Bespin – Browser based IDE by Mozilla Labs

Bespin is the latest thing out of Mozilla Labs. It’s a browser-based IDE written in Javascript using HTML 5.

There’s a video of two guys basically showing you how far along the development process they — aren’t. Highlighting some of the functionalities… whatever.

What’s cool

• It runs on Firefox so hopefully once it’s been developed more (because Firefox does have some very talented developers.) it will increase the speed and options available to a programmer.
• It could eventually be the solution for a universal IDE that supports any architecture as well command line integration and possibly collaboration across programmers. Bridging that communication gap between code and conversation.
• You get to write your own methods for the command line.
• It’s a new project so you could help make it what it should be.
  

They figured out how to do text highlighting purely in javascript and it’s architecture is such, that it’s increasingly easy to run commands that you’ve created in the console. Perhaps a custom commit, switching environments, who knows. It’s still pretty cool

What’s not cool

• It’s slow. No matter what they say, it won’t ever replace a solid desktop development environment.
• It runs on Firefox.
• As of today, it’s just not practical for real-time development.
• It doesn’t have FTP/SCP.
• Code highlighting is seriously lacking.

I program primarily in PHP and there’s no PHP code highlighting. I guess I could extend GeSHi but my IDE already has code highlighting. Why would I want to use another one that’s worse than the one I currently use? I know where they’re going with Bespin but I think they released it a little too early. No FTP? I do plan on trying it out once a lot of these features get developed though.

Looking forward to it.

Check out Bespin, see what you think for yourself.

WordPress Plugins you shouldn’t not have

Let’s all agree that the wordpress plugin repository blows. The wordpress theme repository blows. I’m not flaming wordpress because I have found a good amount of plugins through their website but I hate when I search for something that’s very specific and I get the same results returned. That doesn’t make any sense to me. I dare you to go google “search engine optimization wordpress plugins” or anything of the like then google “huge dwarfs with tiny hands and feet” and get the same results. You’d be furious with this free search engine that you had nothing to do with nor made any attempt to improve. I’m just saying, it’s frustrating.

Over the past 4 months I’ve installed/uninstalled probably 100 wordpress plugins and kept a few, but I only want one plugin to do one thing. I’m not a big seventy-in-one plugin kind of guy.

WordPress Plugins

Below you’ll find the (up-to-date) plugins that I find most useful with wordpress in their respective category. This obviously isn’t every single awesome wordpress plugin but this list isn’t an end all be all. I also hate people that write 50 “top 10″ posts about wordpress plugins for the sake of traffic rather than resourcefulness and quality. Quality is what I aim for.

All of these wordpress plugins are FREE.

Spam protection

Akismet
Hands down the best in spam protection for your money (it’s completely free.)

Search Engine Optimzation (SEO)

All in One SEO Pack
Update posts with meta data specific to that post/page. This is invaluable if you want to SEO your blog properly for rankings in Google, Yahoo, MSN et cetera.

Google XML Sitemaps
Generate your Google XML Sitemap with valid XML that’s always up to date. This helps tremendously if you want google to take your blog seriously.

Robots Meta
Manage your robots.txt file dynamically

Usability

Multi-page Toolkit
Write multi-page articles, tired of using the “kitchen sink”? this plugin will do all you need.

Aesthetics & Imagery

Lightbox 2
‘Nuff said.

SyntaxHighlighter
If you write a lot of source code in your articles like I tend to do this helps a lot. What else are you going to do? Plaintext source code is extremely “web 1.0″

Social Marketing & Media

DiggZ-et
Put that sexy digg button on your articles/pages. Manage the icon as well as where to exclude/include it. Very useful.

ShareThis
On all of my posts I have a “ShareThis” link at the bottom. I personally hate reading an article on a blog with 900 buttons to click, this encompasses more than just social media, you can send to a friend and various other functions through one javascript window.

WordPress Specific Plugins

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
Upgrade your wordpress to the latest installation (Note: This plugin will probably be rendered useless in future releases of wordpress as I’m sure they’ll build this functionality into the core more effectively, but for now it’s helpful.)

WordPress Related Posts
Show posts related to tags in specific posts.

WP Super Cache
If you get the digg effect through one of your articles at random, you don’t want to be caught naked. This will cache high traffic pages saving your server the beating that digg undoubtedly would have delivered had you not been the wiser.

WordPress.com Popular Posts
Display your most popular posts (related by # of comments from your wordpress.com stats)

Search & Replace
Sometimes you want to replace every “apple” with an “orange” or the like. This comes in handy at random times but when you need it, it really comes in handy. Replace any string with a string over all your posts pages, or anything.

That should get you started. There are tons of useful wordpress plugins so know that this is just a few that I picked. I will be updating this article weekly most likely so be sure to check back.

Be about it,
Bryan

Twisten.FM – Listen to Twitter

Disclaimer: I never, I repeat never – liked twitter until I saw this. 

I used to use it every once in awhile to get in “twights” (twitter fights) with my “followers” and random schananagans, but even the times I’d use it I’d want to slap myself for using it because no matter how you use it, you just sort of feel like a fanboy. Then I found #nerdpickuplines and a few other cool twitter personalities and it got bearable.

It’s like Last.fm but for twitter.

Discover new music through Twitter with Twisten.FM

Here comes Twisten.FM from the makers of Grooveshark (which is probably still cooler, but not as unique.) 

Twisten lets you “hear” twitter. Hear meaning people that recommend songs get thrown into the twisten database and in return you get a huge amount of information based on current music trends and other things. Last hours the song of the hour was angels by wax poetic. Great song. I’m already liking this.

If you need a place to discover new music then this is it. On top of that you can twitter music that you’re listening to. Giving back into the collective bad-ass that is the makers of grooveshark, and now the makers of Twisten.

Link it up
Discover new music with Twisten.FM
Play any freaking song you want with Grooveshark

Wrock and Wroll,
Bryan

Bank of America and Down Time.

Argh. I hate/love Bank of America. I’m sure you noticed the down time yesterday from around 2:00pm til today at about 3:00pm.

Bank of America changed my credi tcard information and number to a new one without notifying me. My web host was set to auto-pay the bill on the 10th with my original credit card which, two days ago was apparently wrong because Bank of America went rogue on me.

They claimed they sent me a notification letter which I got today, but was mailed on the 5th of February. There wasn’t a new credit card in that notification, they were just letting me know that my shit was weak and that I should probably get better shit. Fargin’ sneaky bastages.

I called them and had them overnight me a new credit card which should be here today. Praisealujah.

Anyways I wrote my host cari.net and they were cool enough to put it back up while I get this malarky sorted out with Bank of Retards. Thank you cari.net, always good to have a host you can count on to understand situations.

It really pissed me off though because I had just launched Dr. Myspace and finished writing the Developer API page that went along with it. Who knows how much traffic I would have received had my server not gone down the day after I posted all of that stuff. Anyways, we’ll see what happens but for now we should back up for good. Sorry about that, it wasn’t my fault.

Home of the 99.99% uptime guarantee,
Bryan

WordPress 2.7.1 Released

There’s a new release of WordPress from 2.7 to 2.7.1

2.7.1, the first 2.7 maintenance release, is now available.  2.7.1 fixes 68 tickets.  You can automatically upgrade from 2.7 to 2.7.1 via the Tools->Upgrade menu, or you can download the package and upgrade manually.

Consult the list of fixed tickets and the  full set of changes between 2.7 and 2.7.1 for details.

Be sure to upgrade!