I’ve tried two services so far: Codenvy and Cloud9. Both of these services are, of course, more than just text editors. They also handle other aspects like tight integration with Github, SSH console, and easy deploying to other services. The obvious benenfit is you no longer have to install text editors and SSH clients on every computer you use, as well as configure your environment – supposedly this is all done for you.

Codenvy seems a little less polished than Cloud9. One thing that struck me as being difficult with Codenvy was simple file management tasks like moving multiple files into another folder. However, Codenvy seems to have more built-in PAAS integrations than Cloud9 does.

However, with Cloud9 there’s two lingering issues I have:

1. The 1 GB storage limit for your project files.
2. The inability to push code changes to one repository, and deploy to another service/repository.

Perhaps the above are not real issues, and I just overlooked the feature – but if that’s the case these things are not easy to figure out on your own.

For #1, I think the paid Cloud9 plan should not limit your file storage. I understand they don’t want it to be used as a file storage service, and that most projects should easily fit under 1 GB. But if the goal is to get developers away from their local machines for coding (where they have much more than 1 GB of storage), this is just a dumb roadblock that doesn’t need to be there early on. If anything make it easy to upgrade file storage to reasonable billing plans.

For #2, this is possibly just a conceptual flaw on my part. I am not even sure I absolutely need to do this, but it’s probably something that would get me signed up to a paid plan today, versus sitting around indefinitely deciding if I want to pay for the service.

Of course with anything based in the cloud you’re susceptible to it not being available for periods of time, as shown below for Cloud9 (which I just tried to access):

With my local text editor, I might not be able to push changes to a remote service (temporarily), but at least my editor (and entire coding environment) doesn’t suddenly disappear as well.

In closing, the future might heavily involve web-based text editors (or IDE’s) but until they fine-tune the basic features like file management and storage space not many developers are going to immediately drop their local system for the browser.

Just call it a “web-based text editor” or “text editor in your browser” for crying out loud!

More on my disdain for “cloud”.

Would the songs still be playable? Since my local Spotify application would not be able to check if I still had a valid account (with the internet disconnected), how would it ever know to restrict my access, and remove those songs that are already synced?

I don’t plan to attempt this (I love Spotify and have gladly paid for it) – I am more curious than anything.

1. Import all blog posts and feedback.
2. Have the same URL’s for blog posts and RSS feeds.

I was able to accomplish both of these things using the nifty RSS importer plugin, with some customizations made.

First, the importer made it very easy because all I had to do was generate a giant XML file from my server that contained all of my blog posts. This was straight-forward using PHP. Approximately 2,000 blog posts made for a 6 MB file. Easy.

Second, in order to make sure my blog posts had the same exact URL (from my custom CMS to WordPress), I simply had to import the “post slug,” or lowercase title (separated by dashes) that you see at the end of every blog post permanent URL. Just look there now – you’ll see “my-checklist-for-moving-to-wordpress.” That’s the slug. As long as that stayed the same (I stored it in my custom CMS), then URL’s would be identical.

By default, the RSS importer does not import the slug, so I had to modify the core plugin, but it was a very simple addition.

Next came comments. The RSS importer also does not import comments, so this was more tricky. What I did was include each comment in my RSS feed export (surrounded by <comment> tags – within each <item> element for each post). Then I had to modify the RSS importer again to read those comments and insert into the database.

This was not as easy as inserting blog posts, however. I actually opened up my own database connection in PHP (in the RSS importer plugin), which gave me access to insert anything into the wp_comments database table. All that was left was to make sure that each comment related to the appropriate blog post. Within the RSS importer script, I had access to $post_id (the blog post ID), so it ended up being very easy after that.

Here are some other minor things I had to adjust:

1. Made sure to include the GMT date for comments.
2. Had to increase my script execution time limit in PHP, as the default of 30 seconds was not enough for larger imports.
3. Made sure each imported post was actual HTML, not the Markdown version of it (I stored both versions in my CMS).
4. Image URL’s would get re-written to reference the WordPress URL (not the WordPress admin URL, but the public URL), so I made sure my settings were correct before importing.

I loved hand-coding my site – being able to control every aspect from server to web browser, I could customize things to my liking, and was never stuck with a system that locked things away from being accessed or changed. I don’t like being controlled when it comes to web development because, as it is my profession, I felt I could write my own CMS and be much more satisfied with it.

This is still true for most things – I like writing my own applications still, but as I get older I am finding that I have to choose more wisely where I spend my time (especially with a daughter on the way very soon). Having to constantly revise, improve, and fix bugs with my blogging CMS is not an area I care to spend time on anymore. I would rather spend time actually writing blog posts, than working on the site itself.

Now, that doesn’t mean I won’t spend some time customizing my site, tweaking it to my liking, and stressing out over tiny details (as I always do when it comes to website design) – it just won’t be as frequent, and I can rest easily knowing that the CMS I am using now is much more secure and being improved regularly.

Plus I had a ton of little bugs and fixes I needed to apply, and I never seemed to find the time to get to that. The backlog of CMS issues just kept growing.

Now I can take advantage of a lot of nice features that make publishing easier, so I can focus more on writing posts, than maintaining the system. And WordPress is customizable enough that I can get under the hood if I need to do something.

Here’s to a new era for me.

Sometimes it’s apps like this that are more successful than software that tries to do everything.

I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and enjoying certain aspects. There are also things that could be improved, or made more obvious.

For example, Trello uses it’s own lingo for various facets of the application. A typical project hierarchy goes like this:

• Boards
  • Lists
    • Cards

Boards contain lists, which in turn contain cards.

