Frack.
One of my favorite WordPress plugins – Text Control – is broken with the update to WordPress 2.1.3. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice it until this morning, so it’s probable that my blog was broken all day yesterday. I’ve no idea if this plugin is still being supported – I certainly hope it is because all of my entries are formatted using Textile 2, which Text Control handles (or did) very nicely.
I can only hope it gets updated. And soon. For now, all my formatting from historical entries is broken.
Edit: I’ve reinstalled the Textile2 plugin (now TextileWrapper) so that at least my formatting works again. But I’m back to the problem I had before where, for some reason, the quicktags for my Contact and PluginsUsed pages break.
Tags: plugins, software, text-control, WordPress
Apparently, updating three addons at once causes Firefox to take quite a bit longer to load.
Tags: addons, firefox, software
I use a lot of portable applications. At last count, I have 22 of them sitting on my flash drive. I use about half of them nearly every day, and the other half get used often enough to warrant their continued presence on my flash drive. Part 1 of the Portable Applications section will cover the programs that are, for me, daily essentials. Part 2 will cover the ones that I consider to be my ‘support’ programs.
- Firefox Portable – I have long held disdain for Internet Explorer, and Firefox has been my replacement browser of choice. When computer account limitations at work prevented me from installing Firefox on my work PC, I went hunting for alternate solutions. What I found was Firefox Portable. It was my introduction to portable applications nearly a year and a half ago, and I’ve never looked back. I now run Firefox exclusively from my flash drive, which allows me to keep all my settings, bookmarks, and addons with me at all times. I’ll be talking about Firefox addons in a later part that will make this browser even more powerful and versatile.
- GAIM Portable – What computer and web geek would be without his Instant Messaging client? GAIM Portable gives you the power of several of the most popular IM clients right on your flash drive. No more worrying about getting logged off on another computer or having to import your settings (or installing the software) on a new computer. Launch it from your flash drive and your good to go. It also allows you to run multiple AIM accounts, which is a huge advantage if you have different screen names for different groups of people.
- FileZilla Portable – Web developers rely heavily on their FTP clients. I use mine literally every day for moving files back and forth on my webhost. FileZilla has become my FTP client of choice – it’s free, and it’s extremely easy to use.
- metapad – Who needs Windows Notepad when you have something as powerful as metapad? Granted, Notepad has become a bit more powerful with recent editions, but in my opinion, metapad is still far superior. It offers up more options than does Notepad and handles certain types of files (like .php and .css) much better than Notepad does. metapad has been a staple program for me for several years now.
- GIMP Portable – Photoshop is still my graphics editor of choice, but since it is also still prohibitively expensive to buy – and since I’ve not yet seen a portable version of the software – GIMP fills the gap for the kinds of basic graphic manipulations I generally need to do. It’s relatively small, as programs go, and lets you do quite a bit of the same things that you can do in Photoshop. It’s not as user-friendly or as intuitive as Photoshop, but it generally does what I need it to.
- MWSnap – I frequently need to quickly and easily capture screens from my computer. SnagIt is a great capture software for doing just this, but it’s also relatively expensive to buy. MWSnap does exactly the same thing that SnagIt does, but it has the bonus of being both free and portable. It’s very easy to use and makes it very simple to capture the entire screen, individual windows, or custom-sized rectangles from your computer screen.
- 7-zip Portable – I work with compressed files a lot these days, so I have to have compression software at the ready all the time. WinZip is fine, insofar as it goes – but it only handles .zip files. Sometimes I need to open up a .tar or a .tar.gz file. PowerArchiver does these and more – but it also costs money to buy (unless you’re purchasing much older versions with fewer features). 7-zip opens just about every kind of compressed file out there.
- irfanView – Periodically, I need to resize some pictures, especially ones coming down off a digital camera. The main thing that I use irfanView is its ability to process entire batches of images. I simply select all the images I want to resize, tell it how big I want them, and within a moment or two, everything is down to a manageable size. It makes sharing digital photographs or maintaining a photoblog that much easier.
- OpenOffice Portable – Microsoft has a relatively solid office suite with their MSOffice package. However, like most things Microsoft, it’s also rather expensive. It’s also not portable. OpenOffice provides an alternative office suite to Microsoft’s version that runs every bit as good as, if not better than, the MS version. It has also now been made portable so that you can load it up on your flash drive and run it from anywhere.
