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Review: Transmit 4

Filed Under : My Thoughts,Technology,Web Development by Douglas Bell

Jul.2,2010

If you’re like me, and you make a living as a web developer, you rely on FTP clients. Ah, yes, these programs whose sole purpose it is to connect to a server and allow you to copy files between it and your desktop. Seems easy, right? Turns out it’s anything but.

Problem #1 is that the Mac OS X Finder does not support FTP, hence demonstrating the need for a client. But even if the Finder did, it would not be adequate. People who really use FTP clients aren’t merely managing files that they’ve created on their computer; they’re uploading files to the server from their computer and downloading files from the server to their computer. En masse. (There’s a reason it’s called “File Transfer Protocol,” after all.) The Mac Finder simply does not give you what you need to make that work efficiently, even if it did support FTP.

The long-time king of Mac FTP clients has been Panic’s Transmit, which I’m pretty sure was the first FTP client to implement the two-column browser, implementing a blatantly obvious label of “your stuff” versus “their stuff” to differentiate them. No longer was it necessary to have multiple windows to find your files or have to drag them on- and off-screen.

The problem was that the Panic folks let a lot of time lapse between versions. Transmit 3.0, a major improvement to their software, was released in February 2005 amidst much fanfare and many awards… and then sat there for over five years. Other Mac FTP clients with snazzier interfaces and newer features emerged over time. Even I switched earlier this year to Flow when I got it as part of the last MacHeist bundle. (The MacHeist Bundle page for Flow took direct jabs at the staleness of Transmit 3, declaring “1998 called, it wants its file transfer app back.”)

About two months ago, Panic finally roared back onto the scene with the release of Transmit 4. Boy, did they make up for lost time! This new release of Transmit is packed with features and refinements that launch it at least five years ahead of any other FTP client out there today.
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Building Bridges

Filed Under : My Thoughts,Student Government by Douglas Bell

Jun.26,2010

I would just like to ask every member of AU’s Undergraduate Senate, every member of AU’s campus media, and every student at American who has ever been critical of or pessimistic about the AU Student Government to watch this video.

This is what Student Government is really about.

My Six Favorite New Features in WordPress 3.0

Filed Under : My Thoughts,Web Development by Douglas Bell

Jun.25,2010

WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” was released eight days ago to much fanfare. Certainly for me, I don’t think I’ve been quite as excited for any other major WordPress release as I was for 3.0. Now granted, at first glance, 3.0 doesn’t actually look that different from 2.9, at least in terms of what meets the eye. Quite frankly, WordPress 2.7, which introduced the modern interface for the WordPress admin screens, had much more impact in terms of new features that were apparent to the eye. By contrast, most of the new features in WordPress 3.0 address more under-the-hood tweaks and improvements, but collectively, they pack a punch.

(As a side-note, the funniest new feature that strikes me is the addition of a filter called capital_P_dangit() that forces any instance of “WordPress” being written without the P being capitalized gets automatically fixed to what it should be. I’d try to demonstrate, but you know, the filter would eliminate that effort!)

After working with WordPress 3.0 very closely for the past week, and also playing with the Release Candidates for a few weeks before that, here is my list of my six favorite new features in WordPress 3.0.
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Meet Smorgasbord 2.0: My Personal Blog, Reloaded

Filed Under : Personal,Web Development by Douglas Bell

Jun.24,2010

That’s right, I just can’t seem to leave well-enough alone for a long period of time before I have to get up and start working on a brand new refresh of my personal website. And it is in that spirit that today I proudly announce the unveiling of Version 2.0 of The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell.

Interestingly enough, I’ve held a personal blog for myself for about five years now, and it’s gone through a number of iterations as my experiences and needs have changed over time. I actually went back a ways to refresh myself with the history of how it has evolved:

