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Scott Hanselman presents the following article on getting a machine up to speed for Web Development.

There’s a new site at http://www.microsoft.com/web and a new (beta) of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (blog announcement). It’s basically a super bootstrapper that keeps track of where to get stuff and organizes them as profiles.

If I select “Your Choice” I get a complete list from a catalog of things that can be downloaded. I can auto-select options from a dropdown like “PHP Developer” or “Classic ASP Developer.” Cool that those options are there as well as ASP.NET Developer. There’s a manifest that it downloads to get the latest versions of each of these.

On the Web Server tab, it’ll pick the right IIS modules you’d need to get a site up, but it also shows as options some of the more interesting (and not well publicized) modules like ARR and BitRate Throttling that have been released since IIS7 came out.

If you’re running a Web Development shop, it’s certainly a quick way to get everything you’d need installed, including the free version of Visual Studio Web Express.

Check it out, and if you have any trouble or find anything interesting, you can report it directly to the team at the Web Platform Installer Forum. If you like it or hate it, let them now. It’d be interesting to see how extensible it can be and if they choose to extend it other developer products.

Undoubtedly every web-designer and developer who as made any attempt to use CSS will have found a situation where different web-browsers require different style statements. I’ve just encountered this myself with a side project I’ve been working on. This irritation is due to the varying degree of completeness of the CSS implementation across browsers and browser versions.

Conditional-CSS is a solution to this problem, taking the idea of the conditional comment syntax from Internet Explorer and placing it inline with your CSS statements.

Conditional-CSS is something you need to install on your server to be able to use. It comes in three platform versions:

PHP -Very simple to install and portable to any platform that runs PHP – the right option for you if you want to give Conditional-CSS a go.

C – Exceedingly fast and will run on just about every *nix platform, this is a little tricker to install, but very useful as a global interpreter.

C# -Runs under .NET 2.0 in Windows and Mono on many other platforms, use this version if you are using IIS or a .NET based web-server.

Get Conditional-CSS here.

So I installed the WP Super Cache plugin. Seemed simple enough, I’d been using WP-Cache for a long time and was pretty please with it. WP Super Cache is based on the excellent WP-Cache plugin and therefore brings all the benefits of that plugin to WordPress. On top of that it creates copies of every page that is accessed on a blog in a form that is quickly served by the web server. It’s almost as quick as if the you had saved a page in your browser and uploaded it to replace your homepage.

So that sounds good, except that I followed all the steps, let the plugin to it’s automagic stuff and then I got a 500 error when attempting to hit my site. OUCH! No good.

Turns out the issue was the way my .htaccess file was written (it did this automatically, no clue why it didn’t work out correctly. Anyway, what ended up in my htaccess was:

Options All -Indexes# BEGIN WPSuperCache
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

What it SHOULD be is this:

Options All -Indexes
# BEGIN WPSuperCache
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

Make that simple update to the first line, ensuring that the #BEGIN WPSuperCache is on it’s own line and everything started working as expected.