If you do any kind of work that requires S/FTP, you know the hassle of marking up your local copy, saving, uploading, and checking the result. I know it drives me batty to have to do all of that up-and-down crap. And sure, I can use vi in the command shell, and I do regularly, but I find I’m much slower in vi than I am in a regular text editor. So I struggled with vi or the FTP up-and-down, until I found a great bit of functionality within my already chosen text editor on Mac.

I had been using TextWrangler for a while — mostly because it is a powerful text editor, with the added benefit of being free — before someone tipped me off to the ability to open and save files from within TextWrangler over S/FTP connections. I hadn’t ever considered that could be placed into software, but I found it to be a brilliant feature to a product I already considered to be of high quality. With TextWrangler, you open a FTP browser window, enter your S/FTP information (or pick from a saved bookmark), and connect. It’s a pretty basic FTP browser, but it doesn’t need to be super fancy.

Sure, it has its limitations. You need to have permissions to the file, and cannot use a SUDO command to gain super user access to edit it. Also, if you have to CHMOD or CHOWN you need to do that elsewhere. In full honesty, these are the only limitations I’ve come up against at this point, and maybe I’m not looking hard enough to find the way to do it. I’ve been using this functionality from TextWrangler for about a year now, and this is one of those simple, yet killer features that I will expect out of any future text editor I use.

Does anyone know of a text editor on the Windows or Linux platforms that provide similar functionality, because I’d sure like to give it a go on my other workstations.

It’s been a while since I talked here about MindMeister (11 months), and about six months since I’ve seriously used it. In that time they have made some pretty sweet changes.

The big announcement in November was their release of MindMeister Offline. Built on Google Gears, MindMeister Offline allows you to take your mindmaps offline, work completely offline (including creating new maps), and sync it back up when you are able to get back online. This feature is only available to Premium account holders.

Geistesblitz is a set of tools that let you do spur-of-the-moment-brain-dumps to your default map. Whether through the dashboard widget, or the browser search bar extension, what you enter in is place in your default map. I tested this out a bit, and found it worked quite well in a form of a to-do manager. This is open to all account levels.

Thirdly, they have come out with a full API, on top of the embed API. Nothing really here for the general public, per se, but I would expect to see some sweet stuff for tying MindMeister maps into any and every online resource possible. I’m also curious to see if someone will come out with a cocoa-based MindMeister app.

In account level “news”, now all account levels can embed maps into websites and blogs. I might just have to do that to say I’ve done it.

Lastly, one thing I noticed today which I thought was very cool. If you have shared a map, you can have MindMeister notify you through Twitter that your map has been modified. Gotta love that.

Keep up with MindMeister development on their blog.

A short while ago, I was talking with a co-worker about personal productivity (i.e. to-do) systems.  There are so many systems out there, and each with their own spin on GTD.  He showed me one that is a spin on the TiddlyWiki system:  Tiddlyspot.Tiddlyspot is a hosted version of TiddlyWiki, with a twist.  Not only can you work on your wiki online, but you can download a version of it to work on locally when you are, say, getting ready to get on a flight.  Once you are where you have an internet connection again, you can sync you local copy up to the server, and you are back in the cloud with it.Yeah, sure you can just get TiddlyWiki and put it on a thumb drive, but this gets you local and cloud workability without having to tote a thumb drive around with you.And, do top it off, there is a pretty slick Firefox extension that complements TiddlyWiki and Tiddlyspot.  TiddlySnip gives you three key context menu options:  TiddlySnip a selection, the clipboard, or the page. The clipboard option is perhaps the most creative of the three. Say you want to create a tiddler of something from Word, you copy it from Word, go into Firefox, and TiddlySnip the clipboard. Extremely handy. 

There are a lot of options out there for the instant messaging crowd. There are probably three multi-protocol clients available for every one single-protocol (standalone) client. There are two related multi-protocol clients, that work pretty much across the board on the three major flavors of operating systems, that I think are flat out better than anything else out there.

If I’m installing an IM client on a Windows or Linux box I’m going with Pidgin. Pidgin is released under GPLv2, and has implemented (at present count) 16 IM protocols, ranging from the standard ones — MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, and Jabber — to the no-so-standard — Gadu-Gadu, MySpaceIM, and Groupwise to name a few. While this does require the GTK libraries to be installed on Windows, they have seamlessly integrated this into the installer, so there is no pain involved. There are lots of plugins available, including my favorite — Psychic Mode.

Adium is a cousin of Pidgin. Adium is built on the libraries behind Pidgin, and is only for Mac OS X. Where Pidgin doesn’t quite seem to carry the look and feel of Windows, Adium is 100% Mac in its look and feel. Adium also integrates perfectly with Growl. The protocol support is a little bit less with Adium compared to Pidgin, but I’ll never use the obscure ones it doesn’t support. It does, however, pickup support for the .Mac protocol.

You may say, “What about Trillian? What about iChat?” What about them? With Trillian, you have to buy the pro version to get the Jabber protocol. With iChat you only have .Mac, Jabber, AIM, and Bonjour protocols; no MSN or Yahoo! support. I’ve tried using Trillian and iChat, but I always end up back with Pidgin and Adium.

iChat does have one major advantage over Adium at this point: voice and video chat. While Adium (and Pidgin) is currently working on this issue, you have to go to iChat to take advantage of that functionality.

If you haven’t heard of Pownce, think Twitter but with the ability to do more than just messages. It’s currently in closed beta, and I’ve got six invites for the first six comments. Be sure to check out the local client app, too, written in Adobe AIR.

UPDATE: I just received six more invites, so I currently have a total of eight for those that are curious about Pownce.

