I wrote a Python script for automating the steps required to setup a web project environment on my local dev machine that runs on Ubuntu. Called it pywst: Python, Web, Svn, Trac. That's the best I could do, sorry :P

The main steps for setting up a new project are:

• Create a virtual host
• Add it to /etc/hosts
• Enable the virtual host
• Import the new project to the SVN repository
• Checkout the project to /var/www
• Create a TRAC environment for the project
• Restart Apache

After these steps I have http://projectName.lh/ which points to /var/www/projectName/public/, SVN repo under http://localhost/repos/projectName/ and the TRAC environment under http://localhost/trac/projectName/.

As I have this ability to forget things, I always forget a step or 2 of this process. Thus, I wrote pywst (note, this is a txt file, to use it, save it to your HDD and rename it to pywst.py). It's not the best and nicest Python script ever wrote, but gets the job done. All that is need to be done to setup a project with pywst is:

sudo ./pywst.py projectName

2 things are required: to run it with sudo powers and to provide a name for the project.

Future improvements

The first, and the most important is to finish the rollback() method. Now, it only exits pywst when an error occurs, but it should undo all the steps made prior to the error.

Second, to make it work on other distros, not only on Ubuntu. That would require for me getting those other distros, set them up, look where they store Apache and stuff, where's the default document root, etc. Hmm... This will take a while :)

Third, support PHP frameworks - Zend Framework, CodeIgniter and CakePHP — ZF is a must :P Under support I mean to create the basic file structure for them automagically.

Cheers!

I just found a nice web site where you can “smush” your images — Smushit.com. SmushIt takes an image and removes all unnecessary information about it: when was it last edited, what image editor was used etc., but keeps the quality of the image! This is more than useful for sites where there are lots of images.

The result of smushing

There are several ways to provide images to SmushIt:

• Upload an image
• Provide an URL to the image
• Use the Firefox SmushIt add-on

The first two ways are quite obvious; provide an image and it'll process it in a few seconds.

The Firefox add-on is pretty cool: open up a web page where are the images you want to smush, click the SmushIt add-on icon (it'll be in the right corner of the status bar), it will take you to their site and process all the images found on your web page.

When the processing is complete, there will be a table showing details about the smushing. Also a download link will be provided, to download the smushed images in one zip file.

Now run little lurker and smush your images :)