I was having weird problems with Firefox lagging every once in a while, so I decided to just build my own for Mac OS X Leopard on my Intel Core 2 Duo Mac Pro. Didn’t turn out to be too difficult; Neil Lee at BeatnikPad already has Intel and G5 native builds of Firefox 3 available, but I like having the default branding (Firefox instead of Minefield, the fox icon instead of the weird bomb-planet thing) and a little more customized optimization. Here’s a basic walkthrough of how I did it; you’ll need the latest version of Xcode installed, a passing familiarity with the Terminal, and the latest version of libIDL (if you have Fink, fink install libidl2; for MacPorts, sudo port install libidl).

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Like I mentioned previously, this site is now being served up by lighttpd; it took a while to get clean URLs working right, but what right now is making my server tick is a very carefully laid-out filesystem and set of bash scripts and lighty config files, wrapped around a Drupal multisite installation to make installing modules and upgrading the entire system as intuitive and painless as possible. Upgrading Drupal (from 6.2 to the brand-new 6.3 for example) takes no more than running a single command. Here’s an overview of how my own site is set up, generalized to make it applicable to almost any other system.

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