MAMP!

MAMP stands for Mac OS, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

Those are the components you need to run a webserver. Specifically that's: Mac OS (Operating System), Apache (Webserver), MySQL (Database), PHP (Server Scripting Language)

I may have mentioned in a previous post that I'm trying to put together a dynamic website. To put this simply, a dynamic website (versus a static website) uses information that is contained in a database to provide that content that is presented on the website. The content is accessed from the database using PHP and stored on the web server.

The biggest advantage of a dynamic website versus a static website is that if you wanted to build a static website, you would have to code (build) a page for every single link on your site and then store it on a database. On a dynamic website however, the content that is passed to your browser is simply pulled from a database and formatted so that it appears on your browser a certain way.

Massive sites like Facebook are dynamic websites that use forms that allow you to enter your information into fields that are then stored in a database. When your browser tries to connect to the server it causes a script to pull certain information that's stored on the server and at the same time format it to appear a certain way on your computer.

I don't want to bore you with any technical details but I just thought I would share a milestone in my startup journey.

This was a really helpful article that walked me through the MAMP installation process.

Click here to read the article

I've successfully installed the MAMP stack on my computer and just to prove to myself that I've done it properly I've taken a screen shot of my first webpage that's being hosted on my local machine.

Check it out! It works!