This post was last updated on 22 August 2011.

Related to my recent “restart,” I want to talk a little bit about my local development environment. I apologize; this is kind of a long, boring post that is basically “listy.” However, I both wanted to document the things that I have, don’t have and do and share them with other developers. I’m also very interested in hearing about other developers’ local environments.

My new computer is a 15-inch MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard (10.6.8) with a 2 GHz processor and 4 GB of RAM.

The core of my local development environment is MAMP (2.0.1), which includes:

• Apache 2.0.63
• MySQL 5.1.44
• PHP 5.2.13 & 5.3.2
• APC 3.1.3
• eAccelerator 0.9.6
• XCache 1.2.2 & 1.3.0
• phpMyAdmin 3.2.5
• Zend Optimizer 3.3.9
• SQLiteManager 1.2.4
• Freetype 2.3.9
• t1lib 5.1.2
• curl 7.20.0
• jpeg 8
• libpng-1.2.42
• gd 2.0.34
• libxml 2.7.6
• libxslt 1.1.26
• gettext 0.17
• libidn 1.15
• iconv 1.13
• mcrypt 2.6.8
• YAZ 4.0.1 & PHP/YAZ 1.0.14

In the next few days, I plan to revisit the previous how-tos I’ve written on MAMP to see if they’re still valid.

TextMate (1.5.10 (1631)) is my text editor of choice and I use Transmit (4.17) as an FTP client.

Subversion is the VCS I use for all of my sites, and it turns out the MacBook Pro (either) comes with (or was installed with the developer tools) Subversion 1.6.26 and Git 1.7.3.4. Since I use both from the command line, I haven’t installed a GUI for either.

My primary browser for development purposes is still Firefox (I know, I know… So old-fashioned! :p). I have version 6.0 installed and I use the following extensions:

• ColorZilla
• Firebug
• Firecookie
• Live HTTP headers
• MeasureIt (currently incompatible with version 6.0)
• Operator
• Page Speed
• User Agent Switcher
• Web Developer
• YSlow

For testing/development, I also have Chrome 13.0.782.215, Safari 5.1 and Opera 11.50 installed. All ship with good developer tools, so I haven’t installed any extensions for any of them.

I have the latest version of the following browser plugins installed:

• Flash
• Java
• QuickTime
• Silverlight

On my previous laptop (also a MacBook Pro), I was running Parallels with four virtual machines installed:

• Windows XP with Internet Explorer (IE) 6 and various old versions of other browsers.
• Windows Vista with IE 7 and various old versions of other browsers.
• Windows 7 with IE 9 and various new versions of other browsers.
• Ubuntu. Primarily to test Konqueror. (I did a job for the BBC and they require it. Srsly!)

At the moment, I haz none.

I also don’t have a graphics editor (or, at least a good one I know about) installed. I’m debating whether I should install GIMP or just shell out for Photoshop. And there’s no diagramming software installed either (I used to run Omnigraffle).

As I change my local development environment (or, in the event I forgot anything!), I plan to update this post. If you have any comments about my setup or would like to share your environment (either a long “post” in the comments or a link in the comments to a post on your blog), I’d love to hear them/about it!

Tabula rasa: The term in Latin equates to the English “blank slate” (or, more accurately, “erased slate”) (which refers to writing on a slate sheet in chalk) but comes from the Roman tabula or wax tablet, used for notes, which was blanked by heating the wax and then smoothing it to give a tabula rasa.

Well, sort of… If you’re a’tall familiar with this blog/site, you’ll have noticed that two significant things have changed:

1. A majority of the content is gone.
2. It’s using the (now) default WordPress theme Twenty Eleven.

The reason for this was the confluence of three situations (the third being dispositive):

1. I haven’t written a post since 13 January 2011 (Whut?!?)
2. I’ve been meaning to do (and have started on twice) a redesign of this blog (including IA, markup and visual design) for the past year and a half. A lot of that work was done, but…
3. My personal (and only) computer was stolen two and a half weeks ago. And my backup turned out to be spotty (more on this later), so a lot of personal work was lost.

After purchasing a new computer, restoring what I could, resetting passwords and realizing that some things were just irretrievably lost, I decided to look at this as an opportunity to clean up my production server and completely redo my blog. So I backed it up, whacked it and did a vanilla install of WordPress 3.2.1.

Originally, I planned to remove everything and just start with this post and an updated “about” page. However, I decided to import the few posts that it seems people still find useful and the dag bio isn’t done yet (believe it or not, I hate writing about myself!).

From this point forward, if you’re interested, I plan to do daily posts and talk about my local and production environments, WordPress and how I plan to redo the theme according to current best practices (both markup and performance). After that, I’ll eventually bring all of my archives back online and continue blogging about web development in general.

Since I haven’t settled on the categories or tags I ultimately plan to use, the only thing that is certain is that all posts related to my redesign/rebuild will be tagged tabula-rasa.

Hopefully, you’ll join me as I publicly work through re-doing this site. I look forward to hearing your feedback, and, more importantly, it should be fun!

—Jeffrey