Archive for the ‘web applications’ Category

Tiddlywiki

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

I’m a note writer.

I’ve got Google docs full of notes, dropbox notes, iPhone notes, plain text files for GTD, and inked back-of-envelopes everywhere. Or at least, I did.

After a pointer from a friend and colleague I decided to consolidate and digitize my notes using TiddlyWiki. TiddlyWiki is a personal wiki wrapped up in a single web page. Because key text automatically hyperlinks (these are called wikiwords) a TiddlyWiki can be thought of as a “non-linear notepad”. You don’t write or read from top to bottom but rather jump from “tiddler” to tiddler.

A tiddler is a block of text or a given topic. Collectively they form your TiddlyWiki. Let me try explain better with my Getting Things Done Tiddler. I’ve got a GTD note (a tiddler) in my TiddlyWiki that links to three other notes: ToDo, Done, and Waiting. Clicking on any of these three opens a new note with a list of either “todos”, “done stuff” or “waiting on something”. Within each of these are further links to notes on tasks in my every day life.

TiddlyWiki is immediately useful to anyone with a modicum of HTML knowledge. If you know what <a href means then you can easily learn how to create your own TIddlyWiki in about an hour. It is well worth the effort.

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Web Development IDE

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

I’ve been setting up my development environment for building PHP based web applications. Since I’m an Eclipse geek I decided to try out the Aptana suite. I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts.

The installation of Aptana is through the Eclipse update manager. Simple stuff. After you reload the IDE you’re presented with the Aptana home page. From here you can install the extra plugin for PHP (or others). More clicks. Simple again.

What I like: the code tab has a set of preview tabs next to it. You can load up your page in any of your installed browsers and check that it works. This is awesome for checking cross-browser compatibility. The debugging of PHP is excellent. Being able to step through as the page renders makes bug tracking so much simpler.

My Aptana experience has not been all plain sailing. For some reason my call to mysql_connect would only work if I pass in params for dbuser, dbpasswd etc. AND had to repeat them in the php.ini file (you edit this under the Aptana section in the workspace preferences dialog). I’m still not sure why this is happening but it works for now.

gd (graphics manipulation) support didn’t work out the box. The default install of Aptana included a gd.so file but Eclipse told me that it was missing libpng.so (go into window -> prefs -> Aptana -> PHP Interpreters and Edit then click verify). I copied the gd.so file from my Ubuntu PHP install into the ext dir for the Aptana CGI PHP interpreter [.eclipse/org.eclipse.sdk.ide/updates/eclipse/plugins/com.aptana.ide.php.interpreters.linux.x86_5.3.16.v20081209/resources/php5/ext/], overwriting the default, and that fixed it.

My latest weirdness was that the internal Jaxer HTTP server wouldn’t serve out new/uploaded files. The fix for this is to refresh the workspace view in Eclipse. Jaxer must use the Eclipse workspace config file to decide what it will serve out as web pages.

If you are interested in more then the screencast intro to PHP is a good starting point. Next I’m going too try out PHPUnit with Eclipse and Aptana.

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Feed me simple

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

On our travels we’ve been keeping a blog with updates and photos. It seems like a better way to let people know what we are doing than the mass email shot approach (which no one really reads and you always offend someone by forgetting to add them to the list).

I keep up-to-date on blogs, news, journal publications and assorted RSS feeds with google reader. Explaining what that means to non-geeks is almost impossible. A friend of mine had exactly this problem with his folks and came up with the idea of Feed My Inbox.

FMI is the simplest way to keep up with feeds. To subscribe to a blog you go to Feed My Inbox, enter the blog addess, your email address and then click a link in the confirmation email you get sent. From then on FMI will send you a daily email with feed updates. For low volume RSS consumption it looks perfect.

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