Panic Coda

I have to admit it, Coda by Panic is really one of the best Mac apps ever. Not only it has finally given me the better direction in developing HTML/CSS correctly, it also makes it more fun! It is quite a shame that Panic has not been updating it for a few months now, but that does not make it less powerful.

Why? Because Coda supports third-party plug-ins to enable you add more functions on top on the ones that come with the application itself. No, those plug-ins will not automatically create a website for you.. Consider them like as WordPress plug-ins or widgets, simple and small functions but if collected and used properly can save you hours of development time.

You can get a long list of the officially supported plugin-ins on Panic’s Developer section. To help you in choosing the right ones, here are my favorites:

• Lorem Ipsum
  Generate 1 to 5 paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum placeholder text.
• Remove Trailing Whitespace
  Trims whitespace from the ends of lines.
• Replace Special Characters
  Converts almost all special symbols and characters into HTML entities.
• TEA for Coda (not listed on Panic’s website)
  Text Editor Actions for Coda (formerly “Textmate Emulation Actions”, and always TEA for short) is a plugin that emulates some of my favorite Textmate HTML.bundle actions.
• CSS Tools
  Performs automatic reformatting of CSS.

If you have your own favorites, please feel free to share them below.

Few web developers hesitate to include one because they think it will take too much time or effort to make it work, specially if they do not have any server-side programming basics. That is no longer the case, these tools will help you build nice contact form for any project quickly:

Contactable

Contactable is a jQuery plugin designed to make contact/feedback forms simpler and more accessible. This plugin will enable you to create a contact form on any page of a site with minimal effort. I also made a small modification of this great plugin to appear on the right side of the page instead the left, you can check it here.

Wufoo

Wufoo is one of the easiest form builder around. It helps you create contact forms, online surveys, and invitations so you can collect the data, registrations and online payments you need without writing a single line of code. Its free account is more than enough to create basic online forms, but you can easily upgrade to premium plans to fit your needs.

pForm

Similar with Wufoo, pForm comes with an online form builder with simple interface that will help you build forms of any kind. Integration with your existing web page might be a bit more complicated than Wufoo, but still more simple than building a custom form yourself.

MachForm

MachForm is developed by the same company as pForm. It is the server installable version. You have more options like: receive submission and save to database, send entries to email, send autoresponder email, validate inputs, and lot more.

Yomire builds useful components and templates exclusively on the envato network based on beautiful and functional designs, implemented with great care to optimise efficiency and usability.

Our Aim

Be the best seller on the envato network by:

• timely response to user comments and questions.
• putting up all of our items’ documentations online as well as offline to allow buyers easy reference to them at all times. Potential customers will also no doubt find this feature useful as they will be able to familiarize themselves with an item’s customisation potential prior to committing to buy.
• actively update the FAQ section for all our items based on real user comments and questions, whenever appropriate.
• introduce a section that will always be present in each items’ documentation: Version History. The Version History section will document updates and what each one entail.
• build a blog containing all new updates of existing items and new item releases.
• be an active participant in social network sites that we are a member of. Currently, this includes twitter and facebook.

Design Style

• clean & sophisticated.
• neutral – We want users to be able to incorporate our components into their exisiting websites or suit their company with very minimal customisation possible.

Coding and Development

• asset-free – When we create flash components for activeden, we always try not to use assets whenever possible. For buyers, this means more flexible customisation from XML , light resulting SWF file and easier further customisation through the use of actionscript, if required.
• OOP (Object Oriented Programming) using classes which means highly organised source codes and easy updating.
• efficient and re-usable classes; in most cases buyers can take our custom utility classes, like scrollers, simple shapes drawing, etc, from our templates and incorporate them into their own projects.

Check out our profile on ActiveDen.

I needed to use this plugin for one of my project, but I want it to be on the right side of the page instead of left. In order to do this, you need to change a small portion of the CSS and JS files. No special skills required. Still, you can save your time since you can download it directly below:

» click here to download Contactable on right side of page «

All credits go to Philip Beel. Instructions and demo can be checked directly on this plugin’s homepage.

One inconvenient thing that might prevent you to do an update immediately is it cannot auto-update (WordPress style), so you need to manually reupload the necessary files. Official documentation from Interspire to upgrade your ISC installation can be found here.

Following the instructions there is the safest method for sure. But if you do not have the super fast connection via FTP to your server, overwriting the files one by one might take at least a few hours. So I tried to find with a faster way with the help of SSH. Let’s start.

Preparation

Make sure you have done the followings:

1. Backup your store’s database and files.
2. Read the changelog.txt file from the latest update to know which template files that need to be updated.
3. If you changed or customized the system files, you might want to reprogrammed some of the files first.

Step 1: Rename your current ISC folder

By default, the store folder is named ‘shoppingcart’. You can rename it to ‘shoppingcart-old’. If it is on your root folder, you can create a new folder and move everything there.

Step 2: Upload and unzip the update file

You can use FTP to do this. Then using SSH, unzip the file:

unzip Interspire_Shopping_Cart_(Edition)-5.x.x.zip

The folder can be renamed after unzipped.

Step 3: Copy product images folder

This folder contains all the product images that you have uploaded, so it is very important to keep it intact. First you need to rename the ‘product_images’ folder from the new system folder. Then go to your old store folder and copy the ‘product_images’ folder:

cp -r product_images ../shoppingcart/

Step 4: Copy the template folder (if you use custom theme)

Go to ‘templates’ subfolder, find your custom template name:

cp -r CustomThemeFolder ../../shoppingcart/templates/

Step 5: Finalize the upgrade

From here, ISC upgrade script will take care of the rest. Just open your ISC admin URL, then it will do the database upgrade and all necessary steps.

