Dan Klassen

Over the past few months I’ve made a number of posts regarding various tools that are useful for web developers / contractors. Also, numerous posts on server management and web development in general can all lead to one conclusion… I run a web design company.

Nikki and I have recently launched Triple I Web Solutions. We specialize in developing websites for small to medium sized businesses and non-profit organizations. Our focus is to provide creative, usable web solutions catered to the goals of your organization.

We all know backups are an essential part of running a server. Being able to restore in the worst case scenario of complete drive corruption (let’s say that your RAID setup failed somehow as well) as quickly as possible is key. Another situation could be one of your clients deleted their incredibly important file 3 days ago, but decided to call you about it now.

Rsnapshot is a series of scripts and commands which can automate the process of backing up your files to a remote location, as well as keeping a incremental copy of any changes. I have it set to keep 7 daily copies, 4 weekly copies (on Saturdays) and 6 monthly copies. Now this may sound like it will use up a great deal of disk space, but rsnapshot makes clever use of hard links, which means it only needs to store copies of files that have changed since the last backup as well as aslight overhead. In my case, this means that for every 100 megs that is backed up, on average only 1 extra meg is stored per copy. So, if I had 1GB of data and 17 old versions (7 days + 4 weeks + 6 months) it would require approximately 1.2GB of physical disk space.

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If you have done any xhtml / css, I’m sure you have experienced the joy of making the site look the same in all browsers. Typically went implementing a site, I will first develop it in FireFox to get the general layout correct, then test in Safari, Chrome, and the dreaded multiple versions of Internet Explorer. Recently, a colleague of mine pointed me in the direction of a tool called IETester.

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I’ve been using version control for various projects for quite a while now. Basically, it lets you (and your co-developers) track your changes, who added what, merge conflicts, as well as going back in time and reverting your code base to its previous state.

Typically (in Subversion and CVS for example) you will have a central server which all the developers check their code in to. For a project not too long ago I was required to learn git, a distributed version control system. There were a number of reasons for doing so, but the most important (well, in my opinion) are: Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I needed a clean environment to do some development for a project at work. The OS (ubuntu) I have installed on my development computer wasn’t the same as what the application was originally developed and deployed in (red hat) and this was causing a few issues. I debated bringing up a slicehost slice solely for coding and testing, but this seemed like a hassle, as well as an extra expense.

Enter virtualization. There are a number of options to create a virtual computer on your host system. The most popular hypervisors are VMware and Xen. What these programs will let you do is create a completely separate installation of an operating system inside your current one. This let me create the clean environment I needed for this project.

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