I’m the tech/operations person for a branch of our organization that has staff in 3 locations. I work out of the “main office,” and do a poor job of making it out to the other two locations on a regular basis. Partially because of the location spread, and partially because I think it’d be fun, I’m going to start producing some demo/instructional screencasts. I know, this is completely unique take on screencasting that no one else is doing. Maybe I should patent it. (please note the thick sarcasm) I’m tied to Windows at work, so I looked first at Camtasia. Being cheap I balked at the price tag. That started me looking for free alternatives.

I read something a couple of weeks ago about a “free” Windows-based screencasting setup. For the capture George suggested using CamStudio. I’ve played around with it a little, and I’ve been very impressed with the simplicity and general quality of the capture. CamStudio’s captures are fairly large, so George took a suggestion from Free Vlog and used Windows Movie Maker to achieve better compression — and convert the AVI file to WMV.

What other options are out there? I’ve read about Wink, but haven’t tried it yet. What do you use for Windows-based screencasting?

One thing I am regularly frustrated with is the lack of ability to enter a TAB into a web form. There are times when you want to use TAB spacing, but are relegated to hitting the spacebar a bunch of times. With Tabinta — Tab In Textarea — that problem just disappears. One obvious drawback is you will no longer be able to tab through forms with a textarea element; you’ll have to grab for that mouse.

One commenter of the plugin says, “Cntrl-Tab should insert a tab if Firefox follows the MS multi-line programming SDK.” This comment would be perfect if we hadn’t just discussed that the Ctrl-Tab keystroke cycles through tabs in Firefox and IE7. I tried a bunch of keystroke combinations, but nothing worked. I was a little excited when I found Option-Tab created a tab space in the OS X Spotlight search field, but that’s pretty much it. It kinda works in Safari text fields, but not textarea fields.

If anyone out there is game, I’d love to see a Firefox plugin similar to Tabinta, but one that used the Ctrl-Alt-Tab (and Ctrl-Cmd-Tab on Mac) keystroke — or something along those lines — to add a tab. I’d be forever indebted to you, especially if it works with the Web Developer plugin for editing CSS. Just figured I’d throw that out there.

Most people in the tech industry are familiar with the accronym LAMP (if not, follow that link). MAMP is a variation on LAMP, but for Mac.

I need to preface this post with the advice that the product I’m about to show is not for “production” type environments. The official word is:

MAMP was created primarily as a PHP development environment for Macintosh computer and should therefore not be used as Live Webserver for the Internet. In this case, we recommend that you use Mac OS X server with the provided Apache or a Linux server.

That out of the way, this is THE BEST web development environment when working on a Mac. To install, drag the MAMP folder to your Applications folder. You don’t have to install Apache, PHP, and MySQL separately, and configure them to work together; it just works.

You don’t have to run any scripts to get it to load, you just launch the MAMP application and Apache and MySQL services start (it does require you to enter your Administrator credentials). The configuration is done through a simple preferences menu, allowing you to modify Apache and MySQL ports, whether to use PHP4 or PHP5, and the Apache document root folder, plus some other minor settings.

Everything is local, so you can use your favorite PHP/HTML/CSS editor (I use Smultron), save your changes, and immediately check the results. I love WordPress, but the native template and plugin editor forms are just basic textarea form elements. With MAMP I’ve got a WordPress installation where I can do my template/plugin work in Smultron, and instantly see the results without having to upload anything to a server out on the interwebs.

A Top 10 Free Mac Apps list was just made over at Lifehacker. I was satisfied with their list, but was a little sad to not see MAMP on it. Check MAMP out, you won’t be disappointed. It’ll probably make your top 10 list, just like it’s on mine.

I just recently added the Digg It buttons on here. I had to do some debugging to try to get it to work properly, so I figured I’d pass along my work for anyone else to use. There are two things that I did to make it work right:

1. Modify the posts loop on the template pages I wanted the badge to appear on. In my case this was the index.php, single.php, and page.php templates.
2. I encapsulated the Digg code in a DIV so I could style it up.

This snippet of code below is what you will want to put in your posts loop, right above the <?php the_content(); ?> function call. I chose to include the digg_url and digg_title JavaScript variables.

The digg_url variable is required if you are going to place the badge in your index.php template, or any template where it is possible to see multiple posts e.g. archives.php. What it does is encodes each badge with the permalink for the appropriate post, rather than using the URL of the page you are currently viewing. I decided to include digg_url on single.php and page.php for consistency. The digg_title variable pre-populates the Story Title field for the first person to Digg the post.

<div class="diggit"><script type="text/javascript">
digg_url = '<?php the_permalink() ?>';
digg_title = '<?php the_title(); ?>';
</script>
<script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>
<?php the_content(); ?>


Now for the CSS stuff. For my template I only needed to float the DIV to one side — I chose left — and modify the padding options to get it in position.

.entry .diggit {
float:left;
padding: 20px 5px 0 0;
}


The general information for this came from the Digg Tools Integration section. I added in the necessary WordPress PHP functions in order to fill in the JavaScript variables. Try it out and let me know how it goes.

I writing this post not from my home in Oregon, but from Boise, Idaho. Some colleagues and I are in Boise visiting our campus here for work. When we setup this trip last week I got to thinking about airport wifi, and how I was very glad that the airports in both Portland and Boise offer free wifi.

My first thought was that I could put together a list of airports around the country, and their wifi offerings. I had even decided that I was going to get some group participation going on, with readers sending me information about their local airports. As I mentioned this to my wife she gently — as to not crush my brilliant idea — told me that someone has probably already done that.

Sure enough. The helpful people over at TravelPost.com have compiled “the definitive guide to US airport wireless connections and free airport wifi.” They’ve even compiled lists for international airports and airport clubs/lounges.

While that would have been fun to put something together like this, they did a bang-up job that’s not worth duplicating. Happy traveling.