I spent an extremely uneventful couple of hours going from Tiger to Snow Leopard yesterday on my second generation Intel mini. No problems except I had to go through the trouble of selecting my Bounjour printer again. All my preferences were carried over except my wireless network. Which took a second or two to log into. I made sure to install Rosetta and the Office 2004 and Quicken 2006 apps still run just fine. Now I’ve got to transition to the iWork apps.

I was a bit disappointed to see that Snow Leopard’s Airport Admin Utility doesn’t work with my trusty Airport Snow. Sure I could use a new wireless router but with only one Mac active on the wireless network, it’s more than adequate right now. So now I can’t configure my Airport Snow. And I can’t sync my Palm Centro until I by Missing Sync. Not bad.

With all of the URL shortening services out there, it’s easy to notice all sorts of domains that aren’t .com or .net. So I was playing with my surname and sure enough, I can get a Slovenian domain (.si) which matches the last two letters of my surname. I guess they need to raise revenue somehow so there’s a bit of a charge for the domain name regardless of who I register it with.  Is $70 per year worth having a cute domain name? Am I being cheap?

I’m no pro but I’ve been knocking around on my self hosted WP installation for a couple of years now. I can take apart the pieces of a theme, re-engineer existing CSS, bang out php and other stuff but I’m not a graphic artist nor a designer. On my self hosted install, I use a great, free theme (Web 2.0) which is now unsupported and highly tweaked for my use. When I was asked to help another volunteer based organization retool their web site, I thought of using WordPress as a CMS because I didn’t want to be the webmaster in the traditional sense with workflow going through me. Since I had a budget, I decided to use a premium theme, specifically The Station from WooThemes to get up and running quickly.

The premium theme market for WordPress seems to grow by the day. I’m not sure how I wound up with WooThemes but I’m happy I did. When you’re thinking about using or choosing a premium theme, here are a couple of items to consider:

• You are going to have to tinker with the theme files. If you think a premium theme will be 100% ready to go for your use, you’re mistaken. You’ll have to know some basic WordPress template and conditional tags to get your site just right.
• Consider using a vendor with a sizable portfolio of themes that use a common framework. That way if WordPress makes some structural changes, the vendor will make the their theme framework adapt to new WordPress features quickly.
• You will have to create template files if you use WordPress as a CMS. When selecting a premium theme, make sure the theme has multiple format templates so if you want a full width page (important in a CMS), you don’t have to create it from scratch.
• If the theme uses javascript (most do), make sure you can easily understand how the theme loads the js so when you need to add a javascript, you can get it loaded easily.
• In many cases, you don’t want to make too many modifications to the theme’s functions.php file. When the theme updates, you could lose your mods if you didn’t use good practices making the changes. Look for a theme vendor who publishes recommended practices for making modifications. That’s good support.

Remember, when you buy a theme, you’re not just buying the creativity of the theme designer, you’re buying support. Make sure you understand what kind of support will be provided before you buy. So far, I’m very happy with WooThemes. Their support is excellent (via forums) and they’ve got a nice array of FAQs. Their code is formatted very well with extensive commenting. Makes tweaks and mods very simple.

I really want to upgrade from Tiger to Snow Leopard. I really don’t want to install Rosetta on my underpowered Mini. I need Quicken. FAIL.

Quicken for the Mac Delayed into 2010 | Product News | The Mac Observer.

So I’m all ready to upgrade my little mini from Tiger to Snow Leopard and then I get wind of this. Yes, I’m still very happy with my Centro, thank you. Truth is, I should have been running Missing Link all the time but I never got around to it. While Missing Link is reporting some problems with Snow Leopard compatibility, I’m sure they’ll fix that stuff. Even if they don’t, I don’t use the compromised features.

AppleInsider | Apple drops Palm OS HotSync conduit from Snow Leopard.

I can feel Apple pushing me again. Last time, it was dumping ‘classic’ OS 9 for the new fangled OSX. All my old apps either perished or were finally updated. Now Apple is strongly hinting that I need to do the same with my legacy apps which are not universal binary, if in fact, Rosetta is an optional module for Snow Leopard as widely reported.

So I downloaded Panic Software’s Coda web development software the other day and started to play with it as a potential replacement for Dreamweaver 8 (yes, I know). I started with Dreamweaver because I needed to get up and running quickly and DW had a bunch of ‘out of the box’ solutions for me. As the years have gone by, I’ve found little use for DW’s WYSIWYG editing, canned login scripts and templates. I essentially code by hand but enjoy the autocomplete and syntax matching features. So without further ado, here’s my initial reactions and thoughts about Coda.

• Splashy, familiar interface. Really feels like a Mac application and not something ported over. Normally, this doesn’t bother me but Coda just feels smoother.
• Interesting effects and functional autocomplete and syntax matching. Automatically provides closing parens (very welcome since I tend to forget them). However, I wish it had DW’s add-ins which extend this feature to jQuery (sweet). Looks like the Coda API will allow third party developers to do this but we’ll see if there is a big enough developer base for this.
• Coda lets you work on the server directly, if you want to. Feels like you’re working without a net until you get used to it. The integrated FTP is much more responsive than DW’s.
• If you work on a single site from multiple desktops, Coda doesn’t provide you with the same sense of security that you won’t overwrite more recent work unless you run Subversion (which Coda does natively…very sweet). DW will tell you there’s a fresher version on the server during the upload process. Again, if you work directly on the server with Coda, you know you’re working with the most recent version.

On my Coda wishlist:

• It would be nice if I could more quickly distinguish whether I was working on the remote or the local version of the file. Perhaps color coding the tab. I know there’s an icon there but you have to mouseover to see it.
• Keystrokes (or better yet, a button) for reverse publish (better known as an ftp ‘get’). I’ve gotten into the habit on DW of opening a file and immediately getting it from the server with a click.

I haven’t played around with the CSS editor too much but it looks to be just fine. I think Coda will do nicely for me, especially at $99 USD.

As if I don’t have enough to do, I’m going to get a site up and running using WordPress as a CMS. I’ll probably have a little budget to do it so if anyone can recommend a CMS style theme (premium is ok), I’d appreciate it. I’ve had my blog theme running for so long and it’s so customized, I haven’t shopped for a theme in a long while. Plus my existing blog theme is not set up for CMS.

By the way, the site is not e-commerce but I will need advertisement space on the front page. As always, recommendations and comments are truly appreciated.

5 Freebies for June!

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Some easy methods to get better performance from your jQuery coding. Good stuff.

jQuery Performance Rules – Best Practices for Speeding Up jQuery

I finally got around to jumping into javascript, specifically jQuery. It’s an awesome framework and a valuable part of the toolbox. Now I haven’t really found anything I couldn’t do server-side in php but there are certainly a bunch of things that are just easier using client-side, especially styling (which I hate). Using jQuery has improved my html coding, especially the use of optional attributes, which jQuery exploits quite nicely. There’s more to css life than just styles and ids.

When I first started with jQuery, all I saw was simple hide/shows and effects. It really didn’t take long to figure out how to use AJAX which not only handles form submissions but it lets me take a chunk of output and use it all over my static site. Change it once and it’s updated all over.

There are a lot of plugins around for jQuery to handle a lot of routine tasks like form validation and form submission. While I started out using plugins, I’ve eventually figured out it’s just as easy to code a couple of lines and have a customized solution that you can understand and manipulate.

Javascript and jQuery have a learning curve like most everything else but it’s worthwhile to give it a try.