Here’s the code:

Put this in the head of your document:

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript">
function AddItem(ItemId)
{
document.Form.textarea.value = document.Form.textarea.value + ItemId;
}
</script>

This is the form:

<form name="Form" method="post" action="post.php">
<a href="#" onclick="AddItem('<em></em>');"> Italic</a>
<textarea rows="10" name="textarea" cols="70"></textarea> <br /><br />
</form>

How it works.

The mechanics of the script are simple. When the onclick="AddItem();" function is called the contents between the brackets of the onclick event is added to the textarea defined textarea. In this case the name of the textarea is ‘textarea’ and the name of the form is ‘Form’ so that’s what was changed in the script.

A few quotes

Here are a few quotes included in the plugin:
To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain

We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided

Download

You can download the pensieve plugin here ( Licensed under GPL)

Got a potter quote you want me to add? then leave a comment below.

Doit.im

Doit.im is a very useful free peice of software that runs using adobe air; meaning it’s cross platform. It’s features include

• An inbox to add tasks quickly
• Ability to group tasks in projects
• Add contacts to mark individual tasks to them
• Ability to sync to the server
• Much, much more

Remember The Milk

Remember the milk is a web based to-do list application that has features that include:

• The ability to get reminders anywhere e.g. through SMS, IM, skype and E-mail
• The ability to tag tasks
• View tasks on a map
• And mooo-re (get it)

teuxdeux.com

teuxdeux is another web based to-do list application that is extremely easy to use and is very well designed, but lacks many features of the other mentioned applications. It’s features include

• The ability to add tasks to future days
• uh, oh, that’s it really. Did I mention it’s easy to use

tadalist

tadalist is yet another web based to-do list application that has the ability to group tasks and share them with friends. It’s very simple but very useful.

Todo.txt

Todo.txt is a bash script that works from the a command line like interface, it has very useful features that include:

• Add to-do’s
• Group to-do’s
• search to-do’s
• Prioritise to-do’s

Todoist

Yes, you guessed todoist is another web based application that is ‘fast and easy to use’. It features:

• A built in calendar
• The ability to create sub-projects and sub items
• Reminders
• Labels

Free GTD articles

Okay, so it’s not software but it’s still useful. Free articles by the GTD master himself David allen:

#this is for sub directory - http://localhost/appname
DirectoryIndex index.php
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images|css|js|robots\.txt|favicon\.ico)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ ./index.php/$1 [L,QSA]

This then fixed the problem. But then when moving it over to a subdomain I ran into the same problem. So, I found some other code to help me fix the problem. Take a look:

In the .htaccess file of your root put this (change ‘myapp.mydomain.com to your full URL and change ‘myapp’ to your subdomain name):

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}    ^myapp.mydomain.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}  !^/myapp/
RewriteRule (.*)            /myapp/$1 [last]

This will direct your request to the .htacess file in your subdomain. You then need to put the following code in the .htacess file of your subdomain:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1[QSA]

Problem solved.

Wordpress links does exactly what it says on the tin, it displays links in your wordpress template whether its widgetized or not. But there’s so much more that the built in ‘Links’ functionality can do. In this article we will look at how the ‘Links’ functionality can be used to help make your life easier and do the same things that bespoke plugins have be made too do.

I’ve Got The Power!

Or more precisely WordPress has the power. We’ve all seen different hacks, workarounds and general hickory pokery used to show off the expandability of WordPress, so what I’m about to show isn’t anything special. In fact there will be no hacking or workarounds and most definitely no hickory pokery in this article; all we will be doing here is using the WordPress API to the advantage of the user i.e you.

Get To The Point!

Or more importantly the code. What i’m about to show you is a very basic use of the wordpress ‘Links’ but hopefully those einsteins among will think of better uses than this. I’m going to show you how to create a ‘Currently Reading’ widget (like the one in my sidebar) that will show the name of the book and a description of the book. This is easy enough to work out how to do if you read the Wordpress Documentation but I thought I would share how I did it.

In the latest version of WordPress the wp_list_bookmarks() function is used to call the bookmarks/Links and display them on the page so this is what were going to be using.

Here is the code used in the sidebar:

<?php wp_list_bookmarks('category_before= //The text that goes before each category. Defaults to <li id="[category id]">
&category_after= //Text that goes after each category. Defaults to </li>
&category_name=Currently Reading //The name of the category
&show_images=0 //Display an image (in this case book cover).1=true 0=false&show_description=1 //display description.
&orderby=updated //Order it by the last updates bookmark
&title_before=<h4> //what goes before the title
&title_after=</h4> //what goes after the title
&show_name=1 //show the text link
&between=<br /> //Text to place between each bookmark/image and its description. Defaults to '\n' (newline).
&before=<p> //Text to place before each bookmark. Defaults to '<li>'.
&after=</p> //Text to place after each bookmark. Defaults to '</li>'.
&title_li=0 //Text for the heading of the list
&categorize=0 //Bookmarks should be shown within their assigned Categories or not.
'); ?>

It should be noted that this code has been formatted for display reasons. This is how the code should be entered:

<?php wp_list_bookmarks('category_before=&category_after= &category_name=Currently Reading&show_images=0&show_description=1&orderby=updated&title_before=<h4>&title_after=&show_name=1&between=&before=&after=&title_li=0&categorize=0'); ?>

This has just been thrown into a text widget that I called currently reading. For the code to be executed in the text widget you will need the Exec-PHP plugin. You can read the documentation about wp_list_bookmarks() on the WordPress Codex. The only thing left to do is create a link category called ‘Currently Reading’ and add a bookmark with the name of your book, and image and a description, the plugin will do the rest.

