My setup is like yours. Here's what I do. I keep a web browser, a telnet client, and my editor (CodeWright with integrated ftp client) open on my Windoze box.

I code a while. Then hit upload to fire off my work to the server. Then I request the appropriate page in my browser.

If there are any problems, I run this shell script (as root -- so it can write to the error log) on the server using the telnet client:

if [ "$#" -eq 1 ]; then
   lines=$1
else
   lines=50
fi
echo
echo
echo "----------printing $lines lines----------"
log_file="/usr/local/apache/logs/www.myserver.com-error_log"
tail -n$lines $log_file
echo "#####################################">>$log_file
date >> $log_file
echo "#####################################">>$log_file
[download]

And then back to my editor to fix or build some more.

The lines in the shell script that append to the log_file mark it and time/date stamp it each time I dump the tail. This way, I can easily see which error entries are new with the most recent page load attempt. Very handy.

The rhythm of this entire cycle has become second nature to me. There is a 2-5 second delay with each save. But I don't even notice that any more. And the differences in the environment between the server and my box are enough that there would be sure to be surprises if I tested first on my local machine. It's just not worth it.

Everybody's different but this works for me. HTH