I’m pretty happy with how the app is coming along and it’s almost ready to open to the public. I’m planning on sending out the first batch of invites out next month so if you think you’d like to try this app out then head over to bindrr and sign up for an invite if you haven’t already.

In this post I’m going to cover some free and premium programs you can use to manage your code snippets to save you time in the future. This is quite a long post because there are a lot of options for this kind of software, I’ve tried to cover as many as I can. If you think I’ve missed a good one or if you just want to add your input on which ones you like best and why you can do so in the comments after the article. Maybe I’ll do an in depth look at the most popular ones in another article.

Cross Platform

These are platform independent apps which means they can be installed on Windows, Mac or Linux. Very handy if you want to use the same programs on a few different operating systems.

Snippely

Snippet Manager

Code Dogg

jCodeCollector

Code Bank

qsnipps

Windows

Snippet Bin

Snippet Manager

The Snippet Manager

Mac

Snippet Monkey

Code Collector Pro

jfSnip

Dash

Snippets App

CodeBox

Kousek

Willow

TextExpander

ClipMenu

Web Based

SnippShot

Code Repository | Snippet Manager

Web Development Accelerator

Code Barrel

Snipt

Snipplr

The first book I’ll be reviewing is Javascript The Definitive guide by David Flanagan. First off, this book is huge! (it’s almost 1100 pages).

Normally when you get a book that is as big as this you kind of expect it to be over elaborate when making points and it can get old a bit fast but I didn’t think this was the case with this book, it is very concise.

As the name suggests, the book will teach you everything from the very basics of javascript to the more advanced stuff meaning it is good for both beginners and developers who have been working with javascript for a while. If you have experience with languages that use similar syntax such as PHP or C you might find that some of the earlier sections (I’m thinking variable types and operators here) aren’t new to you, I read through these bits anyway. I did find some of the earlier chapters very informative too (the stuff on variable scope was pretty interesting).

Later chapters in the book go over everything from object-oriented subjects to regular expressions and even a few chapters HTML 5 APIs (geolocation, web workers, client-side databases, web sockets and some more!).

Even after a read through, this book will be very useful for any little problems I might come across later on.

If you’re looking for a book to teach you jQuery, Mootools or another javascript library then this book isn’t for you. Similarly, if you want ready made solutions you can just copy then this isn’t the book for you either. What this book will do is to teach you how these javascript libraries work behind the scenes and give you a much clearer idea what you’re doing when you load that jQuery plugin.

I would actually advise people to read a book like this before trying to learn to use a javascript library, I think the knowledge you would gain from this book will make picking up any javascript library much easier and will especially help you if you want to create your own plugins etc.

Also, as I mentioned earlier on in the article. This book is huge so it’s maybe not the best book to take on holiday with you to read on a plane or something but it is (for me anyway) an essential book to have on your bookshelf.

If you’d like to buy Javascript The Definitive guide, head on over to Amazon (they also have a Kindle version).

A very simple way of keeping the content on your website fresh is to grab your latest tweets from Twitter and display them on your WordPress site. At first it might seem like it could be quite a lot of work to do this. Luckily WordPress has a fantastic community of plugin developers and an easy way of adding new content to certain areas of your site.

You might have guessed that I’m talking about widgets here. If you don’t know what widgets in WordPress are you could check out my other article on adding widgets to your WordPress site and also have a look at what the official WordPress site has to say on widgets.

Once your happy that your theme will support widgets and you know how to add them, we’ll move on to the best WordPress plugins to add tweets to your site and some other cool features.

Twitter Feed For WordPress

This one is a nice simple plugin to get any Twitter users tweets and display them on your blog. If you only want to display your tweets then this plugin is great, it’s really easy to customise too!

Tweetable

This plugin has quite a few features. It can automatically post to your Twitter account when you add a new blog post, you can also tweet straight from the WordPress admin panel. Of course there are a few different options ways of displaying tweets in your widget areas and in your posts!

