At last year's Drupalcon in Denver there was an excellent session called Delivering Drupal.  It had to do with the oftentimes painful process of deploying a website to web servers.

I try to subscribe to security and release announcement RSS feeds in Google Reader since it's bad practice to let software become out of date, especially on a web server.  At the very least you'll know of a vulnerability and be able to patch it.  Here are some important ones I use:

I feel starting out as a person who makes websites today is different than it was 12 years ago when I started.  Back then I had literally no guide and I was a middle school student.  Somehow, I pulled through and that experience is an interesting thing to look at now that I'm a little older.  Compared to some I am still a beginning web developer, but I now do it professionally and make a living with it.

Here is a list of things I'd recommend to anyone starting out on the path of web development.

I'm tired of reading PHP rant posts on sites like Hacker News.  Who submits these things?  Here's a counter-rant, maybe some PHP hating language developer will see it.

If you need a way to redirect webform submissions to a dynamic URL in Drupal 6, using the Webform PHP module can work well with Webform 3.x.  I recommend only using post processing conditionals on select fields if possible with Webform PHP since you need to enable the permission to "use PHP for additional processing" for users who submit webforms (typically anonymous).

Here's the process:

I've been expanding my programming language base lately.  Being a web developer, I don't have an immediate need to learn other languages.  However, learning them seems to pass time and it doesn't seem like a worthless endeavor.  Who knows, being the one who creates the next "killer app" could be worth it.  Here's an overview of some of the languages I've been experimenting with:

I found this trick during the development of Acton Institute's new Drupal-ized website.  I wanted to be able to list out other articles by the same author and show it on a sidebar.  Here's the setup:

• Article authors are CCK nodereference fields to a separate author content type

How does one then construct a view that thinks the author is a CCK field and not the actual node's author?  It's a lot easier than I thought.  The only thing you need to have in your view is an argument with a little PHP magic.