10 Dirty Little Web Development Tricks

1. I finally got work to switch from CVS to SVN o.O I finally got us to use "svn up" for staging, but not yet for production… We’re using "svn export --force" for production, which I guess is kind of nice, but afaik it doesn’t delete any files that were deleted in the repository… or if it does, then it also probably ends up deleting any uploaded/cached files as well.

2. I like using the CSS reset from Eric Meyer, but certain people at certain places I’ve worked at are doing well if they can remember an id is supposed to be unique on a page & that the class attribute is a space separated list (not a single value!) that can be used for more than CSS >.< … Granted, a particular brand of browser is doing good if it can figure out how to apply multiply classed CSS definitions to an element (i.e. .class1.class2 { color: #00f; } should be applied to ).

3. Kind of have system & static stuff separated at my current place of employment - templates, css, etc go into a templates directory under htdocs & people are too scared to use a framework or an index router >.< My preference is a framework that can handle this (see Symfony or ZF)

4. I don’t drink coffee, but it’s a nice idea - I’ve been drinking caffeine (in the form of pop) before going to bed for years… It helps me go to sleep. I have been drinking XS (no, it doesn’t use sugar - it uses Ace-K as a sweetener, uses B vitamins for the boost [similar to that 5 hour energy drink], and has lots of yummy flavors) to prolong the time before I need to get to sleep. Drinking 1 right before bed can also help give a boost in the morning.

5. Underscores are nifty, but I think he’s missing the boat - generally speaking, come up with a useful convention for letting the file system organize files in general… underscores are great, but other things deserve organization as well - i.e. date based data output should be done in YYYY-MM-DD format for automatic sorting as another example.

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