Ok so the only person that I know of to be “long awaiting” this plugin is myself. I’ve had it on the drawing board for over a year now.

I worked on a commercial project a few years back that built and utilized a database of events throughout history to display “Today in History” results. That venture slowly went belly-up so here I was with this database of Tens of Thousands of events that had been so painstakingly added to this database, so what could I do with them.

Well today is the answer and fulfillment of that question. I give you the Today In History Widget so that you can display interesting facts and figures for your readers. So I hope you will enjoy this plugin, and if you do feel free to send us your questions or comments, and if it is working well for you I hope you would consider donating to help further the development.

I know, I know the last three or four posts have been about updates to our Social Crowd wordpress plugin… Don’t worry there will be more of them as we have been pretty active in it’s development over the last several days/weeks.

This release fixes a minor bug in the plugin’s admin UI as well as providing some additional functionality to address some confusion. The confusion being caused because the Profile ID fields for each social network were built to receive the actual Profile ID or Unique Identifier for the given social network. The example under each field showed an example url from each social network that had the ID you should enter bolded. But after receiving some feedback from users, it became apparent that some if not many users were inserting the whole URL rather than just the ID. So some code was added to accept either the ID or the full URL.

I hope this makes the plugin easier to use.

I know what you’re thinking, why should I care about Regular Expressions? I failed in math and don’t like Simple or Advance expressions, so why would I care about regular ones? Well now is your chance to learn something, and it doesn’t really have anything that you will recognize that deals with math… well maybe.

Anyhoo, Regular Expressions or Regex for short, are snippets of symbols that represent the type of content you would like to find within a given body of text or string. They can be very handy, and are extremely useful for developers that are trying to parse content out of a mass of other content. But while they are useful (at least for me) they could be a pain to try and figure out what expression will get to your specific content so you can get on with conquering the world. I’ve used a myriad of online tools to help me with this process, but it is always a seeming inconvienience to have to remember where “that” website is to work out my regex statement.

But no more, a great little app is available called Reggy, this little app gives you the ability to insert a segment of content and then play with your regular expression until you get it to grab exactly what you are looking for. Brilliant if you ask me, I just don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier. hehe. So take a look at this very simple but powerful tool that should speed up your development workflow.

Reggy Project Homepage

Download Reggy

WordPress 3.3 has just recently been released, and with that release comes the ability to make your content a little more… timeless. For years the basic permalink structure on wordpress contained the year and month, or possibly even the day of your blog posts. But not all blog posts are time dependent. Unless you are a News organization or have a very specific reason for having information on your site that is specifically tied to a date, you probably don’t want your information to be tied to a date. And research shows that when people see dates in urls on google or other search engines, regardless of how relevant the content may be (because it’s timeless info) the users tend to pick other options that don’t look so… well… old.

But with the advent of wordpress 3.3 you now have the ability to have just the post name/title as the permalink structure element.

But obviously you can’t just make the change without loosing all the incoming links that are pointed at posts using the old permalink structure. Well fortunately for all of us Joost de Valk over at Yoast.com has built a quick and easy solution for you.

Use this tool that he has built to generate a 301 redirect line to add to your .htaccess file, after adding it to your .htaccess file Login to your backend and change the permalink settings to the “Post Name” option, and you are all set. Timeless content is now YOURS!!

Original Post on Yoast.com

You’ve been there before, working hard on a project, opening lots of different windows for different applications, and pretty soon you cannot see what you are working on for all the other windows that are hanging around.

With Spirited Away you can avoid getting distracted by focusing on the application that you are currently using, and it alone. How does this litte app get this amazing feat done you ask?

Spirited Away pays attention to the apps that you are using, and the ones that you are not. After a predetermined amount of time (user defined, 60 seconds by default) an idle app is hidden from view. You can also select specific apps that you would like to be exempted from this “hiding” behavior by clicking the ghost icon in the menu bar. So don’t get carried away with yourself, stay focused and productive with Spirited Away.

Spirited Away Homepage

Download Spirited Away

Depending on the age of your mac there are two different ways to accomplish this:

Leopard and Above (OSX 10.5 and higher) :

dscacheutil – flushcache

Tiger and Below (OSX 10.4 and lower) :

lookupd -flushcache

With either command your DNS cache is completely cleared so that your next DNS query will be forced to be requested from your upstream DNS provider.

I hope this helps someone out there to save some time, effort, and energy,as it did for me.

Originally read at:

Hongkiat.com: Hongkiat – How to Clear DNS Cache In Mac OSX Leopard

SQLEditor provides the best interface that I have seen to create your database layout in a very visual format. It allows you to build your

tables specifying the column types, linking with foreign keys, and dragging the table layouts around the canvas so that you can easily understand what you were building at a glance when you come back to a project after an extended period.

But the best part comes after the database design is complete, you can export it to a PDF for distribution around the office, send it to a plotter to print a large wall size copy for reference.

But then comes the fun part, after you have made all of your changes to the database layout you can either export the contents directly to a txt file in the SQL dialect of your choice (MySQL, Oracle, Postgresql, etc…) or even connect directly to a database using JDBC drivers and propagate your changes directly to the running database server.

SQLEditor has full support for Mac OS X 10.6 and is ready to run on your Mac Development System.

Although this solution is not freeware or open source, it is an essential tool for every developer who designs or develops database integration strategies. I highly recommend this product and it is well worth the expense to purchase it for the time it will save you. But don’t worry like most software applications it comes with a hassle free 30 day free trial period so you can see how effective it will be in your development workflow.

Here is an extended list of features:

Product Homepage

For those who are fortunate enough to find themselves doing development on the mac platform, there is an alternative, which although it may not be the newest game on the block, it is one of the best all around. Sissy FauxVelopers need not apply to use this app. It has no build your app with one click buttons. It is designed to take the development experience to the next level for those who like to get their “fingers” dirty and actually do some major textual manipulations.

From the first launch it’s basic simplicity and power are immediately perceptible. It is feature packed enough to quell the pining soul of the most advanced developer, but simple enough to handle basic text document edits. From customizable coloring of the interface (I prefer the “All Hallow’s Eve” scheme) to the elegant line numbering and code folding features in the applications “trough”, this bad boy was built to move mountains and work minor miracles.

With built in support for dozens of predominant document formats, it provides out of the box streamlining of your developer workflow while also allowing you to add your own file format specifications should you happen to be crafty enough to have come up with your own file formats and specifications.

Additionally you can create functions to validate your files layout and formatting right into your file specification. Giving you on the fly access to all the features you want when you are developing.

This great product has seen me through many development projects, and has greatly increased my development capacity through it’s simplistic yet powerful functions.Although this product isn’t free, it is well worth the €39 purchase price, and it comes with a 30 day trial for all parties that may be interested, but not yet committed to the purchase.

Go give it a test spin. All you have to loose is pain and frustration.

Download Demo

Homepage

http://www.quickref.org

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