First Webmacster87.info (March-June 2005) — I didn’t know what I was doing, so I actually set up a phpBB2 forum and posted my blog posts on there. Needless to say, it didn’t last too long.
Webmacster87.info 2 (June-July 2005) — My first experience with WordPress, version 1.5. (My, how it has changed since then!) This version utilized some kind of notebook-like theme. Though I didn’t stick with it for long, you may have noticed that I’ve since returned to those roots, eh?
Webmacster87.info 2.5 (July-November 2005) — I remember actually declaring this “version 2.5.” Unimpressed with the notebook theme, I adopted a cooler theme with red/silver boxes that glowed on top of a black background. It was kind of cool, and my most meaningful content here was commentary on Hurricane Katrina. Went down due to web hosting issues.
Webmacster87.info 3 (1 Week in January 2006) — I don’t even remember why this went down, but for a week I had a black-themed K2 version of WordPress 2.0 which I used solely to post Macworld 2006 photos.
Webmacster87.info 4 (April-August 2006) — This was the first time that my blog truly had a good design. It ran K2, but had a header with a big “W” themed like Apple’s logo for Mac OS X Tiger, made by a good friend. However I was using a friend’s webhosting service for free, and he unexpectedly abandoned it in August, causing me to lose all of my content.
Webmacster87@WordPress.com (October-December 2006) — I restarted my blog WordPress.com with the same theme and layout, again on K2.
Webmacster87.info 4.5 (January-April 2007) — On January 1, I took advantage of WP.com’s new Domains feature to reinstate Webmacster87.info with my WP.com blog, reinstating its proper name. Nothing else changed. (I still have all of my blog posts since 1/1/07 posted on this site!)
Webmacster87.info 4.6 (April-June 2007) — Maybe I got itchy feet, but I decided to splurge and pay for web hosting (partly in order to host a new site for phpBB Weekly), and so I moved Webmacster87.info off of WP.com. Same theme and design, still.
Webmacster87.info 5 (June 2007-June 2009) — This was the biggest redesign of my personal site ever and represented my first effort digging into the WordPress codebase and tweaking stuff (which is now second-nature to me). I loved this design, particularly the header, which is why it stayed in place for two straight years.
Smorgasboard 1.0 (June 2009-June 2010) — I had purchased the DouglasBell.us domain back in early 2008, which originally redirected to Webmacster87.info. However, as I readied to graduate high school, I recognized that Webmacster87.info was getting hard for a lot of people to type, and I started to have a desire to “graduate” from Webmacster87.info, which represented my high school years. Unfortunately, this version was somewhat rushed, and did not serve me particularly well over the past year.

New Design & Features
Smorgasbord 2.0 represents about a month of planning, followed by a week of actual work, doing a lot of planning and fine-tuning of many corners of the site. It takes advantage of the newly-released WordPress 3.0, and a really nice new theme called Wood is Good. While it doesn’t have very many more features than the previous version of Smorgasbord has, it presents them in a much cleaner, more organized manner.

The homepage puts much more emphasis on the blog posts, thanks to some CSS which I stole from a website I like. The Google Calendar is still here, and sits side-by-side with a Twitter widget. (Much more attractive than the unordered list I used before.)

The Weather has now moved to the sidebar, using the new WP-Weather plugin, and my Social Media listing is now back on Dustin Bachrach’s ShowYourself plugin, a blast from the Webmacster87.info past. A new Linkroll links to other organizations that I’m affiliated with, and then there’s the Random Quote. And I’ve gotten rid of the “Tip Jar,” because I got some flak about that previously.

I’ve built-in some customized location-awareness to the site. As a special addition to the theme, you’ll notice an extra slip of paper in the header identifying my current general location, which is also where the date/time/day of year is now shown more prominently. Plus, the rest of the site, including the Weather and Google Calendar has been tweaked on the back-end to be integrated with this location awareness as well. So now you’ll be able to quickly see where I am as I take my cross-country journeys and follow along. Not bad, eh?

Finally, I’ve made some updates to my About Me page (formerly called the Colophon, but I decided to apply a clearer name), and I have a new Portfolio page highlighting my web design work. The Portfolio is just the first of a few more pages that will be coming soon to highlight some of my more professional work and other projects. That’s right, there are a few more features still in the pipeline.

New License
Like many people, I want to see the internet become a more open place. Not the Facebook-kind of “open,” where people have no privacy, but “open” where people are more willing to share knowledge and ideas with each other. And so it is in that spirit that I have changed the license used on this site to a Creative Commons Attribution License. The previous Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license allowed reproduction of my work but still established rather strict guidelines. The new license now allows anyone to reproduce my work in any way, shape, or form, with the only condition being that my work is attributed to me.

New Commitment
I used to be a frequent blogger–blogging every day or two–up until the end of summer 2008. Then, I must have gotten busy or something. And during the first year of Smorgasbord, I almost entirely abandoned this blog. This is something that I want to change, which is why I am also committing to blogging, on average, at least once per week. I’m also going to try to broaden my scope from just blogging about myself, to also blogging about more general thoughts on college life, issues affecting my local area(s), technology, etc. In short: I want more content and better content on my blog, and I’m going to try to make that happen for at least the remainder of 2010.

So that’s Smorgasbord 2.0. Not exactly a huge slew of new features, but a lot more polish and cohesiveness that will make this a personal site that I can be proud of again. I’m looking forward to getting a lot of use out of it in the weeks and months to come. Enjoy, and thanks for visiting!

Coming Soon: Smorgasbord 2.0

Filed Under : Personal by Douglas Bell

Jun.1,2010

I know, it’s been forever since I last posted here. Partly this is because I’ve never quite been happy with the way that I redid this site at this time last year. As such, The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell will be fully restocked with an extreme makeover, which will launch sometime this month. (No specific launch date has been set yet.) Until then, stay tuned…