It’s quite common for web engineers to develop applications on either a local machine, or a server running on the local network. In many situations one does not have the luxury of a domain name service to base everything off of, and it becomes a matter of using the IP address or an internal host file.

For example, I have an internal server that we do most of our development on and we’ve typically placed everything in the default htdocs directory. That tends to be a problem if we’re working on a pre-existing application that was designed to work only from the root level.

In the following steps I’ll describe setting up a virtual host and how to trick your computer into simulating the domain service.
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Here is a quick and dirty guide to create your own remote repository. Access is controlled through standard ssh so it’s as secure as your ssh access is.
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It’s pretty straightforward to install Git on a mediatemple DV 3.0 server. If you have later versions of their servers with Yum installed, you may be able to simply install it through yum.

To begin you need to download the latest version and run through the standard extraction and configure/make/make install.

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At Trellis Development we’re working on several applications which need to frequently convert dates between various time zones.

By default, both PHP and MySQL operate using a single timezone which is identified during installation and is quite often the same as the host server. Both tools allow you to specify a different timezone on the fly, and all following date operations work based off of that locale.

The primary goal is to preserve a base standard time so that we can easily convert between different timezones, without loosing the ability to convert again. Two choices emerged – storing a Unix Time stamp or a date string stored using GMT/UTC time.
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