- RoughDraft – Now, from a writer’s perspective, RoughDraft is one of the best utilities in my toolkit. I have two writing programs that I use with regularity. RoughDraft is the one I use for writing flash fiction and short stories. It works exclusively with .rtf files, which is actually a pretty good thing because it’s a versatile file type that is available to a number of different word processing programs. RoughDraft allows you to open multiple documents in tabs right inside the main window, so there’s no worry about having too many things open in your Windows taskbar at the same time. This is a slick little program that is must-have for any writer.
- yWriter – For longer writing project I use yWriter. This is quite possibly one of the most powerful little writing packages I’ve ever seen, allowing you to easily create chapters, break them into scenes, and move pieces around as you need to adjust chronology. It also allows you to create character profiles and keep track of notes. This is another must-have for any writer who is serious about getting that novel written.
All of these programs of free and easy to use. These are the programs that I use nearly every day and thus serve as the core of my tools for writing and maintaining my website.
Part 2 of Portable Applications will cover another group of portable apps that get used less frequently but in some ways are just as important as my daily essentials.
Note: When leaving comments for this series, you may receive a 302 error and not immediately see your comment. Rest assured that your comment has been logged and received. Simply refresh the page, and you’ll see it. This is a bug with the series plugin I’m currently using and will hopefully be ironed out soon.
Tags: 7-zip-portable, filezilla, filezilla-portable, firefox, firefox-portable, gaim, gaim-portable, Geekware, gimp-portable, irfanview, metapad, mwsnap, open-office-portable, portable-applications, roughdraft, software, ywriter
Today I’m starting a series of entries on some of the software that I use on a daily basis, things that make my life a lot easier and simpler and allow me to do just about anything I want and need to from just about anywhere. In this series, I’m going to talk about a handful of desktop applications I use frequently, portable applications (software that can be run directly from your flash drive), add-ons for Firefox that make the browser much more versatile and powerful, Greasemonkey scripts that further enhance the way you see aspects of certain websites, and WordPress plugins – both those that I consider essential to any WP installation and those that serve as WordPress glam.
This first part of the series will deal with defining some terms, since I know that not everyone is aware what some of these things are:
- Open Source refers to software that is open to anyone to modify and change. The source code is open to everyone, and so there is usually a general community of people who collectively work on making it better. Personally, I’ve come to swear by open source software because, first and foremost, it’s free. These days, with the ready availability of software on the Internet, there is now open source software out there for just about anything that is just as good (and in some cases, better) than brand-name software that you can purchase from a software company. Open source software also tends to be updated frequently, and many extensions and modifications may be available from other coders who wish to make the software more versatile and more powerful. Firefox is one example of this type of software, which we will discuss in greater detail later.
- Freeware is similar to open source software is that it is freely available to all consumers. The major difference here is that freeware isn’t generally continually under development by a community of developers. Either the software is developed once and distributed across the Web, only to be promptly forgotten, or the original author maintains exclusive rights to the source code and so upgraded releases and extensions are developed only by the author.
- FTP stands for file transfer protocol. FTP is what allows web developers to maintain their sites easily by making it fast and efficient to upload (or download) lots of files at once to their websites. Later on I’ll discuss my favorite FTP client and how I use it to make continual changes to my own website.
- Flash drives are miniature hard drives. They run in size anywhere from 256MB to as much as 8GB. Of course, now there are portable hard drives that weigh in at a hefty 250GB that function in much the same way as flash drives. Most flash drives, though, can go on a lanyard or key chain for easy portability. They make great storage for files and applications.
- Portable applications are applications that are designed to be completely self-contained so that you can run them from anywhere – your desktop computer’s hard drive, a CD, or your flash drive. They don’t install – that is, they don’t make any changes to the registry in your Windows operating system – which means that, if you have the application on CD or a flash drive, you can just plug it into any computer anywhere and run it instantly. This is what makes them portable, by being able to essentially take specific functions of your computer with you. I’ve come to swear by portable applications, so much so that pretty much every application I run on a daily basis I run from my 1GB flash drive. I’ll talk more about portable applications later and why I think they are so valuable and convenient.
This is just a taste of things to come. The articles that follow from here will detail different types of software that are great for web geeks and some that are great tools for anyone.