Room For Improvement

This is a very simple and effective use of the WorPress links capability but there are many more ways to use this that more imaginative people could come up. If you liked this *cough* short article then why not leave a comment.

The technical stuff

I wrote The application with the use of the codeigniter PHP library that made development of it much easier. The front was very easy to implement and went as smoothly as it possibly could. The back end, on the other hand, went a little less smoothly; I’ll spare you the details but will say this I now fully appreciate how much hard work goes into creating any bespoke application.

I designed the application and wrote the CSS & XHTML with a little help from the 960gs CSS Framework.

Take a look at prompt me!

function HelloWorld(){
echo 'Hello World';
}

HelloWorld();

What is ClearType?

ClearType is a type of technology developed by Microsoft that improves the display of text on LCD screens that can be found on a variety of devices. Examples of such devices are laptops, pocket PCs and flat panel monitors.

Though you may not know it ClearType comes built into Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems. ClearType is automaticly turned on in the windows Vista operating system.

How Do I use it?

As mentioned above ClearType is already turned on in Windows Vista. To turn it on in xp you need to:

• Right click on the desktop and select ‘Properties’
• Select the ‘Appearance’ tab and press the ‘Effects…’ button
• Check the box for ‘Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts’, then select ‘ClearType’ in the dropdown list
• Close the Effects dialog by clicking ‘OK’ and click ‘Apply’ to complete the process

Tuning ClearType

You may want to tweak your ClearType settings. To do this Microsoft have provided a web Tuner (requires windows Internet Explorer) that allows you to change your settings from there website. Microsoft also provides ‘Power Toy‘;a piece of software that allows you to to tweak your settings. For more information on ClearType visit the ClearType website.

What is it?

The clue is in the name; it’s a template engine. What this means is that smarty is used to display the output of processed data and does not do the processing itself; even thought Smarty is able to do a small amount of processing.

Smarty divides the structure of a web application cleanly into two phases; Processing and output. This is how the application would be divided.

PHP SCRPIT  (PROCESSING) > TPL FILE (THE DESIGN) > OUTPUT HTML (WHAT THE BROWSER SEES)

Why use it?

There are various reasons why smarty should be used to handle the presentation of a site. Here are a few.

It’s clean – The combination of PHP and HTML can look very messy. Why would anyone want all those pieces of PHP code in with the presentation layer of your website, when all the processing can be done via PHP and then have the output displayed with a simple tag?

It has Add-ons – Add-ons are available to help speed up development. Examples of these are Pagination, Form Validation, Drop Down Menus, Calendar Date Pickers, etc.

It’s fast – Smarty has a huge set of features, but this does not impede the performance of the engine. Smarty has built in caching capabilities that can be used to make the presentation of the site load much faster. Though most of the time this is not needed.

For more features: http://www.smarty.net/rightforme.php

Examples

Here is a simple example of how smarty can be used:

PHP

include('Smarty.class.php');
// create object
$smarty = new Smarty;

// assign some content. This would typically come from
// a database or other source, but we'll use static
// values for the purpose of this example.
$smarty->assign('name', 'george smith');
$smarty->assign('address', '45th & Harris');
// display it
$smarty->display('index.tpl');

TPL File

<html>
<head>
<title>User Info</title>
</head>
<body>
User Information:<br />
Name: {$name}<br />
Address: {$address}<br />
</body>
</html>

Output HTML

<html>
<head>
<title>User Info</title>
</head>
<body>
User Information:<br />
Name: george smith<br />
Address: 45th & Harris<br />
</body>
</html>

View more examples: http://www.smarty.net/crashcourse.php

The thing I hate about firefox 3 is the (in my opinion) inappropriately named named ‘Awesome bar’. The problem I have with it is that every time I start to enter a URL it brings up a list of URLs that have been found in the history or your favourites and have been matched with the text that was entered into the address bar. I just don’t like it. I much prefer the firefox 2 address bar. The fact that the ‘Awesome bar’ exist isn’t my problem; my problem is that there isn’t any way of making it act like it does in firefox 2. Sure, you can turn it off but that’s just as unhelpful as having turned on.

I can see that people are either going to love it. Or hate it. I personally hate it.

What do you think?

Update: I Have found a way to stop the bookmarks from appearing in the address bar drop down.

Use this guide to find the you firefox profile

• Now find the userChrome.css file. It should be in the file called chrome. If isn’t in there then just rename the userChrome-example file to ‘userChrome’.
• Now add the following code to the userChrome.css file.

   richlistitem[type=”bookmark”] {
  display: none !important;
  }

• Restart Firefox