Back in 2000 when I was first learning PHP and MySQL, I came up with a project for myself. Hands-on learning is the only method that’s ever worked for me with regard to programming. Reading books is all well and good, but you’ve got to actually try stuff out in order to actually learn anything.

I had been writing down my dreams since I was a kid, and I thought it’d be kinda neat to see what sort of themes emerged from them over time. Thus, The Dream Collective was born. It’s changed names, appearance and domains a few times over the years, but the stuff under the skin has been pretty much the same since I started out with PHP3. (Interestingly, nothing has ever really broken as I’ve upgraded to newer installs of PHP. Yay for backwards compatibility.)

I think it’s about time for a major overhaul, so I’ve got two goals in mind. First, I’m going to port it over to PHP5 and use the Zend Framework . Second, I’m going to do another build in Ruby on Rails .

Upgrading to PHP 5.2.3 and installing ZFW went off without a hitch. Setting up a Rails 2.0 dev environment has been a little more problematic. First problem, all of the tutorials and books I’ve picked up haven’t been updated for 2.0, and there have been some pretty hefty changes that make getting started as a novice less than smooth.

More to come…