My site is down at the moment, but the blog posting goes on…

I’ve been playing with AutoHotkey (which I highly recommend), and automating some things that I should have had working a long time ago, like a hotkey for pausing WinAmp (someone else has written a WinAmp script for AutoHotkey). After getting used to that, I decided I wanted one for the Last.fm player, so I wrote it.
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These are the tools I use when doing web development.
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For years I’ve had no coherent backup strategy. For someone who does so much on computers, that’s rather insane. It’s been a project of mine to have a comprehensive and regularly-executed backup plan for about a decade. I’m not quite there, but I think that it’s finally within my grasp…
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I usually write documents in one of three formats: text/blog/wiki (yes, that’s one format), HTML, or RTF. What I write in each is different, and I’m mainly happy with them. But I’m least happy with RTF, and I keep trying to find a replacement for it.
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I started using Last.fm quite a while back because they support tracking what my music player plays, and I like to show that info on the front of my blog. But I didn’t use their other features until recently.
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I’ve recently been writing documentation at work, and have been writing it in HTML, which is more or less my native format for that kind of writing. In doing so, I’ve been focusing more on document structure and how it aids usability for the reader. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve also started to focus on how it might improve usability for the author.
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Steve recently tried to rile me up by sending me a link to this article by a Flash developer about why he does’t think open source Flash is necessary. And it worked. A state of riledom indeed ensued.
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I’m gradually moving more and more of my personal files into my various Subversion repositories, and figuring out how to organize those repositories. I highly recommend Subversion (or some form of version control, but Subversion is free (and libre)) to anyone who uses computers to create documents that they consider important.
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I created a very hacky plugin for TiddlyWiki that will place a node titled with the date at the top of the page if you open the page on that date. In other words, you can create a node with a specific date, and when you open TiddlyWiki on that date you’ll see that node.
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I had to do some screen-scraping today, and found myself doing it in JavaScript, just because JavaScript is able to understand the DOM. I would prefer to be able to walk the HTML DOM in another scripting language, like Perl, Ruby, or Python.
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I’m not a fan of proprietary software, and I’m trying to make sure I don’t start using any more of it. In addition, I don’t like most Microsoft products, and PowerPoint is really low on my list. On the other hand, I need something with which to make presentations for work. Enter S5, Eric Meyer’s XHTML/CSS/JavaScript presentation tool.
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I’ve made progress on my bookmarking project, and have most of the input side done, including the JavaScript and the PHP. The first thing I had to figure out on the backend side was the database structure, which is what I discuss here.
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I’ve wanted bookmark synchronization between machines for quite some time. I’ve been trying to do it myself, using Subversion, but that’s proved awkward and annoying (not through any fault of Subversion’s). There are plenty of services that offer remote bookmark hosting, and there was the sadly undeveloped Bookmarks Synchronizer, but neither fit my purposes. So now I’m trying Foxmarks.
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I’ve been using TiddlyWiki over the last few months, and love it. It’s essentially a wiki-in-a-file, but the difference between a server-side wiki and the extremely lightweight TiddlyWiki is profound.
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Firebug is an amazing web development extension for Firefox. Anyone who does any web development should use it.
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I spent some time today creating a bookmarklet (copy the contents of this page into Firefox or another Gecko-based browser) and greasemonkey script for enhancing the magictraders.com pricelists. This kind of thing exemplifies what I love about HTML, and why I distrust less open technologies.
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My current main server has acted in that capacity since 2001. Earlier this year I decided to upgrade, and got my new server, reflection. I haven’t actually moved all of my services over to it. Or any of them, in fact. Since everything would run faster, I should really do it…
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My web browser of choice is Firefox, which I prize for its openness, flexibility, and extensibility. Since I do web (application) development for a living, do web (application) development as a hobby, and in addition get much of my news/information from the Web, it’s important to be happy with my browser.
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Here’s a list of software I consider essential on a Windows machine, more or less in order of importance:
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