The challenge is converting the Trello lingo into real-world components, as the naming convention tries to be cute, which ends up being vague (which could be a good thing).

For example, boards could be departments of the company or team. Lists could be phases of progression (Open, In Progress, Complete, etc). Cards could be individual tasks within each phase. This seems to be a popular approach.

However, there is a lot of flexibility in that you could mix-and-match things different ways.

In one board of mine, I am using lists as phases, but not your typical stages. In other words, it’s either “Working on” or “Not working on.”

Then each card is not an actual task, but a resource (in my case, the name of a company/service).

Within each resource (card) I use checklists for individual tasks. Checklists feel more akin to tasks than cards do (in my opinion).

I like this approach because I don’t think of cards as individual tasks that become “complete,” like in a typical task management application. Cards are living things that are never truly complete and therefore should remain alive (either active or dormant).

So Trello is very flexible with how you approach it.

The iOS app is also nice as it adapts the desktop fluidity into a mobile experience that doesn’t feel like a dumbed-down version of the desktop interface.

I’d recommend giving Trello a try if you are bored with your current task management application.

What I want is the ability to share a blog post (to non-editors and non-administrators) before it goes live, meaning before it shows up on the main /blog/ page and RSS feed.

This is useful for getting feedback or simply previewing the post to only certain people (those that have the direct URL).

To be clear – I want to share a link that anyone can access, even if you are not logged-in to that WordPress account as an editor or administrator. I know there are ways to share the “Draft” preview of a post with other editors and admins, but this is for anyone.

When I fiddle with the “Publish” settings, I never get the desired result. When I change the visibility to “Private,” it only works for editors or administrators of that WordPress account.

My only solution was to set the visibility to “Public,” then change the published date to a very old date in the past (like something in the year 2000, but any old date will do). Then I add a “noindex, nofollow, noarchive” header to the page (easy to do via the “Edit Post” page), so search engines won’t pick it up, and any links to it won’t be followed.

This makes the post accessible to anyone via the actual permalink, yet hides it from all views, such as the main /blog/ page and RSS feed.

It still shows up when performing a search on the WordPress site, but you’d have to know the exact search terms.

It’s not the most elegant solution but it gets the job done. If anyone knows a better solution please let me know.

I found it helped me easily compare text files (containing software code) with other versions of the same file (to see what was changed), which saved me a lot of time. (This was in the days before I used SVN or Git, which have third-party clients with their own built-in tools for comparing files.)

Beyond Compare quickly became an indispensible utility for quickly comparing files. The interface is also very well-designed and intuitive.

With my main version-control system being Git these days, I wanted to combine the Windows GUI that I use for Github (TortoiseGit) with the powerful (and better designed) comparison tool of Beyond Compare.

Turns out it is pretty straight-forward (lucky me).

First, right-click on any Git repository on your local Windows machine, and choose TortoiseGit > Settings.

Next, click on “Diff Viewer” and then choose “External” for the location of the software:

Locate the Beyond Compare software on your computer.

Now, anytime you do a “Compare with base” it will open Beyond Compare instead of the native comparison utility:

Favorite Beyond Compare features

This is by no means a comprehensive list of my favorite features. The application is so versatile, this hardly scratches the surface, but here are some quick ones that I appreciate on a daily basis.

File paths shown

Being able to see the paths to both files (on the left and right) is not earth-shattering, but something the Tortoise client does not show by default:

Easier to copy changes from side-to-side

Line changes are easier to copy from side-to-side. It feels like Beyond Compare is smarter about detecting differences and letting you copy changes from one side to another with ease.

Tons of features and settings

In a nutshell, you will notice a lot of differences between your standard SVN or Git UI client comparison tool, and that of Beyond Compare (pun intended – if only it could compare software application features!).

By the way, it is also possible to compare many other file types with Beyond Compare:

Overall it is very powerful and easy-to-use software.

I often use Google Chat to keep in touch with family and friends, as it’s a simple instant-message interface that’s baked into my Gmail inbox (which I already look at multiple times per day). It just makes sense to have chat alongside email.

It is annoying to always have to be at a desktop or laptop just to access Google Chat, as it is more useful while mobile (almost like an SMS replacement).

I believe it’s baked-in to Android devices, and I think it’s a huge selling point, considering a lot of people already use Gmail. Apple has their own messages service, but it’s less useful to me currently.

Just another thorn in my side as I continue to be stuck between Apple and Google for hardware and software.

UPDATE: A reader pointed me to Talkatone, which is not from Google, but might be worth trying out.

If you enable Drive, Google Docs redirects to Drive. Makes sense to me as the “Docs” label/branding was staring to bulge at the seams (I upload so many different file types – not just documents).

Interesting possible alternative to Dropbox desktop sync.

The Google Drive desktop sync app seemed a little buggy at first. Chrome tries to download and install it without additional prompts and on a couple of different computers it ended up doing nothing at all.

The desktop application started syncing every file that is not in a folder in Google Docs, which is quite a bit for me, as I have been using Google Docs for years and many files are not in folders. My computer started heavily working as it tried to download every possible file from the server onto my hard drive.

Per the above, why would I want to sync backwards like that (cloud to client)? Isn’t the whole point of “cloud computing” to keep everything off your local computer?

I was able to force-quit the Drive sync and stop it from pulling down files from the server.

Time will tell if this replaces Dropbox for me. I find Dropbox much simpler and HTTP-oriented (I can easily grab the public URL for any file from the desktop application).