Posts Tagged ‘Tools’

Poor man’s code repository and versioning with Dropbox

February 7th, 2010 – Desktop Development, Web Development (, , , ) No Comments »

By now just about everyone knows about Dropbox, the simple file syncing/sharing and online backup solution. The software is available for several operating systems and is very fast and intuitive. It even has a good online interface so you can access your dropbox without the software.

But did you think about using it as a poor man’s CVS? It’s actually a really good solution for personal projects, or for a small group of people working on a project. I have fallen in love with the service for several reasons.

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Must-have Firefox Add-ons for Web Developers & Designers

January 27th, 2010 – Web Design (, , , ) No Comments »

Mozilla Firefox is by far my favorite web browser. It is secure, feature packed, and very well maintained with a great community behind it. It is also the web developers’ best friend, with tons of built-in tools and user created add-ons to help people creating web sites. In my opinion, because of the array of tools available and the quality of the product, every web developer should already be using Firefox as their main browser.

This is an arbitrary list of my favorite Firefox add-ons for web development. These tools have fundamentally changed how I design and develop web pages. With these tools I can accomplish tasks in minutes that would have taken me hours just four years ago.

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An IDE for PHP that doesn’t suck

January 22nd, 2010 – Web Development (, , , ) No Comments »

A few months ago I commented on how PHP needs an IDE and a membership provider. Well, I’m still waiting on the membership provider, but I’m happy to say that I’ve finally found an IDE that doesn’t suck, phpDesigner. phpDesigner is a complete IDE for PHP based web development. It is a pretty simple idea but this one seems to have actually pulled it off. If you’re looking for a Windows PHP IDE, this one is certainly worth a look.

This development environment isn’t perfect, that is to say it’s not Visual Studio smooth, but it is far better than anything else that I’ve tried for PHP. It has all of the basic features that I’ve been looking for in a PHP IDE that runs on Windows.

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Firewall script tool for iptables

September 26th, 2009 – System Administration (, , , , , ) No Comments »

If you run a public linux server of any kind then you should have a firewall running. Hopefully you already know that. I prefer iptables because it is so powerful, however the iptables language is a little less than intuitive.

If you’re just getting started with iptables and you want a good strong rule set to use or learn from then check out the Easy Firewall Generator for IPTables. This is a great little tool that will give you a shell script with a very nice rule set.

Just fill out the form and save the script to your server. Run the shell script and you have a great firewall with good logging. Though don’t auto-run the script on bootup until you are absolutely sure that you have the rules perfect, iptables can and will happily lock you out of your own server for good.