It’s cheap and easy to install web server software on your computer for developing and testing websites or web applications.

While previewing static html pages in a browser will give an accurate depiction of how they’ll look, sites that include dynamic server-side technologies like PHP, Perl, ASP, MySQL, or Ruby, must be running on a web server to be previewed accurately.

There many free, open-source web server solutions for PC, Mac, or Linux users.

Following are three Apache-based distributions that aim to make it easier for server rookies to install, configure and run web server software on local computers.

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The long-awaited Wordpress 2.1 has just been released and is brimming with improvements.

If you haven’t heard, Wordpress is one of the coolest blogging platforms available. It’s easy to install, even easier to use, and quite simple to customize with a little knowledge of CSS, HTML and (for the adventurous) some basic PHP.
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Need to block access to a directory on your site?

If your hosting environment runs the Apache web server, you can simply create an .htaccess file in the directory you’d like to protect and insert the following code:

Options -Indexes

For example, say you’ve created a sub-folder on your site to hold images. Without protection, a user could visit http://yoursite.com/images/ and see a directory listing of the files and folders in the images directory.

By simply creating a file with the above line and saving it as .htaccess in the images directory, users will get an error rather than a directory listing when they visit the URL.

For more info on .htaccess, visit the Apache website.

technorati tags:.htaccess, Apache

If you’re running a site on Apache’s web server, you can easily create custom error pages using Apache’s .htaccess file.

First, create or edit an .htaccess file in your public_html directory so that it has the following lines in it:

ErrorDocument 404 /myerrors/404.html
ErrorDocument 403 /myerrors/403.html
ErrorDocument 500 /myerrors/500.html

Here’s what each piece does:

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If you’re a Firefox user and design websites, definitely check out the FireBug extension for Firefox. According to the Mozilla site:

FireBug [has] all of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including a debugger, an error console, command line, and a variety of fun inspectors.

FireBug | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation

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