In line with my grand plan of bringing Psychic Questing to the people, I have embarked upon a project to create the de facto portal for the Questing community. Eschewing David Percy’s idea of calling it www.ididntneedgoogletogethere.com, I plumbed for the more straight forward www.psychicquesting.com which should allow both psychics and non-psychics to find it. I envisage the portal having a number of key functions which I hope to illustrate later in the blog but key amongst them are a Blog facility (of course!) and some kind of Foruming ability. I will also need a database of books for producing bibliographies, some ability to conduct commercial transactions (possibly taking subscription fees, possibly selling goods of interest to Questors). As one of the overriding principles of the project is to achieve this with as little outlay as possible, I hoped to use the same basic setup as I already use to host my personal website. My web server is actually a Windows XP Professional desktop running IIS. Now that I have ousted the warez hackers it all seems to be running smoothly and, in truth, if the Psychic Questing website is getting overloaded then this is a problem that I will be happy to deal with at the time. I knew that the blog interface would need smartening but had worked out that by using Infra’s Add Note Facility I could simulate the “main post and follow-up comments” structure of most regular blogs. However, here I hit my first issue. To deploy this approach of blog creation meant that I would have to purchase a SQL Server processor licence costing about £3,500. This probably equates to the expected profit of the website over its entire life so there was no way I could afford that. I looked around for suitable alternatives and quickly realised that the ubiquitous MySQL database can essentially be deployed for free (which explains its popularity). infraEnterprise is not geared to work against MySQL but as all the SQL queries are exposed, I reckoned I could modify the few I needed to be compatible. Excited by this I even went and found a Windows version of MySql. Having sorted the blogging issue for the moment I turned my attention to the Foruming component. I decided that if I had gone to the trouble of setting up MySQL, I might as well use it to power the forums. I quickly found one application that seemed perfect for what I needed called Phorum. It relies on PHP as well as MySQL but PHP is not normally installed on IIS. Happily I discovered that you can install a PHP module on IIS although I did begin to worry that my original system was getting pulled a bit out of shape.