Programming Beginnings: FTP Madness

When I started doing (amateur) web development, I quickly settled into a very convoluted development process... which seems completely ridiculous nowadays. I just thought I'd post it here for laughs.

My first web stack was made of:

• XAMPP, of which I used:
• Apache
• FileZilla FTP server
• Mercury SMTP server
• PHP 5
• MySQL
• Firefox, with some extensions:
• Firebug
• FireFTP
• Notepad++
• Mercurial

Now, I had only one Windows box which I used for development, and a free hosting account somewhere I don't remember where which had limited ssh access.

My development process went like this:

• Boot up XAMPP, including all the components I listed.
• Start Firefox.
• Dev:
• Open Notepad++ and point it to the %HOME%\My Documents\mywebsite folder which had my website's "source".
• Edit files.
• Open FireFTP and connect to the (local!) FileZilla FTP server.
• Upload the modified files to the C:\xampp\htdocs folder (yes, on the same machine).
• Refresh the page, test, etc.
• Repeat.
• When satisfied:
• Commit my changes to local hg repo.
• Push to remote mercurial hosting (somewhere free and private, intuxication?).
• SSH to hosting.
• Pull the changes from the remote hg.
• Log in to hosting cpanel.
• Use the GUI to copy the files over to web folder.
• Repeat ad nauseam.

I did that for ages (read: 6 months), until I broke my Windows, installed Ubuntu, and finally entered the real world. The "good ol' days", huh...