Are Prepared Statements a waste for normal queries? (PHP)

I was interested to know if using prepared statements was a waste of time if the statement was only going to be used once. I found Are Prepared Statements a waste for normal queries? (PHP) on StackOverflow and basically came away with the understanding that it’s a pretty low overhead and it’s good for security so you might as well use prepared statements all the time.

To use mysqli or PDO?

I’m trying to make my mind up about whether I should be using mysqli or PDO for a project I’m just starting and I’ve found a few relevant articles:

And based on all of that I think I’ve decided to use PDO.

Firefox prompting to download application x-trash from Apache2

I was changing a HTML file index.html to be a PHP file called index.php and I renamed my index.html file index.html.bak. The plan was that Apache would find index.php rather than index.html and serve that as the default page. But when I went to load my page Firefox was asking me if I wanted to save the file with MIME type application/x-trash — not what I was expecting! It turns out the problem was related to the index.html.bak file, apparently Apache had decided that was the default page and then when it tried to get the MIME type for .bak it came up with application/x-trash. So the solution was to move the index.html.bak file to something with a filename that didn’t begin with ‘index.html’ (I used ‘original-index.html’) and then once that file had been renamed the index.php page was served properly.