I consider myself proficient at a few web programming languages, but I’m certainly not a back-end guru (here’s lookin at you Pat and Jon). Because I will soon be on the road for about a week and a half, journeying to LA with little or no internet access, I needed to set up a server environment on my Mac to test out my own wordpress plugins, themes, etc. Rather than going through the oftentimes painstaking experience of installing and configuring Apache with PHP and MySQL, I used xampp. This installation and set-up package is a quick and easy way to get going with the aforementioned items, in an hour or less. If you want to test out Content Management Systems, php scripts, or other web apps, but don’t feel completely comfortable setting things up manually, I highly recommend it.