“At rail stations and shopping malls around the world, reports are popping up of people, particularly young children, getting their toes caught in escalators. The one common theme seems to be the clunky soft-soled clogs known by the name of the most popular brand, Crocs.” [ link ]
That’s what you get for wearing ugly shoes. Hopefully Ugg Boots are next.
These spam schemes are getting way too complex. I clearly don’t have the foresight to run a profitable spam business. There have got to be at least 4 or 5 steps to actual monetization, unless just going to their site automatically steals $2,000 from your bank account.
Though I’m sure I’ve been guilty of this somewhere, it drives me absolutely NUTS when I am searching forums for an answer and find a thread with the exact problem I’m having, only to discover that after several solutions were proposed, the original poster just left the thread hanging without any sort of feedback on whether any of the solutions had worked.
Question: is it a good idea for forum software writers to implement an optional feature which would mark threads as open or closed (sort of like bugs in bugzilla) and bug thread starters who leave their threads open too long? What would be the best way to implement this?
On with it, then 
A while ago, Richard Crowley wrote that not having direct sftp access to the files you are editing encourages bad programming practice, at least for web programming. I forget what his exact complaint was and can’t find the entry now, but I agree in any case and can reconstruct my own argument for it – you write large chunks of code without testing what it actually looks like in the browser. Then, once you’ve finally synced up with the web server and hit refresh in your browser, you end up with either something that doesn’t work, or worse, something that appears to work but actually doesn’t because something is actually going wrong in one of the intermediate steps. Being able to hit Ctrl+S and then refresh your browser to see immediate results is invaluable to web programming and styling. It’s basically poor man’s unit testing. Having the ability to browse the tree of your web directory editing the files in it at will is also crucial. For what it’s worth, it’s also just so much faster and more convenient than having to hit upload in an FTP program or run a sync script.
Problem: most free IDE software (the only kind I like) does not have robust file tree browsing capabilities; the ones that do are usually limited to FTP, not SFTP. Coincidentally, the latter is what most hosts I’ve had to work on offer, and with good reason. Naturally, in Linux the solutions are ample, down to Nautilus having essentially native support for the functionality which integrates well with GEdit (I should note that my requirements for an IDE aside from file browsing are low to very low). However, I’m not quite ballsy enough yet to put Linux on my work laptop, and switching between two laptops depending on who I’m doing work for was getting tedious fast. Here was my list of requirements:
One solution is to shell out the cash for something like Zend Studio, which handles SFTP beautifully – but that’s not how I do things. I needed something free, or at least cheap.
One solution I found was a program called “WebDrive” which lets you “mount” an SFTP connection as a shared drive. It’s not free, but it’s only $50. I figured that for the number of sites I could use this for, it might be worth the money, so I downloaded the free trial. However, I quickly discovered that this approach was very slow, at least in Eclipse (Note: though Eclipse seems like an odd choice given my low requirements for an IDE, I got into using it when I got to Yahoo! almost as a result of peer pressure – I had had access to Zend Studio at my previous job, but now had to choose a freeware IDE; the majority of the guys around me were using Eclipse or straight vi, so I opted for the former) so I wanted to see what it would be like in another IDE. The first thing that came to mind was jEdit, so I downloaded it and it seemed to work ok. However, jEdit felt incredibly ugly, so it was failing one of my requirements.
Crowley suggested Notepad++. It seemed to get lots of positive reviews online, so I gave it a shot (plus, I don’t question Crowley); it felt much better right away, though I won’t get into the details of why I liked it here. It even had an FTP plugin, but naturally no SFTP support. It worked alright with WebDrive, but I still did not want to pay $50 for it. Then I found this article on particletree.com by searching for “notepad++ sftp” in which one of the comments suggests using WinSCP as the file browser and setting its default editor to be notepad++. Though it involves having two windows open, I’m alright with this, as I do most of my code on a 19″ monitor (24″ when I’m in CA) so nothing is maximized anyway. Further, tweaking the WinSCP interface a little and doing some rearranging results in what almost looks like a sidepane file browser.
Solution: completely free super lightweight hacked-together IDE with SFTP support. I will probably be switching over to TortoiseCVS/SVN and abandoning Eclipse all together. I can only handle so many random Java crashes.
So if you’re stuck on a Windows machine and are looking for a way to streamline your work flow on SFTP hosts without spending any money, WinSCP+Notepad++ are a winning combo for you… as long as you’re willing to put up with two windows being open, aka you have a large enough monitor. Naturally, the search continues for an even better solution.
Update: I’ve discovered that Dreamweaver, which Yahoo! has a site license for, has the exact functionality I need. It’s free to me