I love running my own web server. It does a superb job of testing fast and efficiently. Part of this easy freedom is the fact that I still don’t get the whole thing with svn and version control. Sure, they could save you from losing something in the long run and are pretty much required when you take on any team project. However, I don’t work with a team. I work by myself putting hours into applications doing all of the design, programming, and copywriting myself. Instead of having to upload to some server somewhere or release onto svn, all I have to do is save a file and go to it on localhost. You also have the benefit of increased security since you can easily close of your personal computer from prying eyes who would like to get a peek at your next big beta. This has proven to be huge time saver for me and I am now developing entire projects this way. However, developing wasn’t always this easy. To think, just a few months ago I was uploading files right onto my production server for testing. That all changes when I installed WAMP.
“WAMP!” you exclaim. Thats right, I am running Windows. Vista RC2 to be precise. Thats why it was so hard to setup my web server. I tried a few different packages including xampp and installing everything myself. In the end, WAMP was the only one that ran well and installed easily on x64 Vista. Still, I had to do a few tweaks. One of the most confusing things was the fact that something was listening on port 80. No, not big brother but the big S. As it turns out, Skype uses “ports 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections.” The problem was easily fixed by unticking that box on the connection tab of Skype options. After fixing that, everything was working great and I have been testing locally ever since. If you do a lot of web work and aren’t working with a team I highly recommend you set up a local testing server.
I know, I’m not cool at all since I am still using PHP. No rails for me, babe. Although there is plenty of steam in that engine and a seemingly solid track. Still, I love my PHP.
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