Tweet Blender

Tweet blender will grab tweets based on lots of different criteria, you can filter tweets from one user, multiple users, tweets that contain a certain hash tag or keyword and some other things.

Elegant Twitter Widget

Another nice simple plugin that will output semantic HTML. This plugin is one of the few Twitter plugins for WordPress that will work on a PHP 4 server.

Twitter Widget Pro

This widget will grab the latest posts for a user you specify. It will also handle hashtags, @usernames and in tweet links properly. It also supports displaying profile images and there are a few different options on how to display dates.

In WordPress, widgets allow you to add content to special areas of your theme without having to modify any code. If your theme is ‘widgetized’ you can use the built in drag and drop functionality built into WordPress to add new content and move content around on your site. Widgets make it really easy to add things like a ‘latest tweets’ box or a custom menu to any widget area in your theme.

If your theme isn’t widgetized, then don’t worry. Adding widget areas is really simple!

First of all, you will need to make sure your theme has got a functions.php file. Most themes will have this already but if it isn’t there just create it and WordPress will pick it up automatically. If you’re modifying a theme you’ve downloaded, it might be worth creating a child theme so that your changes aren’t overwritten during the next update.

In the functions.php file, simply add the following code.

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar();

In the array we pass some options to the register_sidebar function. Here’s the options and what they do (quoted from the WordPress site):

• name - Sidebar name.
• id - Sidebar id – Must be all in lowercase, with no spaces.
• description - Text description of what/where the sidebar is. Shown on widget management screen. (Since 2.9)
• before_widget - HTML to place before every widget.
• after_widget - HTML to place after every widget.
• before_title - HTML to place before every title.
• after_title - HTML to place after every title.

The next step is to add the code to the places where our widget will appear in our theme. To do this we will use the dynamic_sidebar function in WordPress. The most simple example of this in action is:

if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : endif;

If you have some default code to run if no widgets have been added to the sidebar, you would do it like this:

if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar() ) :
	//Default code to run here
endif;

If you gave your widget area a name in the functions.php file then you can specifically load the settings for that widget by passing its name to the dynamic_sidebar function.

Finally we can now go to the Appearance -> Widgets option in the WordPress menu to see our available widgets and widget areas. Adding / removing widgets is as simple as dragging and dropping them.

In WordPress a child theme is simply a theme that inherits style and functionality from it’s parent theme. All you really need to create a child theme is a style.css file in the themes directory of your WordPress installation. This quick article will show you situations in which child themes might be useful and how to create them.

Child themes are useful in a few different situations. The first is theme frameworks. If you use the main theme framework as the parent theme, you can create a child theme to extend or change some of the functionality and style of the framework without ever modifying any of the frameworks original files. In theory you could have many child themes that all extend the parent theme.

The second situation where using child themes in WordPress can be useful is when you download a theme from the internet. By default WordPress will tell you when your themes need to be updated, if you do the update after making some modifications to your theme you will lose all of your changes, not good.

By using a child theme you can extend the parent theme and make your changes in there. Then if the parent theme is ever updated, you will still have your nicely intact child theme. There is still a possibility that something might break depending on what is changed in the update, but at least you haven’t lost all of your hard work!

Like most things in WordPress, setting up a child theme is pretty straight forward. First of all we would create a folder for our new theme inside the wp-content/themes folder of your WordPress installation. Inside that you will need a style.css file. Here’s an example of the header of a style.css file taken from the official WordPress sites page on child themes.

/*
Theme Name:     Twenty Eleven Child
Theme URI:      http://example.com/
Description:    Child theme for the Twenty Eleven theme
Author:         Your name here
Author URI:     http://example.com/about/
Template:       twentyeleven
Version:        0.1.0
*/

If you’ve ever created a theme before this won’t be new to you. The only option that is new is the ‘Template’ option. This is simply the name of the folder that contains the theme you want to extend.

