Since I am currently working on several (count eight) web development projects at the same time, life has been hectic but very productive. With my improved energy levels, I’m better motivated to learn and do more things at one go, but I felt that I needed to use more new arsenals in the form of web development tools that I hope can speed up the development process and the project as a whole. Preferably those arsenals are free and goes hand-in-hand with my prototyping methods of finishing my projects.

One of the things I don’t really enjoy doing is designing forms. I have to think about client-side validation, and making the fields more appealing and user-friendly with tooltips and whatnot. However, since forms are an integral part of data entry in a web application, I can’t get away without it. And then, there’s the wireframing for layout and functional visualization, very important for documentation. I prefer pencil-sketching. It’s easier to control where everything goes, rather than using my mouse to navigate the precise location of a certain text within Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks. I have wireframing sheets printed out and hand drawn, and I would clip them into my handy-dandy notebook, which, at some point will be overflowing with stuff that it just won’t be practical to drag about.

I’ve just discovered and worked with at least two spiffy apps these past week that made project visualization and forms development much faster and easier for me.

JotForm is not only a form builder, but it also hosts the forms and data for you. I personally like the smooth design that comes with the form. It has the ability to not only get those validation and tooltips in, but it highlights the section of the form you are selecting. Once I’m done, I can either just use the embed code, or if I want to integrate the form with my database, I just copy the whole HTML layout with its CSS and JavaScript codes intact into my app, and voila, pretty form. Happy days.

And wireframing using a computer isn’t as bad as I thought after all. Or maybe it’s just Mockingbird making it easy for me. The widgets and forms that are available for me to use are just enough for me to design a nice website wireframe, and I particularly like the align grids that shows automatically every time I insert a new object in. Once I’m done, I can share the file with anyone I want without having to generate the file as another format and upload it elsewhere. Mockingbird is fast for a web application, most probably because it’s programmed with Cappucino / Cocoa, a relatively new open-source programming framework that runs on a client, giving itself the feel that you’re running a software that’s installed in your computer. Very impressive and very nice.

Evolus’s Pencil and Appnitro’s pForm deserve a special mention here; both look promising and worth a try when I have the time to spare. Pencil is a free prototyping/wireframing tool that to me looks even more powerful and richer than Mockingbird, and runs either as a Firefox addon or standalone app. The free AJAX-powered version of pForm provides a simple click-and-drag way to create forms from a variant of design sets available in the site; the commercial version, in the meantime, has MySQL, e-mail and autoresponder integration for unlimited amount of sites.

This week, I was planning to continue with my WordPress plugin development for a GEDCOM viewer, after making myself busy with OS upgrading and testing, as well as niche blog building since last year.

Alas, when I checked the WP.org Extend directory to request a repository for my GEDCOM project, I’ve found that a GEDCOM viewer plugin has already been developed. So I thought that since mine is still a beta, I might as well not reinvent the wheel and let someone else do the hard work (and believe me, there’s a lot of hard work and reading going on with my GEDCOM plugin development).

l’ve decided to stop development of my GEDCOM plugin, and instead recommend you to check out WP Family Tree. There is also one simple but pretty-looking GEDCOM viewer called Family Tree PHP, which you can install if your web hosting provider supports PHP and MySQL. Last but not least, PhpGedView is one other option if you’re interested in a more extensive genealogy application on the Web, and was the basis of my WordPress plugin.

After almost a year lying dormant, my namesake web site is finally revived. I guess. A few explanations on why I chose Tumblr instead of WordPress are as follows:

1. Tumblr is perfect for microblogging, which is what I do most of the time. I’m more active on Twitter now than in Facebook, but it doesn’t mean that I’ll stop twittering. Tumblr will auto-fetch those tweets periodically.
2. I decided to use that site for personal rants after all (just like what most of you recommended), instead of going for a specific niche. I’m focusing on enough niche sites which are taking its toll on my energy and time.
3. I love how those templates differentiate between video, audio, image, link, chat and normal posts. The theme I currently used for the site highlights those differences by colors.
   
