Category: Web Development

Creating a WordPress site is easy but maintaining it is no fun. If you keep your WordPress version and plug-ins up-to-date, you can be vulnerable to attacks which could lead to your hosting company suspending your account. The cheapest managed WordPress service providers that I’ve found are

• WordPress.com ($99 per year) – by the makers of WordPress
• GoDaddy Managed WordPress Hosting ($1.00 a month – on sale, regularly $6.99)

This blog is currently on WordPress.com but I have another on GoDaddy.

If you need an online store, while there are many free, open-source ecommerce applications you can install on a server, you still have to manage the upgrades. To avoid that, you can use WordPress and install free plugins that provide ecommerce functionality. I’ve tried this with what seems to be the most popular one (WooCommerce) and it works really well. The plugins I am using are

• WooCommerce
• Simple Custom CSS

Removing duplicate lines of text should be something all text editors can do. However, you may not realize where to do it in Sublime Text. It’s under the “Permute Lines” menu item where you will see a “Unique” function to uniquify your text (remove duplicate lines).

Edit > Permute Text > Unique

There! I’ve blogged about it. Now hopefully I’ll remember that it’s there.

One thing that’s nice about the Linux program, grep, is that it only shows you lines that match your search condition and removes all non-matching lines. You can accomplish the same thing and more with the Sublime Text editor. In addition to removing non-matching lines, it can remove all non-matching text leaving you with only the matches you want. Just do the following

1. Enter your search condition
2. Click the Find All button
3. Click Selection > Invert Selection
4. Delete the inverted selection
5. Hit Enter to put each match on a separate line (notice the multiple cursors flashing)

UPDATE: Actually, after you click the Find All button, you can just copy all matches (CTRL+C) and paste them into a new file to accomplish the same thing as steps 3, 4, 5.

 

1. Set Up AppGyver Steroids on Your Development Machine

Go to www.appgyver.com, click the Get Started button, and follow the steps to set up your environment. If you’re developing on Windows, you’ll need to install Git, Python, and Node.js which are all very easy and quick to do with the installers. You’ll then install Steroids by running the command

npm install steroids -g

When done, create a Steroids account at www.appgyver.com, log in, and then set up the Steroids login by running the command

steroids login

Steroids should tell you that your login was successful.

Continue reading How to Build a Data-Driven Hybrid Mobile App with HTML, CSS, Javacript, jQuery Mobile, AppGyver and Parse.

On Windows, when you save a file using the Save As dialog, you normally get some reset shortcuts or places on the left side of the window. These places may not be what you’d like them to be. Fortunately, you can change the shortcuts as I’ve done below showing three items (Desktop, trunk, and image).

Continue reading Change Items Displayed in Places/Favorites Bar in Save As File Dialog (Windows 7)

I recently need to set up a wire transfer on BankOfAmerica.com and it asked me to enter a SafePass code that was supposed to have been texted to me from the short code 73981. After many attempts, I was unable to receive the text / SMS even though I can receive them perfectly fine from a regular phone number. It turns out that T-Mobile blocks content downloads by default. To fix this issue, I needed to unblock content downloads by unchecking the check box next to the service. Once I did that, I was able to receive message from short codes and the Bank of America SafePass code.

I’ve been using WinMerge to see side-by-side diffs of text files and it works pretty well. But, having to use a separate program from my text editor, Sublime Text, is a bit inconvenient. While there are many diff plugins for Sublime Text, Sublimerge appears to be one of the best. I tested it out and it’s pretty easy to use with some nice syntax and diff highlighting. One thing I particularly like about it is the ability to show differences “within” a line in a very clear way. Lines containing differences are outlined whereas the actually text that is different is highlighted as shown in the screenshot below.

As a web developer, you will inevitably need to view and/or edit your HTTP request headers to test various functionality. The Chome inspector makes it very easy to see your headers but when it comes to modifying or adding new headers, the Google Chome extension called Modify Headers for Google Chrome works pretty well and is super simple to use. Below is a screenshot showing the interface. You can enable and disable individual headers or all headers for individual pages, tabs or all pages/ tabs.

Don’t just you hate running out of disk space? If you need to clean up your machine by deleting unnecessary large files, you can easily find those unnecessary large files by using a tool called SpaceMonger.

http://edgerunner.com/spacemonger/

It runs super fast and gives you many views into seeing the size of various files and folders on your system with the ability to dig down into subfolders.

Continue reading Easily Find Large Files / Folders on Windows to Clear Up Space

When you’re trying to find a file on your Windows computer, you probably use the native Windows Explorer search function which not only is slow but sometimes extremely slow and often slower than the amount of time it’d take you to browse to the file manually. Today I installed the Everything search program by Void Tools.

http://www.voidtools.com/

I entered just the filename of an image and it displayed matching results practically instantly including the path to the file. Clicking on a search result conveniently opens the file (image) in my preferred editor (Photoshop). Now that’s how file searching should work!

Continue reading Blazing Fast File / Folder Search for Windows