Done.

Luckily many free or premium applications are now available for you to choose to quickly create your online portfolio and resume, with easy-to-use interface to manage and regularly update them. Here is a shortlist of ones that I found to be really nice and are packed with features that you will mostly need:

Carbonmade

Carbonmade is one of the most popular online portfolio services with many features. You can create a free account for up to 5 projects with 35 images. Whoo! pro plan is available for $12/month, where you get 50 projects with up to 500 hi-res images and 10 high quality videos.

Coroflot

Coroflot is focused for creative industry with a very active job board. Based on their About page, it is hosting portfolios of over 150,000 creative professionals and students.

Raveal

Raveal is another one that you can consider. It is oriented on the social media and search engines parts to make your names easily heard by the rest of the world. Its Free plan gives 100MB of storage, while the Professional plan provides 1GB storage with some additional features.

Need more functions or different look? Then installing WordPress with a theme optimized for portfolio might be the best and easiest solution. I will save that for different post.

Wrong. If you have the principle that a web project does not end after you launch a website and get the final payment, you should realize the extra work you need to do if you chose or suggested wrong hosting provider. You want your client to be happy with the website you built, not to get frustrated because it goes down every now and then while you can do nothing about it.

So, what makes the differences between the right providers with the rest? To me it would be quality, support and transparency. Put prices in consideration after you are confident with those three first. Remember, web hosting is a very competitive business. It is rarely a company is trying to overcharge you unless it has much better quality than the rest.

Now to the most important question: what type of server that you need?

Shared Hosting

Most companies and developers usually put this as the first option for a very reasonable reason: price. Nowadays, you can get the good shared hosting plans from $5-20/month. Are there differences between one with another that costs 4-5 times more? Most of the time, yes. Usually providers that offer more economical plans gain the profit by trying to sell more with the same server resources, this might mean they put more restrictions for the account like outgoing email and databases limitations.

When you are researching for a shared hosting plan, be sure to check on the limits for those. The next thing you might also want to know is SSH support.

The good things

• Economical
• Best money for disk capacity offered
• Can be set with minimal web server knowledge
• Easy to upgrade, although mostly only for space and bandwidth

What you might miss

• Limited resources
• Limited access

Things to check

• Disk space capacity
• Email, database, etc limitations
• SSH access support

Ideal for…

• Websites with minimal or no plan of expansion
• Static websites
• Companies or clients that plan to host many email accounts so require a big disk space

Recommendation

• BlueHost
• MediaTemple*

*Note: recently MT has been having stability and security issues on their gs (shared) plans, but I cannot overlook the fact that it has the nicest interface. This is important because it encourages the clients to browse through their control panel and do not get overwhelmed by it.

Virtual Private Server

This is the next upgrade for regular hosting, above this then it means you are developing a website in a very huge scale. Virtual Private Server gives you much more flexibility when it comes to resources and access. You can practically install anything that you can do on your local computer/server. It can easily be an overkill you opt for this if you only plan to host a simple company profile without any server-side processes.

When do you need to upgrade to dedicated virtual? When your blog is listed as the top 10 blogs to follow by Smashing Magazine, kidding. You should start considering it if you are developing a web project or installing a web app that requires more than average resources, like a newsletter system with thousands of subscribers or e-commerce system with many customers.

The good things

• Better flexibility
• Installable with almost any type of web based applications
• Can be reselled
• Guaranteed resources

What you might miss

• Cost more than shared hosting, usually with less disk space
• Simple access, more knowledge is needed

Things to check

• Type of server: unmanaged/semi-managed/managed
• Control Panel system: CPanel/Plesk/etc
• Disk space, actual memory, server processor

Ideal for…

• Websites with few applications installed
• Dynamic websites and blogs with very high daily traffic
• Companies or clients who are planning to expand the website with new sections and features
• If you want to host the projects from your clients yourself

Recommendation

• Linode (unmanaged)
• WiredTree (managed)

At the end, when comes the time to choose one, look for direct references and do your research to find the most suitable plan for. It is worth to mention about WebHostingTalk as one of the best source to find web hosting reviews and coupon codes and promotion!

I am sure you have your own opinions and suggestions about this, please feel free to post your comments.

Fancybox

FancyBox is a tool for displaying images, html content and multi-media in a Mac-style “lightbox” that floats overtop of web page.

Jqtransform

This plugin is a jQuery styling plugin wich allows you to skin form elements.

Supersized

Supersized resizes images to fill browser while maintaining image dimension ratio, cycles Images/backgrounds via slideshow with transitions and preloading.

Scrollable

The purpose of this library is to make it extremely easy to add scrolling functionality to a website. Whenever you wish to scroll HTML elements in a visually-appealing manner, this is the only library you need. The main design goals of this library are to provide visual customization functionality and programmability.

TipTip

TipTip is a very lightweight and intelligent custom tooltip jQuery plugin. It uses ZERO images and is completely customizable via CSS. It’s also only 3.5kb minified!

Kudos for the programmers who developed these great plugins!

Anyway, I have been wanting to blog again since the start of the year. After being postponed for many self-created reasons, I found the exact theme I need from Smashing Magazine. This website theme is called SimpleFolio and designed by Omar E. Corrales. So many thanks to Omar and SM for sharing this amazing theme for FREE.

The dream feature is of course the Portfolio functions, I have been wanting to be able to maintain my work portfolio in a better way. Please make sure to check out my portfolio page.

Time to take a break. Cheers!

Such a simple idea, but it is so nicely built and gaining more and more members every single day. Check out my desk there!

My work desk on Deskography