4. I’m freeing up some space on my web hosting account, and will only use WordPress for some serious blogging and niche building. The latest releases of WordPress have made it easier for all to upgrade (both the platform and the plugins), but not easy enough once you own 10 or more of those blogs with all those deemed-as-necessary-for-SEO plugins. 10 blogs x 10 plugins per blog = ?
5. I’ve always wanted to use Tumblr for fun.

I almost went for Posterous, if not for the fact that the blog design is so bland.

I only recently found the need to use sticky posts in a couple of my WordPress niche blogs. Sticky posts are basically blog posts that remain prominently displayed in the main page of your site, and won’t get bumped even as you post up new articles or posts into your blog.

Although this is a permanent feature made available in WordPress 2.7 and later, you also have to realize that you need a sticky-friendly theme to go with it in order to make them work. Bet you didn’t know that, did you? Many of the popular WordPress themes out there aren’t, in fact, sticky-friendly. Such is the nature of one of my favourite WordPress AdSense templates called ProSense, a design made famous by Dosh Dosh.

But fret not. It’s actually quite simple to modify your choice WordPress theme to make stickies work, as long as you’re comfortable doing a little bit of HTML/CSS editing or are familiar with the Theme Editor section of your WordPress blog dashboard. Quick Online Tips has a short and sweet step-by-step on how you can DIY, while Nathan Rice delved deeper into the innards of sticky posts, if you’re into those sort of thing.

Are you using ProSense, and would like to get the sticky-friendly version of it? Yeah, I have it. Just click any of the following links to download it: ProSense (original brown color), Prosense Blue, ProSense Grey.

Allow me to rant before I get to the actual content of this post (if you prefer not to read it, skip right ahead to steps on solving the problem):

<rant>

My foray into the world of Ubuntu since installing it in my Acer Aspire One did not come smoothly.

No, I’m not talking about its installation, which was a breeze. Nor was it about hardware compatibility; the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) distribution made sure that all my hardware worked immediately.

My actual challenge was to choose the right software that would fit my needs, and they were many! Holy cow, if I knew how many free software was out there for Linux, I would have switched sooner!

My main chagrin about a few of these software is its user-friendliness, not in terms of software usability, but in terms of documentation.

Take, for example, getting KompoZer to open PHP files. I did the usual configuration of having all files with the .php extension to open with KompoZer, but KompoZer defiantly denies it and kept prompting me to select a different program (you know, the equivalent of Open With… in Windows).

I found that the KompoZer extension called HandCoder would do the trick; all I needed to do was to download HandCoder from its site and add it via KompoZer’s addon manager.

The problem was… there was no fracking download link! Instead, there was only one link with the word “download”, which points to HTML Tidy, which I was not interested at all. I was hard-pressed to find the place to download it, only to find hours later (through a very short description somewhere within the page of some other KompoZer / Nvu extension description) that there is actually a link there, although not very obvious. Alright, I better stop ranting or else I won’t be able to finish this blog post.

</rant>

To open PHP files in KompoZer for Ubuntu, follow these steps:

1. In the Files and Folders view, right-click on any PHP file.
2. Select Open With / KompoZer. Or, if you don’t see KompoZer listed, go to Other Application and browse to /usr/bin/kompozer.

   

3. Visit the HandCoder website, and click on one of the flags (based on your language preference) to download the XPI file (or just click here to start the download). Click on the flag to download — hah, who freaking knew?! Remember where you save it.

   

4. Open KompoZer. In the menu, select Tools / Add-ons.
5. In the the Add-ons window, click the Install button on the bottom.
6. Navigate to the location in your computer where you saved it, select the HandCoder XPI file, and click the Open button.

   

7. Once you see HandCoder listed under the Extensions section, close the KompoZer program and reopen KompoZer again.

You should now be able to open PHP files with Kompozer in Ubuntu.