OK - so I’m a heretic.

This is absolutely against the accepted Drupal Dogma.

What’s great about Drupal is that you can achieve most things without hacking the core codebase; this means that every Drupal installation has the same base and any good developer who knows Drupal can take over the site.

Kdesvn and Kompare are two very nice tools providing rich GUI’s for svn and file comparison respectively.

In order to show the difference between two revisions using Kompare, change the default external diff settings to:

While creating websites I often find the need to manipulate files in all sorts of ad-hoc ways.

Things that are hard to do by hand, but you don’t want to write a whole program for - you’ll just use it once and throw it away.

It’s often handy to look at the changes made by a commit ignoring whitespace changes.

The selected file could not be uploaded, because the destination is not properly configured

This “feature” has bitten me before. It’s one of those annoying Drupal things which would be fine if the error message wasn’t so misleading.

What’s happening is that file_copy() calls file_create_path()

Version conflicts to be aware of

Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) now ships with Subversion 1.5

You can’t use a svn 1.4 client and a svn 1.5 client on the same working copy.

One of the trial of web development is ensuring that your site works across a range of browsers.

Standards compliance is an important part of this - but testing cannot be avoided.

I work on Ubuntu, and use VirtualBox together with a licensed copy of Windows XP to test in a Windows environment, which also allows me to at least test the Windows version of Safari.

Having just upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 my key observation is that it’s important to read the release notes first.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810

There are a few bugs which have affected me

One of the great things about Debian/Ubuntu is the consistency with which system documentation is placed in /usr/share/doc/

Assuming you have a web server installed this documentation is then available at http://localhost/doc/

I just discovered a nifty little utility

Often working copies are only partially updated, this command gives a very quick command-line summary of the state of the working copy.

It’s not as rich an output as kdesvn which will colour code all the updateable files, but its a standard part of svn so should always be available.