bradKELLETT

I’ve been using a little bash script I wrote that will automatically minify any Javascript and CSS files recursively in a directory with the YUI Compressor, and I thought I’d share it with the world. With the script, you can chose to minify just Javascript (with the -j option), just CSS (with the -c option), delete any existing minifed files (with the -d option), or any combination of the three. Files will be saved with a .min.js or .min.css extension (for example, test.js will become test.min.js). All you need to do is put the YUI Compressor JAR file somewhere within the current working directory, and the script will find it.

Usage is simple:

$ ./minify.sh -dcj
Deleting existing minified files...

Minifying JavaScript...
Processing: ./test.js

Minifying CSS...
Processing: ./test.css

Done.

You can download the latest version of the script from my GitHub repository.

I’ve been doing web development for many years now, and over time I’ve discovered a few tools that make my life easier. I’ve used these in personal projects and recommended them to others, and I thought I’d share them here. While I’m a web guy, most of these can quite easily be used for other types of projects as well.

To begin, tools for managing the development process:

Beanstalk (SVN)

SVN is an obvious requirement for any company doing development. The problem is, SVN takes time to set up and maintain properly, and smaller companies just can’t afford to spend this time taking care of it. Beanstalk provides a simple solution to the problem with off-site SVN server hosting, but the real beauty is not in just the stock SVN server – Beanstalk have a great web interface to enable you to manage your repositories and users/permissions, as well as see the latest activity in any repository and browse the source tree. The web UI also allows you to easily diff revisions and download files at specific revisions, and you can configure Beanstalk to send you emails for every commit in pretty HTML format with a full diff. With it’s reasonable pricing and great features above and beyond standard SVN, you really can’t go past it.

16bugs (Bug Tracking)

16bugs has a few bugs itself, but overall it is a great, simple, ‘web 2.0′ style bug tracking system. 16bugs has a fairly basic feature set when compared with some of the more mature products like Trac, but its hosted, web-based nature makes it a snap to maintain.

Google Sites (Wiki)

Google Sites provides a great, simple wiki solution. Sites was created out of Google’s purchase of Jot, and while I prefer the layout of the Jot version, Google Sites is almost as good. Both products take care of the core feature set for a wiki. I’ve used MediaWiki and PmWiki for various purposes in the past, but they can be a pain to set up and I’ve really only used the most basic features of them, which Google Sites easily takes care of.

The key thing you will notice about the above is that they are all hosted solutions. In a small, fast-moving company or for personal purposes, hosted solutions are often the best option to cut down on the time needed to maintain the various systems. Had I not already vested myself in the above, I would have loved to have checked out Assembla, which groups all these things into a single product (SVN, wiki, and Trac for bug management). Though if I did go with Assembla, I’m sure I would miss Beanstalk’s great web UI.

Now, a couple of tools for the development itself:

Aptana Studio (IDE)

Originally based on Eclipse, my IDE of choice for the web is Aptana Studio. Aptana Studio was built for developing AJAX web applications, includes code highlighting and completion for HTML, Javascript, and CSS, and has plugins for PHP and Ruby on Rails. Plugins are also available to ease development for AIR applications and the iPhone.

MacFUSE (Remote Access)

Google’s MacFUSE, cutting through the highly technical descriptions, is a way for you to mount a bunch of file systems on your Mac computer. I use it to mount remote file systems on development machines via SSH, meaning I can work within my home directory on the server as if it was just another locally connected hard drive. This is invaluable when you don’t have a totally self contained local development environment, saving you the effort of having to transfer files back and forth to the server.

In a similar situation? What are your tools of choice?

I have been using the new Brightkite location-aware social network (invite-only at this point) a lot over the last few days, and one of the very common questions I hear is how I do check-ins from my mobile phone, since at this point only U.S. carriers are supported for their SMS service. The (not so) secret is you can send MMS messages to email addresses with most Australian carriers (Vodafone seems to be only exception here), and Brightkite gives a personal email address for every account to send commands to.

Once you have an MMS compatible handset, simply:

1. Log in to Brightkite and select Account settings from the left of the screen
2. Click the Mobile tab
3. Scroll to the bottom and find your unique account email address, program this into your phone or remember it
4. On your mobile phone, create a new MMS message
5. In the To field, instead of putting in a phone number, put your Brightkite email address
6. Put the standard SMS commands into the body of the message. These can be found in the Brightkite help, but the basic ones are:
   • @placemark or @full address to check-in
   • !message to post a message and attach it to your current location

Using this method also means you can post photos to Brightkite from your phone. To do so, just add the photo in the body of the MMS message, and the text you want to go with it in the Subject field.

Enjoy, and feel free to add me as a friend over on Brightkite.

Read about some changes and updates.

The general response to my hesitation on the release of my Twitter timeline export tool was that I should, indeed, release it. So I have.

The tool now carries one of the most attractive names around: TweetDumpr. With it, you can export your entire Twitter timeline to a CSV (comma separated value) file, which can be read by any spreadsheet application. To get around the lingering privacy issues, the tool now requires you to authenticate to Twitter first, which makes sure you are only dumping your timeline and not someone else’s.

Currently, the tool only works on public timelines, but a new version is already in the works that handles protected users. Feel free to give it a go and report back on bugs that you encounter – it is still in the early stages of development.

Update: I have now released the tool.

