“Compare your life to mine, and then kill yourselves.” – Bender/Dan

Updated 04/06/2008

This started as an email to everyone at work, but I thought I'd post it here to share with you losers.

Launchy http://www.launchy.net

Forget the Start menu. It sucks hard. Instead, hit ALT+Space and type the first few letters of the program you want to launch and hit enter. You won’t have to search through your Start menu folders trying to find the program you want. As you go it learns, and even forgives typos.

SFTPDrive http://www.sftpdrive.com
WebDrive http://www.webdrive.com

Editing files locally and then uploading via FTP every time you want to see your changes sucks. A lot. Dreamweaver’s FTP sucks too. Use SFTPDrive or WebDrive and you can mount a server as a drive on your computer. Just open O:\httpdocs\index.html and save/edit it like it’s a regular file on your computer. No more changing a few characters, hitting upload, and uploading. Just click save in your app. WebDrive is almost the same thing as SFTPDrive, but like 4x as expensive. I've used both a lot and found that WebDrive is way better, but more difficult to learn.

E-Text Editor http://www.e-texteditor.com

I’ve always basically used Dreamweaver as just a program with tabs and syntax highlighting. Now I just use E since it’s smaller/faster and even a little cooler for coding. “E is a new text editor for Windows, with powerful editing features and quite a few unique abilities. It makes manipulating text fast and easy, and lets you focus on your writing by automating all the manual work. You can extend it in any language, and by supporting TextMate bundles, it allows you to tap into a huge and active community.” You can write your own plugins, and I’ve even written a few for CodeIgniter.

CodeIgniter http://www.codeigniter.com

Ok so this only helps you if you're a PHP developer, but if you're reading my blog and you made it this far, you probably are.

CodeIgniter has made my life a million times better. I used to try really hard to keep the code for my websites organized, but it somehow always turned into a disaster. I've made about 5 sites with CodeIgniter at this point and I love it. The client can request rediculous changes, and because of how it's organized things still go smoothly. Or at least as good as it can get.

There are other PHP frameworks, a few too many if you ask me, but CodeIgniter scratched the right itch for me. CakePHP was a little too large and imposed it's own coding style on me. Symfony requires too much command line work, some people I'll be working with have never even touched the command line. Not really Symfony's fault as much as them being retards, but oh well. And then Zend just seemed like way too much overkill for me.

CodeIgniter is simple and flexible. Yay.

SQLyog http://www.webyog.com

phpMyAdmin pretty much sucks so I had to look for an alternative. SQLyog is a great way to connect to a MySQL database and make changes. It lets you tunnel over SSH, has a graphical Query builder that helps with complicated JOINs, and a million other lil toys. Best of all it's not web based so it's fast, especially when entering data.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 3:00 am and is filed under Geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.