh/home/gimpa.

So CMS setup - $400
Design and content - $400
Images acquisition & editing - $200
Monthly hosting - $20 - I will give you the whole nine yards - php, mysql, perl, 50 email accounts, webmail, pop, imap and smtp access etc.

If you want me to only setup the CMS and host it for you, no sweat, if you want me to setup on any server, no wahala either. If you are interested, let me know

Mohammed - you have a point but at the moment and in the near future, it will not make any business sense to setup a data center in Nigeria soley for web hosting, you just wouldn't make any profit and the overhead cost will just be too much. I suggest another alternative, I suggest two alternatives.

1. I think this is the first and fastest way to go about it - All ISPs in Nigeria should an association i.e Nigerian Internet Exchange that will have a central facility that will be online 24/7 with electricity. Every ISP will have a direct link to this facility via fibre, copper cable or radio broadband link. Every ISP will have equipments at this facility that will connect their network to a central switch which every other ISP will be connected to. With this in place - local traffic will be a breeze and providing we hosting in the central facility by any ISP will provide very fast access to any user on any ISP that is a member of the exchange. The only think you have to think about is international traffic but if you want to get innovative, you can set it up so that only traffic in Nigeria can access the NIX and international traffic gets routed to servers in the US or europe. If you have this in place - online businesses that are targeting Nigerian consumers will have business modules to host in Nigeria and since all ISPs are responsible for the facility - the scheme will work.

2. Presently - the SAT3 projects around africa are terminated at 2 ends, one in europe and another in Asia via South Africa. If NITEL decides to sell last mile solutions to Nigerians or other ISPs, we will still have to pass through these routes to get to the Internet and if there is a fibre break (we occurs), you are screwed. Nigeria and America can decide to build a multi-billion $$ fibre network from Nigeria directly to the US tapping directly to the Internet. If this happens, then you can afford to set up big and large data centers in Nigeria but until then, I think step 1 is the only solution for now.

Hosting in the US is very affordable - I am presently running a small-scale reseller hosting solution in Ghana with the view of extending it to Nigeria, if any one is interested, please visit http://www.cybergraphixgh.com

sbucareer - I really haven't dived into java, I am just doing that but I was part of the team that built an sms application using php that talks to a java sms gateway. I am talking about over 300,000 subscribers accessing one mysql database, not at the same time though. It was first coded in jsp but I man - they had issues perhaps the coders didn't develop the app well but it was dead slow running on an MAC X server with 2 dual processors.

We converted the app to php and boy did it rock. I was called in to handle the mysql backend and debug certain aspects of the app but we finished the program in no time. I am not saying that php is better than java, no way. I am telling you that for web apps, using php or jsp with the same server software - php will beat jsp in terms of speed.

Thanks for the applet. I reckon you have alot of experience in java, I would appreciate if you coould mentor me. I want to code in java pretty well, so far - I'm loving it.

Guys - so what have we decided to use? PHP or what, if we are using PHP, count me in. Secondaly, I will like to make a suggestion - there are countless PHP CMS and portals out there, if we go ahead and start one, we should keep in mind that there will be alot of bugs, how do we test, we will need some funding. In my view - let us take some GPL PHP framework, i.e joomla - borrow some code, add ours, change somethings and come out with something pretty good.

What do you guys say?

Insightful, simply insightful. In my view, Nigeria is the most complex country to lead. The only way we can move forward is when we decide that we want a change, a few of us do - most of us don't.

We need a overhaul, a complete change in the mentality - you got to have people to think right. Most Nigerians have accepted Nigeria as it is - we know Nigeria is a country where anyone can do anything, take laws into their hands, NEPA takes light anytime, when you give them money, they bring it back.

I support the central dbase system, it will really help us.

Here are tutorials on Basic programming - http://www.freeprogrammingresources.com/basictutr.html.

In my humble opinion, why not start with C or PHP and move to java.

Go to http://www.pogolinux.com/systems/linuxcd.html. They give out free Fedora 2 core cds, they will send it from the states to you but you will have to convince them that you are interested in using it. Also try ubuntu in SA, they send out free cds too. Hope that helps

Guys - easy on Poju. Poju - we are all busy guys, if you want a code to generate random quotes from text files that is not a hard thing to code in php. I saw one of the guys provided you a template, I think that is straight forward and you can use it but if you want us to code the app and give it to you, you will not be learning as you should.

If you really need the code and you will use it for a church or educational institution and place book marks on the site you will deploy the code back to my home page, I will create the script for you. Fair enough?

Ynot,

Smoothwall is good. He just needs to allow port forwarding to the internet, it's a command I use all the time but I can't remember - I will post it as soon as I remember it

HTML is fun and easy - I learnt it at www.w3schools.com. My advice - use a simple text editor like notepad if you are using Microsh*t and vi or textedit if you are using MAC, vi and emac are good editors on unix as well. When you are very comfortable hand coding HTML and you need to develop bigger sites, you can using HTML editors like dreamweaver (the best HTML editor on the market), you can download a 30 day working version for your platform and use it. Otherwise you can use free HTML editors like 1stpage and others (use the FBI tool google to give you answers).

For editing - Photoshop is the best, try and get it. if you want to dive into web programming, PHP is the way to go, it's free and fast and it's simple to learn.

What an interesting topic, I read the whole thread to the end. I really must say I learnt alot of everyone input, I will share the little that I know about software development and engineering.

I just started programming about a year ago, mostly web programming and client-server applications. I started off with HTML, XHTML, javascript and recently moved into PHP, PHP is wonderful, don't ask me why I didn't use ASP, ASPX, JSP or coldfusion. In january, we started java in school - I will tell all of you this, Java is the BOMB!.

If you truly understand the OOP concept, you won't have issues with java, although you have to read and get to know most of it's classes but the effort is worth it. I coded my first application in Java on a windows system using notepad and I ran exact on my iBook G4, it gave me the same result - I tested it on my Fedora 3 server and it produced the same result. No other programming language can take this feature from java - it is platform independent.

For everyone using Microsh*t, my advice to you is this - opensource is the fututre. Java may lag behind in speed but it is not noticable but sbucareer, php scripts are faster than jsp scripts anyday - that I will tell you.

In summary - Java is the future, .NET is not bad but if we don't have over $600 to buy a microsoft server then what happens? or if I want to run my apps I build using .NET on MAC what happens?

onanugaola,

Saw your post - Since your squid server is your gateway, I reckon you have 2 NICs on your server, one acting as the WAN gateway and the other as the LAN gateway. To allow your webcam to browse, you have to tell your system to allow all outgoing ports, I can't seem to remember the actual command put I will send it to you as soon as I do. I have build squid servers and you have to enable this for post of your apps to work i.e yahoo IM, video and audio conferencing.