As part of developing the Twitter Stats application, I created a standalone script that will dump a user’s entire Twitter timeline to a CSV file (comma separated value, readable by spreadsheet applications such as Excel), including the tweet text and the post time.

Initially, it was my intention to release this script to the public. I had several requests from people that wanted to have a record of all their tweets, which I kindly provided for them, and in my opinion the tool would prove quite useful.

After mentioning this to a couple of very smart people, they raised privacy concerns and suggested I keep the code to myself, which I have done thus far. These concerns stem from the fact that the tool can dump any user’s entire non-protected timeline, not just your own. Personally, I don’t really think this is a huge problem – if you have an unprotected timeline, all your tweets are public record anyway, the tool just makes it easier to extract and save these tweets. On the other hand, someone having a local copy of your stream does sound like a worrying proposition.

Clearly, there are far larger privacy issues associated with all of this, but I wanted to open up the floor and find out what other people think of the possible release of this tool. Should I put it out there, or keep it to myself?

After a suggestion from @abacab, I have created a little Twitter trivia bot. This bot posts a random fact from RandomFacts.org to its Twitter account every hour. There are some really interesting things coming through on it, so if you like trivia, give @triviabot a follow. I will be adding more features soon, such as being able to ask it questions and to play simple trivia games, but I have to work out the details first.

If anyone has any other suggestions for bots or other Twitter scripts (or anything for that matter), feel free to drop a comment.

I have created a Google Code page to house the source for Twitter Stats. Both the web version and the command line CSV-output version are available through a straight download or SVN.

While the other contributors and I don’t have a problem with derivative works (the code is released under the GPLv2 license), we would appreciate it if you instead thought about contributing back into the project. If you would like to contribute code, make a wiki page or contact me to become a member of the project so you can check-in using SVN. If you do choose to use some of the code in your own projects, please provide prominent attribution and a link back to the Google Code page and/or the web version of the script.

The code is pretty hideous at the moment, and there are quite a few bugs to work out, but please bear with us – we will be making enhancements and bug fixes very soon.

For all those Twitter lovers out there, like me, I’ve put together a little script based on the work found here to calculate some statistics from your Twitter timeline and present them using the Google Charts API.

Statistics include:

• Tweets per hour of the day
• Total Tweets per day of the week
• Total Tweets per day of the month
• Top @replies
• Top overall @s

Please keep in mind that there are probably a lot of bugs in it, and it can take a very long time to process if you have a large timeline. Other than that, enjoy!

(Yes, an update. I know it’s been a while, but I will try to blog more regularly.)

While I understand Google had to do a lot behind the scenes to ensure that actions mapped into Gmail properly, it has been a long wait for long-time Gmail users like me to get IMAP support in Google’s mail product. I’ve been using Microsoft Exchange for email for a while, but with my reshuffling of jobs, I found I no longer need the advanced features that it provides. Instead, with the new addition of IMAP access (a necessity in my books), I decided to save myself the money on Exchange and switch to Google Apps, and as such, back into Gmail.

This decision left me with a conundrum – how to get my bank of email out of the clutches of the MS empire and into the supposedly less evil Gmail. While my mailbox is not the largest around, weighing in at around 2GB, this was still a daunting task. IMAP support certainly made this easier, but finding the right application to do the move proved difficult.

I tried Outlook 2007 itself, Mozilla Thunderbird, Entourage, and Eudora with varying success, from Outlook’s constant timeouts on the IMAP connection, to Thunderbird ending up with messages without subjects or senders due to Exchange mangling headers. The solution came from an unlikely source: Windows Mail.

Windows Mail is the replacement to Outlook Express in Windows Vista, and was able to import email directly from the Exchange server through Outlook, then upload it to Gmail through IMAP. While the process was slow (around 10 hours for all my email), it managed to get the job done perfectly, without any timeouts and with the complete messages intact. I did not expect much from Windows Mail, but it pulled through in the end, and if Thunderbird wasn’t so damn good, I would consider using it as my full-time email client.

I now have Thunderbird with the Lightning calendar plugin syncing to my Google Apps Gmail and Google Calender, complete with all my email and calendar entries from Exchange. I still fire up Outlook and use the wonderful RemoteCalendars to pull down my Google Calendar for syncing with my iPhone and other devices, but other than that I am totally satisfied with the free alternative to Exchange.

I have been running with a sidebar (the aptly named Desktop Sidebar application) ever since I started using a dual monitor setup many years back. The added productivity from having so much at your fingertips certainly makes up for the small loss of screen real estate. I have tried a couple of different alternatives, but have always come back to Desktop Sidebar. My latest adventure was with turning on the sidebar in Google Desktop Search. The GDS sidebar would have worked perfectly for me, if it were not lacking one thing:

Auto fit.

The plugins for the GDS sidebar cannot be set to auto fit depending on the size of the information displayed. I use auto fit on several panels in my normal Desktop Sidebar, such as the Windows Live Messenger contact list and Outlook Calendar and Task viewer. These panels have content that varies in size, so they need to stretch when several contacts come online, for example. In the sidebar in GDS, if I get too many Live contacts online at a time, I need to manually resize the pane (which is a pain, with Google’s algorithms that resize every other pane to try to make room for your actions), or the contact list scrolls off the page – with no scroll bar!

If anyone can point me to how to turn on auto fit in the GDS sidebar, please do.