While I spend most of mine developing applications with .NET in Visual Studio 2005, there are times when I want to tweak a site built in PHP/MySQL. Since all my sites are hosted on GoDaddy, I don’t have SSH access into the server. This leaves FTP as the sole choice for editing remote content. While a solid practice would be to have a local development environment to text changes, it’s a blog, and it’s just not that important to me if I make a quick mistake. Plus, sometimes you’re dealing with Authorize.NET or PayPal, or FedEx, or another cart-based solution that requires cURL through a proxy.

For editing remote files, I use Cyberduck and TextMate on OSX. Cyberduck handles the FTP interface nicely with a finder-like interface. A quick click and you’re editing the remote file in TextMate. Make your change and save and Cyberduck automatically updates the file on the server. Or at least it did with Tiger.

It seems that some things broke with Leopard in how file update notifications are handled with Cyberduck. If you try to update using the built-in software update, you won’t get anything newer than 2.8 – which doesn’t have the fix. So if you’re using Leopard, you can get this functionality back by installing a nightly build of Cyberduck. It’s a quick install (simply copy to the Applications folder) and you’re back up and running. Do yourself a favor at the same time and turn off the Growl notifications for connection/disconnection to avoid some on-screen spam when saving the file.