Reliable backup systems are critical to any type of development. The following simple python script can be setup on a crontab and will tar a server's /home and /etc directories and scp them to a remote server. It will send an email alert when it is finished, and can be extended to include other directories. It also has a way to exclude wild-card file patterns or directories.
In more complicated applications, it often makes sense to warn users if they try to navigate away from a form without saving the information. For example, in NutrientNet, I have a tool that calculates nutrient credits that spans several tabs, each with a separate form.
I found this posting handy when I was trying to gzip files on my windows machine. The documentation that comes with Python is not very good regarding gzip. This explanation was clear and concise.
One of the sites that I work on, EarthTrends, used to have a stability problem. It was running on a Windows server using Coldfusion and a SQL Server back-end, and we were intermittently having problems with Coldfusion crashing the server.
I decided to setup Trac for the projects I work on at World Resources Institute. Previously, we had used a combination of DokuWiki and Mantis to manage our projects.