Every so often, you want to see how some code will look on your server before you actually deploy it there. Without setting up an identical server at identical cost elsewhere, you might consider testing locally on your desktop computer.
This setup describes what I've found to be useful, which is a system that allows you to host multiple sites on your local system, all resolving to different domain names, and configurable by adding a simple single line to a file and creating the directory to host the site. You don't even need to restart Apache to configure a whole new virtual host with this method.
The steps to do this are pretty simple, and all of the software is freely available. I recommend PSPad as a free text editor, which has a cool feature to let me mark these files as "favorites" to open them quickly without having to browse for them. You could also use Notepad, if you enjoy your own pain....
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With the looming release of WordPress 2.0, there are a bunch of folks that are submitting bug fixes that say things like, "I would submit this to Trac, but I don't know how."
I think even more people are suggesting that writing to the mailing list with their bugs to "confirm" them is better than submitting them directly to Trac. I suppose if you're not sure something is a bug, it might be worthwhile to ask someone else (I would ask on IRC at #wordpress on irc.freenode.net) but it really is better to have a formal record of an issue, even if it turns out that what you're experiencing is expected behavior. If you really fear that it's something to do specifically with your installation, check on IRC or maybe try a fresh install.
Nevertheless, it might be useful to folks to learn how I do it. I'm not saying my method is correct, just that it seems to get the job done with few complaints from the devs who commit my patches. It's also a good method to use on Windows. (Sorry, someone else can document command-line Subversion use - not that I don't know it, I'm just lazy.) Here we go... more
