Patrick J Waters

Drupal can be mysterious in many ways sometimes. Tying to do the simplest things can become a complex series of function calls, that sometimes makes your head hurt tyring to remember everything. http://api.drupal.org can usually give you the answer you are looking for, if you know how to find it. Recently I had to figure out how to create a full path to a file from a file object uri and wanted to share this information. 

While typing a password is not a difficult or super time consuming task, I'd rather spend those minutes a day doing something else.  By setting up your host file, generating a public key and adding it to your remote server, you can eliminate a step everytime you connect to your remote severs (including ssh, sshfs, git push, scp and ftp!). You also get the added benefit of protecting your machines behind more complex passwords for added security.

Lets start by aliasing a remote server:

open your hosts file located in your favorite editor:

After many hours of banging my head against the keyboard I finally have custom syntax highlighting with ckeditor in Drupal 6. When I first set out to add this feature I thought it would be as easy as trun a module on and your good to go. Turns out that isn't the case. I originally tried to use GeSHi with the wysiwyg module and the ckeditor javascript library. I got subpar results with this method.

Over the past few years I have experimented with different web server setups. I have found that the combination Ubuntu,  LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql, and PHP), Webmin, and finally Virtualmin provide many advantages in my day to day workflow as a web developer. This setup provides me with an easy to use and easy to maintain web server that lessens the time spent configuring the server and increases my time programming. Here are my step by step instructions for setting up my favorite server configuration. 

Step 1: Install Ubuntu Server