Now that you know what a child theme is and how to set one up, you never have to worry about overwriting your work again! Check out what the WordPress Codex has to say on child themes for more information.

As a developer, I find it really easy to picture in my head how a system should work, how the code should be structured etc but I must admit I do sometimes struggle to make my creations aesthetically appealing. Luckily there are loads of generous people on the internet who are happy to make beautiful web elements for you to use on your applications, some of them have even created websites full of bits and pieces you can use. In this post, I’m going to do a quick round-up of some of my favourites.

365psd

As far as I know, 365psd is the longest running site on this list. They have loads of different elements, from buttons and badges to full app designs.

PremiumPixels

Premium Pixels is a site by Orman Clark where he adds PSD files you can download on your site. Some of the work on there now is submitted by other authors such as the one above by Haziq.

I’ve seen a few WordPress themes by Orman and they’re all fantastic. You can buy his themes on Theme Forest (full disclosure: that link is an affiliate link. I’m not trying to hide it, I’m just trying out a plugin that tracks how many times a link is clicked).

Pixels Daily

Media Loot

Media Loot isn’t technically free as you need to have a subscription to download most of their stuff but every now and again they release free stuff that you can download without an account and it’s always excellent quality.

That’s just about all of the resources I can think of off the top of my head. If you’re willing to pay a few dollars for the resource you’re looking for then it might be worth checking out Graphic River too, they release a free item every month so it’s worth checking the site out every month just for that.

If you have an application where people add a lot of data, organising this data to make it easy for people to find what they want can be difficult. One simple solution that can make organising and finding this data simple is to allow your users to add tags to each item.

I was looking for a good jQuery plugin for an app I’ve been working on and I thought it might be useful to some people if I did a quick round up of the ones I had a look at.

JQUERY TAGS INPUT PLUGIN

Tagit

jQuery Tag Plugin

Tagzy

In the end, Tagzy was the plugin I decided to use for the tags in my application. I thought it was nice and simple to implement and use.

Also, here is a little screenshot of it in action in my app. Changing the look of the tags was really straight forward too!

I’m also going to be adding some reviews of books and other web dev related stuff that I think you might find useful soon so keep an eye out for that. I’m also going to give this blog a bit of a spruce up. I won’t be re-doing the whole thing, just trying to make it all a bit neater and easier to use.

At work I’ve mostly been playing with maps, because of the licensing stuff for Google/Bing maps etc we had to find something different to use. After messing around with a few different ones I settled on Leaflet.js from Cloudmade, the maps look nice and the documentation is pretty good so if you’re looking to add maps to your application it is worth checking out!

Recently I’ve been looking at a lot of articles on internet marketing and affiliate marketing. It annoys me a bit because you usually get half way through the article and realise that they’re using all of the tips they’re giving you in the article you’re reading! Usually to sell you something.

The main reasons I’ve been looking at these articles is because I want to see what methods they use to drive traffic to the sites but I’m not really getting anywhere, so if anyone can point me to some good no bs sites on this sort of stuff, add the link to the comments.

Over the past few months I’ve been working on a new little app. Yes a few months is a long time to spend on a ‘little’ app but I’ve been working on it by myself and only in my spare time, also my designing skills definitely aren’t on par with my development skills so designing stuff takes me ages.

Anyway, the main reason I created this app was because it is an app I really would like to use myself. In fact I’ve actually been using it as I’ve been developing it!

The new app is called bindrr. It lets you log in and store all of your favourite recipes in one place whether the recipe is from a website, book or anywhere else. All of the recipes you add are easily searchable and you can access them from any computer or mobile device with an internet connection (native, offline mobile applications will hopefully follow soon).

I’m looking for a few beta testers who enjoy cooking and would like to try out the app before anybody else. If you like the sound of bindrr, head over to the site and fill out the form! I’ll be sending out the beta invitations pretty soon.