[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]
What do I need to read & write data from the web? I simply want to have
something on my site to be like a variable $data, and my application can
connect to the site and edit $data or other variables (or create new
ones). Like...
$data[id] = 500
etc...
I'm going to suggest checking out Peepcode's Sinatra screencast. It's a
little over an hour, $9, and covers well beyond what you're asking about.
After you get some basic app running on your computer, check out Heroku for
hosting, which is so easy that I was able to use it, and I don't know
_anything_ about deployment (note I was using Rails not sinatra, but it
should be the same process, b/c Heroku should support any Rack based
application), and it's free for something as small as what you're talking
about, but has the ability to upgrade if you ever need more.
other side note: Heroku has these little "show you how easy it is" examples
that are like 3 lines long, but they usually leave out the databasey stuff.
I think I spent an hour or two messing with it before I finally found a
tutorial that had "$heroku db
ush" which was all the Heroku tutorial was
missing.
Anyway, point is Sinatra is extremely simple, you should be able to get the
hang of it extremely quickly, and heroku is cheap and simple. I'd expect you
can get your app up within 4 hours. Maybe longer if you've never done
anything web based. Also, there is a really simple Authentication system
they add at the end of the Peepcode, pay attention to that, because you
don't want other people to be able to alter your data.
http://peepcode.com/products/sinatra
http://heroku.com/