blog | CreateSean Web Design

E-texteditor vs Notepad++

Thursday October 15 2009

I’ve been using notepad++ as my text-editor of choice for several years now and have been relatively satisfied with it. It does everything I want, but I’ve also heard a lot of good things about e-texteditor which has “the power of textmate on windows”. I’m not a fan of Apple products but have heard so many good things about textmate that I thought I should give it a try.

Both notepad++ and etexteditor allow users to import user created bundles. This is great because I make web sites using ExpressionEngine (EE) and having EE tags color coded and shortcutted would be really nice. There is a bundle for notepad++ on this EE forum thread. The problem for me is that it has never really worked the way I expected it to so I don’t use it.

The textmate bundle for EE is available here. When I added this to e-texteditor it worked exactly the way I expected. Autocomplete worked beautifully and even auto selected variables that were likely to be customized. The only thing missing is that the disable is empty leaving one to remember all the options. I suppose I could customize this to my own tastes. In any case it works great.

When I first started using this I was really excited and thinking it was time to drop notepad++ but I soon found that e-texteditor is missing one key feature of notepad++ that I use all the time. That is the ability to have multiple files open side by side in the same instance and move them from one side to the other or clone to the other view. For me this is great as I can edit my CSS file on one side, while my EE html/eetag template is on the other side. Additionally it’s great when making adjustments to one file as you can open it and then clone it to the other side to make your changes while at the same time being able to see the original.

If or when e-texteditor can do that, I’ll make the switch and gladly buy a license, but until then I’m going to stick with notepad++ I know this may not be the most in depth comparison, but it does look at the features that I use and consider important. Comments welcome.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Oct 15, 2009 at 04:14 PM
code | Expression Engine | General |

| tags: expressionengine, code, editor, |

Texter Pack for ExpressionEngine

Saturday March 07 2009

Yesterday I watched a screencast on text expanders by Jeffrey Way and my brain immediately went into overdrive. I just loved the possibilities. It’s such a timesaver being able to program hotkeys that will work in any program. get texter here

I have already started working on an ExpressionEngine code bundle to share with the community. This bundle will include some basic html short cuts as well.

My plan is to hit up the ExpressionEngine docs and go through it section by section adding in default/suggested code via short cut. Currently I’ve got this one triggered by typing weblog + TAB

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="" limit="" disable="member_data|pagination|trackbacks" status="open" orderby="" sort="desc" category=""}

{/exp:weblog:entries} 

I’m open to suggestions on other approaches. Once I’ve got a large chunk completed I’ll make it available for download here.

Added an ExpressionEngine forum thread as per Derons suggestion in the comments.

As it stands the bundle is not complete, but I feel it has the most commonly used EE tags as well as basic HTML tags. I also included a hotkey for the Solspace FreeFrom Module form tag. It’s the only third party tag included so far. It’s so popular that I felt it was 100% necessary to include.

Suggestions for future additions are welcome, both regular HTML tags as well as EE tags. I will update the bundle as I continue to add to it or recieve suggestions.

Get ExpressionEngine Texter bundle here

You can also see all the tags that I’ve added by looking at the ExpressionEngine Texter Bundle Guide, which is also conveniently included iin the zip file.

Download

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Saturday Mar 7, 2009 at 03:53 PM
code | General |

| tags: expressionengine, code, forums, texter, |

Redesign Complete - Announcement post

Wednesday February 25 2009

I’ve completed the redesign of my portfolio site as well as this blog. I’m much happier with the new look. The old look was put together in a rush when I first got into freelancing as I had clients before I had a site ready. Nothing to complain about, but still I felt the need to get a site up and did a rush job in hacker black—screenshots at the bottom of this post.

When designing the new version I took my time in photoshop and designed each section of the site. My primary goals were to have a site that is cleaner, brighter, more inviting and ultimately more informative to clients. I feel that I have succeeded on all of those points. Of course there is always room for improvement and any suggestions are very welcome.

Technical stuff

This site is of course powered by ExpressionEngine. Third party modules, plugins, & extensions include:

Modules
1. Tag Module—powering tags on this blog as well as the features for each portfolio entry.
2. FreeForm—powering the contact page
Extensions
1. LG Better Meta
2. Multi Drop-down List—used for Role on portfolio page
Plugins
1. TruncHTML—used for all the summary links
2. Gravatar—Avatars on this blog

I also have used some jQuery for the portfolio—the cycle plugin on the individual items to cycle through screenshots and on the sidebar of the About page and this blog to cycle through portfolio thumbnails. On the Portfolio page the testimonial is truncated with the jQuery plugin truncator. I couldn’t use the EE truncHTML plugin as the testimonial is a single custom field with multiple paragraphs and things got funky with the show/hide. Using this jQuery plugin everything works smoothly.

Additionally on the contact page I used a jQuery plugin for form validation. This works a charm requiring minimum character counts, valid email, URL and also restricting file types accepted for upload. If the user makes a mistake the entry field is highlighted in red with an explanation. All very user friendly.

This is also my first site to be built using 960.gs. Layout in photoshop was simple. I was a little thrown off by the actual template provided being 1020px wide but once I realized that I needed to stay in the guidelines everything was good. Using the CSS classes took a bit to get used to (about 10 minutes), but made html/CSS coding real smooth. I know it saved me a ton of time troubleshooting because I didn’t have any errors in IE7 at all and only a few in IE6 which I’m not even going to fix.

Overall alot of improvements to the site. For comparison the old site is below.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Feb 25, 2009 at 08:24 PM
General |

| tags: expressionengine, redesign, this site, |

Thoughts on Support Email

Tuesday December 16 2008

Almost everyone receives email support from various web sites and companies. The problem with all of these different companies is that the name associated with the email is almost always Support. This includes various forums, message boards and blogs. When recieving emails from all of these different entitites it is usually difficult to determine which company/web site sent the email until opening it.

For the end user, that’s me, this is confusing and a potential waste of time. Different forums and support emails have different priorities for me. I know that I can set up email filters and have done so for many of them - Gmail is awesome because it also allows you to color tag as part of a filter. But this still relies on the end user setting up a filter, which is not the ideal situation.

I suggest that companiess and message boards set the from name to something a little more meaningful than merely support. For example all support email from my hosting company Site5 are prefixed with Site5, for example Site5 billing, Site5 support. But forum emails from ExpressionEngine come with the incredibly descritive name of “Support” other names from emails I’ve recieved are Sales & EllisLab. Unless one knows that EllisLab is the parent company of ExpressionEngine that name is not going to be very helpful.

I could go into countless other examples of bad email sender names. Generic names such as Sales and Support should be prefixed with something more meaningful like the name of the Company.

Practice what I Preach

I’m trying to find the settings that set the name for comment notification in ExpressionEngine to check what I have set, but can’t find it. Once I do, I’ll be sure to have a descriptive name in the sender field.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Tuesday Dec 16, 2008 at 08:06 AM
General |

| tags: email, support, |