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Setting up the Perfect Web Development Environment, Part 1

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Inspired by Elliot Jay Stocks’ recent posts on his iMac plus Air setup, I thought I’d document how to set up a seamless development environment between desktop and laptop. If you intend to set up a similar environment, you’ll need to perform these steps identically on both machines. Part 2 of this series will deal with the basics of setting up a portable project, and Part 3 will cover setting up advanced tools and source control.

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Adaptive Content (with a dash of jQuery)

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Aral Balkan posted the following snippet on Twitter just now:

<span>u</span><span class="hideIf320">ser e</span><span class="capIf320">x</span><span class="hideIf320">perience</span> HTML

followed by the explanation:

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April Fool’s Day, 2011: best of the web

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A collection of some of the best April Fool’s Day pranks I’ve seen this year.

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On Responsive Design, Grids and the Golden Canon of Web Page Construction

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Before I start, let’s get some stuff out of the way: I’m no Khoi Vinh. Neither am I an Ethan Marcotte or a Jeremy Keith. I’m not a published writer on the subject of grid theory, or a speaker on the conference circuit. However, this is the Internet, where everybody has an opinion – and this is mine. This post was inspired by Mark Boulton’s post on designing from the content out, which I subsequently failed to discuss with him in 140 characters.

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Skype Annoyances

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Ok Skype, I finally caved in and installed your poxy app. Thing is though, you also allow calls to non-Skype numbers so I’d really appreciate it if you allowed it to be set as the default application to open href="tel:" links. Y’know, RFC 3966? Because believe it or not, some people still use those old-fashioned telephone numbers.

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Localhost slowdown: cracking poor performance in TortoiseSVN and Zend Server

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Continuing from my previous post on troubleshooting SVN setup on Windows, I’ve recently encountered (and solved) quite a serious performance hit that’s been affecting my main development machine.

Since I spend a lot of time on the move, I do most of my development on my laptop, a Dell Latitude D430. It’s a fantastic little machine, but suffers from a storage bottleneck due to the PATA interface and 1.8″ disk, exacerbated by the requirements of a development environment – a web server, database server, IDE and SVN server & client place a lot of demands on the storage subsystem.

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