Tags: addons, firefox, flash-drive, freeware, ftp, Geekware, open-source, plugins, portable-applications, software, Technology, WordPress
It’s confirmed – 2GB is simply not enough space to store my entire music collection. And let me just say this – while I may not have all that many readers, I do have some of the coolest. One of my readers was gracious enough to send me a used 1st generation iPod Nano she no longer had a use for. It arrived Saturday, and I spent the better portion of the day importing CDs into iTunes. I was at least able to get the vast majority of music that I wanted from my collection synced with the Nano. There’s still a handful of CDs and all my podcasts that didn’t make the cut, but I’m content with this – it gives me a way to listen to my music at work without having to rely on the latest (and crappiest) version of Windows Media Player (which just sucks all the RAM right out of your computer).
And let me just say that iTunes is fabulous. It made it super easy to import my music and organize it into playlists. Plus it can handle podcasts and, should I ever choose to do so, I can get music from the iTunes store that I can instantly put on my iPod. I know, I’m behind the game. Most of you probably have already experienced this.
I’m loving my new little toy, so a big thank you goes out to Jean for being awesome. I appreciate the generosity, lady. I believe I’m going to end up running this little sucker through its paces for the foreseeable future.
Tags: apple, ipod, ipod-nano, itunes, software, Technology
I’m brain-burned today. Feels like someone aimed an unhealthy dose of microwaves right at my cranium and set it on ‘Well Done.’ Boom – crispy critterized brain goo. So much I wanted to get done today and so little actually accomplished. I supposed I should be more careful in the future to actually try to get more than five hours of sleep in a night.
Here’s the upshot – I have several entries planned out for the very near future. One is a book review that may fluff into two book reviews before I’m done – Odd Thomas and Forever Odd. The former is already done and the latter is on the homeward stretch. I also have a movie review planned for M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water.
Additionally, I’m been continuing to pimp out Firefox and WordPress with all kinds of fun little toys and ‘gadgets’ that’ll make you positively drool. I believe in getting the most mileage possible out of my tools, and I’m making theses suckers dance!
I also have a bunch of stories begging for my attention. I keep trying to ignore them, but those baseball bats with the nails drilled through them are starting to look more menacing every day, so I suppose I’ll have to bow to their demands soon.
All that’s coming down the pike soon, hopefully after a longer night’s rest tonight so I don’t feel quite so much like whipped egg, fried over low heat, and served up to a horde of voracious junior high kids.
Oh, and do please check out the previous entry – I still need more feet pictures. I’ve already had one willing victim participant. Anyone else wanna join in on this madness?
Tags: books, dean-koontz, firefox, forever-odd, health, lady-in-the-water, m.-night-shyamalan, odd-thomas, software, WordPress, Writing
It kind of bugs me – I’d really wish that, when users leave bug reports and such for plugin and theme authors, that those authors would then at least acknowledge the receipt of those bug reports and give some sort of feedback as to the status of correcting those bugs, even if it’s just to say, “Hey, I don’t have time to work on this right now and probably won’t for a while.” I’ve got three or four different plugins in use at the moment, all of which have minor bugs and glitches, but the authors of these plugins almost seem to have fallen off the planet. If it wasn’t for the fact that there is still new content showing up on their sites (which, to be fair, could be scheduled content), I’d have to assume they’d abandoned their blogs for a while. Some of these reports I’ve left have been out there for several days now. It’d just be nice to get an acknowledgement that, yes, they’ve seen my bug report, and it’s on the list of things to be investigated and, hopefully, fixed. It’s just common courtesy.
Tags: bug-reports, bugs, courtesy, plugins, software, WordPress
WordPress has all kinds of nifty little crosspost plugins now. With one click of a button, anything I post here will automatically and simultaneously be posted on Xanga and LiveJournal, as well. So allow me to add another item to my WordPress wishlist – a WordPress to WordPress crosspost plugin. Why would I ever want something like this? Simple – there are selected items I post here that I might want to deliver to an alternate site or I might simply want to mirror my site elsewhere, kind of as a backup in case something goes kerplooey here. What features would such a plugin require? Here’s some to start:
- Preservation of all the post’s metadata – title, categories, permissions, date/timestamps, passwords, etc.
- Ability to crosspost to as many instances of WordPress as desired.
- Ability to select only certain categories for crossposting.
- Ability to crosspost to a wordpress.com blog.
I think that’d certainly do for starters. Any coding geniuses out there want to take on a new project?
Tags: crossposting, plugins, software, Technology, WordPress
