I’m putting together a ratings and review website to compare electronic cigarettes (eCigs) and eCig suppliers. The site is built on wordpress using the GD Star Ratting plugin. For those of you who may not know about ecigs they are mechanical cigarette like devices which use an atomizer to vaporize nicotine. The main appeal, aside form being “smokeless” (that is in theory you could smoke one in an airport), is they’re a bit cheaper.

Running Microsofts Internet Information Services (IIS) and a SQL Server on the same development box as WAMP can sometimes cause port conflicts resulting in Apache not starting. Suppose – hypothetically speaking – you’ve recently decided to spend some time setting up IIS server and an MS SQL server on a Vista box (Windows Vista Home Premium in my case).  Then later you switch gears and after setting up IIS and MS SQL server you decide to do some Apache and PHP development only to find that Apache is blocked on port 80.

I recently retooled a Zend development environment on a mac laptop running OS X. I had been using the free version of MAMP for awhile but found the free version too limited.  MAMP is useful for getting  Apache, PHP, and MySQL stack up and working together quickly on a mac.  One thing lacking in MAMP though is an actual http.conf file like you probably deal with on a production server.

XAMP is another free AMP stack which includes an editable httpd.conf file making configuring Apache to test SSL connections much more standardized if not straight forward.  Instead of dealing with a GUI one deals with the Apache configuration files directly.  While it’s nice to be able to customize XAMPs Apache installation getting the configuration right can take some time.  If your really uncomfortable meddling with Apache configuration files you should consider just purchasing a licensed version of MAMP which does most of the stuff through a graphical interface.  Of course once you go into production you’ll probably going to have to deal with Apache’s httpd.conf file anyway so you might as well front load the pain now and be better prepared when things actually do go into production.