Recent open source contributions in the Turbo ecosystem

I’ve been pushing Turbo hard the past couple of months. That resulted in running into some edge case scenarios, which have not yet been resolved in the library.

One is an annoying race condition, related to incoming turbo refreshes stealing the navigation to another page. At the time of writing still waiting for merge.

The other one, just merged to main, is an improvement to turbo-rails documentation, which came out of the above work too.

Web technology apps taking over?

It’s interesting to see that my 3 most used desktop apps, during my day to day computer use, are all web technology based:

  • Atom – My code/text editor.
  • Slack – Communication with my team.
  • Chrome – of course

The last time I was working on a desktop app, I used NW.js, which is a platform for building desktop apps using web technologies.

From my perspective, it’s no coincidence. HTML, CSS and JS are great tools for building lots of types of apps. I like this trend.

WordPress Hosting

If you are looking to start a website or blog, then WordPress hosting may be what you need. WordPress is an incredibly popular Content Management System (CMS) which automatically manages site content like blog updates, but also has features form maintaining statics pages. Let’s look at some of the features of WordPress, and then see how to choose a WordPress host.

WordPress makes managing your blog simple by automatically taking care of all the technical details. You don’t have to know anything about computers, servers, or the technicalities of web hosting to run and maintain a WordPress setup. It has a full-featured text editor, and great software for allowing you to manage your content. WordPress is the most popular blogging platform, and is used by thousands of bloggers every day.

There are two ways to run a WordPress blog. You can sign up at WordPress.com for a free account, and let them host your blog for you. This is free and easy, but the free account has a lot of restrictions, and you don’t have very much control over your blog. For much more control, you can use the free download of WordPress from WordPress.org to custom install WordPress on your own server. This gives you a lot of power and control over your blog.

If you are new to blogging and you don’t know much about web hosting or running a server, then this can sound very complicated. Fortunately, many web hosting providers offer packages where you can have WordPress installed and maintained for you, so you don’t have to worry about the technical details. These web hosts usually use software like the cPanel hosting software or a similar package to make it easy to control your server using an easy to understand graphical user interface.

WordPress hosting is a great choice for anyone looking to start a blog. It makes the process of maintaining a blog simple, and there are a wide variety of free themes and widgets that you can use to customize your blog and make it unique. There is also lots of support available for it because so many people use it. WordPress is free, and open-source, so its options for growth, development, and extensions are nearly endless. WordPress hosting makes maintaining a WordPress blog even easier than it already is, so you can have a completely worry-free WordPress experience. Check out what WordPress today to see what it can do for you.

This is a guest post by Jonas Bates.

Zend PDT on 64bit (x64) Linux systems how-to

I am amazed with Hardy Herdon. It’s the best OS I’ve ever used. The only thing that was bugging me is that I was not able to install x64 version of Zend PDT. In my opinion it’s the best free PHP IDE around. The solution is very easy trough.

  1. Download Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers from Eclipse downloads. It includes all the plugins PDT needs. You’ll be missing some with the vanilla Eclipse.
  2. Run it, and go to Help -> Software Updates -> Find and Install… Click Next and add a new remote site. Name: PDT, URL: http://downloads.zend.com/pdt
  3. Thick the new remote site and click Finish. When asked to choose which plugins to install, be sure to deselect the debugger. It’s not available for 64bit systems as far as I know and you’ll get an error proceeding with it.
  4. When you finish the process and restart Eclipse you’ve got it working.

This guide assumes you have 64bit Java working on your system. On Ubuntu it’s just a matter of installing a package in Synaptic.

Trying out Ubuntu

I am happily moved to my new home for more then two weeks now. I was both lazy and occupied to write something. But right now I have a good reason. I bought a new hard drive and guess what? I installed Ubuntu on it to dual boot with Windows. It was not that new to me, because I was playing with Ubuntu before but that changed when I installed XGL and Compiz. I was simply amazed. In the area of 3D accelerated user interface Compiz can not be compared to XP not even Vista. Take a look at this video but you really have to experience it first hand to see the potential. One thing however still keeps me from using Ubuntu for my everyday work. Font displaying. Clear Type is so much better that everything that can be set up in Ubuntu (yes, I tried various guides how to make this better). This really is important to me because texts are the thing I look most at when behind a computer and they have to be as smooth as possible. So I’ll probably stay with Windows for some more time, but I feel it won’t be for long.

Moving to a new flat

The summer holidays officially ended for me. Tomorrow I am moving to a new flat in Bratislava where I study. The school is starting around the 18th of September but there are some things that needs to be done there before. I will be offline for a few days, until my provider connects me. This will be terrible but I survived two weeks on vacation during the holidays without the net so I know how it is like 🙂 I have some articles started and I hope I’ll finish them during this time. Stay tuned!

Books I read recently

I would like to share some great books I have read recently or I am reading right now. If you have something to do with the subjects mentioned here I definitely recommend these.

PHP 5 Power Programming

PHP 5 Power Programming You think you know PHP? Maybe after reading this book you’ll change your mind. This is an extensive journey trough PHP 5 written by the people who know it best. There are a lot of useful code examples and the whole thing is quite amusing to read. The book passes 1 Million downloads so far and they estimate that 1 in 5 PHP developers have this book. Not convinced yet?

Code Complete (second edition)

Code Complete Everyone who ever touched some production code should have this one. This book covers everything from application design to naming conventions. Every page offers pragmatic insight gained through years of effective coding experience and continues to be the principal handbook of software construction success for its practitioners. Project leaders should read this book cover to cover, and then purchase a copy for each of their direct reports. You probably have at least heard of it. This is a must.

The Zen of CSS Design

Zen of CSS Design Another bestseller. For everyone who does web design. The last chapter really nails it. The CSS development of 5 designs from CSS Zen Garden is explained here step by step. I learned a lot from this one.