[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
[quote author="BrianDHall" date="1252111244"]
So, what made such a big difference for you that you just refuse to go without it?
[/quote]
As part of my attempt to get a bunch of 'subjective approaches to common problems' loaded up into the wiki, I set up a category for 'what do you do after you've installed CI' and it seems pretty much aligned with the kind of thing you're talking about here.
I think it could be a really useful resource for new users to browse through and get a take on the very different ways people set up their development environments, and the number of different tools that are available to help.
My page (incomplete) is [url="http://codeigniter.com/wiki/I_have_the_welcome_page_-_but_now_what_-_jedd"]here[/url], and it would be great if you wanted to write something similar. It'd be a matter of creating a page at [url="http://codeigniter.com/wiki/I_have_the_welcome_page_-_but_now_what_-_BrianDHall"]this url[/url] and editing it (though you might want to copy across the source template from my page - the category stuff is a bit messy if you're not used to the CI wiki way of thinking).