I use about 2 dozen applications on a daily basis that aid in everything from domain purchasing to web design, but these are 4 I couldn’t live without regardless of what I was doing.

TaskSwitchXP

By itself, TaskSwitchXP is a replacement for the Alt+Tab task switcher built into Windows XP (I refuse to Vista, so this one is for XP folks only). If you have a Logitech G5 /G7 - or any other mouse with programmable buttons - you can assign the thumb button to Alt+Tab and any time you press it, this task switcher will pop up, using the scroll wheel to cycle through your applications. Release the thumb button to select that app. This makes switching your applications amazingly fast. There’s an even better application called TopDesk, but I chose to give up awesomeness for speed. It’s basically Expose` for Windows.
Vista Users: You can get this effect for free

RKLauncher

Another OS X `esque app I couldn’t live without is RKLauncher. It hides the windows taskbar (optional) and gives you an application launcher that stays out of the way but gives you a much more refined way to access your applications . The real benifit to me other than it looks cool is that it gives me more screen real estate. There are other docks (ObjectDock, RocketDock) but RKLauncher is the simplest and has the fastest response when you start to get several dozen icons going. My personal favorite is ObjectDock because it has so many options and features, but it can get too slow. Again, I prefer speed over wow. My only beef with RKLauncher is that it fails to hide the windows taskbar all the time on my machine. I don’t care though because I keep my taskbar on the left side on auto-hide so I can hit the Windows key and bring up my start menu.

GreenShot

The most useful feature of GreenShot is that when you hit the PrtScn key on your keyboard it gives you cross hairs you use to outline a region of your screen you want a screenshot of. You can set it to save it to a folder somewhere or put it on your clipboard. There are other options as well as a built-in image editor as well, but I don’t use them. In this industry there’s always a need to show someone something on your screen and this little tool helps a lot. (It’s also free and open source)

Snackr

This is the newest addition to my desktop apps and I don’t know how I lived without it. Snackr is a desktop RSS Reader built with Adobe AIR. It sits on any side of any monitor (native support for multiple monitors) and scrolls through entires from your RSS feeds. You can easily hide it or let it sit on top of open windows. It’s so badass I no longer use Google Reader which until yesterday was my absolute favorite RSS Reader of all. I still add my favorite feeds to both so I can get my fix when I’m on the road. Snackr is a perfect example of Desktop 2.0 and a beacon of excellent widget design.

I don’t know how long I’ve wanted to associate files that have no extension with notepad (or any other text editor) and have never taken the time to look into it, but I wish I would have done it sooner.

1. Open Explorer
2. Go to Tools -> Folder Options…
3. Select the File Types tab
4. Select New
5. Enter a single . (period) into the File Extension field and click OK
6. With your new file extension selected click Change…
7. Scroll down to notepad (or whatever text editor you prefer), select it and choose OK
8. Click OK again and you’re done

I’m a bit embarrassed I didn’t think of this sooner, but better late than never right?

About once a year I’ll spend a day - sometimes two - evaluating IDE’s. I’ve been using Dream Weaver for the longest time, but for me it’s basically a glorified text editor with half decent code completion and syntax highlighting I’ve grown accustom to. It has almost no features I would like and my main complaint is it completely taxes one of my cores. I didn’t buy a quad core processor so a text editor could use 25% of my available horsepower even when it’s sitting idle.

Earlier this year I found the new - and always free - Aptana. Overall it’s good software. I wouldn’t say great, but it’s good. The problem with it also lies in its strength: It’s written in Java. It can be used on any platform, but it can be painfully slow when double clicking on files in the file browser and that’s a deal-breaker for me. It has some interesting features (like built-in FireFox preview) and for those looking to save their pennies, it’s by far your best option. I spent a few days here and there with it, but it never stuck. I spent a lot of time trying to configure it, but it just never felt comfortable.

So today I get a message from a developer and good friend of mine Tully that simply said “I found the best PHP IDE EVER. It’s like Zend, but not sh*t. It’s called PHPEd“ I took notice because that’s pretty good praise from him as he’s a bit on the cynical side. So I checked it out. The first thing I have to say is this:

I will never use another IDE for Web Development again.

There is nothing this IDE doesn’t do. For starters, the code completion and syntax highlighting which are my two biggest concerns are excellent and highly configurable (much like the entire IDE). The project management (including FTP) is top notch as well. You can assign different projects to the same domain with different subdirectories which is a feature I’ve never seen before. If this is all it did I would have switched just for these features. The implementation of these features is that good. Some of the things I wasn’t expecting was:

• Built-in SSH (being logged into the server you’re working on in a tab right next to the site you’re working on is priceless). I used to use a great program for this called SecureCRT (think putty, but better acct. management and a tabbed interface), but now I don’t need to have a separate application open just to log into a server. Depending on the kind of developer you are, this is a huge feature.
• Built in php4 and php5 engines running simultaneously. To top it off, it won’t have any effect on any other instances of php running on your machine - which is important because I use wamp5 religiously (who wants to have to upload a file every time they want to see their changes live?).
• Built in preview for IE and FireFox. Everyone has IE preview in their IDE, but the FireFox preview is a real gem in this genre of software. Aptana had it, but last I checked installing it was a pain (that may have changed now that it’s not beta). With PhpEd, it was a check box during install.

Those are the features that really stuck out for me. I would suggest anyone give it a try, you might be surprised. You’ll probably want to hit the Settings and spend a good amount of time in there as a lot of things just don’t feel right out-of-the-box. The delay for code completion (which is the best I’ve ever seen) needs to be reduced and some of the editor options should be played with to get the right feel, but overall I would give it 5 out of 5 stars. It is, by any measure, the perfect Web Development IDE. Period.

If you’ve ever tried to download a file larger than 2GB you quickly learned that on the vast majority of Linux servers, you can’t. This has to do with a limitation imposed by having a 32-bit files system interface which you likely have. Even if you have a 64-bit processor. So for all intensive purposes: If you have a site that is larger than 2GB tarred/zipped/whatevered you can’t move it in on big chunk. This article will explain how you can, and then some. Skip the steps you already know as I’m going to try to make this easy enough to explain for someone who has never used any of these commands before.

In order for this article to make sense to you, you really ought to have some experience with SSH and in order to actually do this, you’re going to need shell access to both the server you’re moving your site from and the server you’re moving your site to.

Archive your site using tar :
The first thing you need to do is archive your site. Since I’m a Plesk man, I would navigate to cd /var/www/vhosts/sitename.com/httpdocs and use tar -xvzf sitename.tar ./* to backup my site. Let’s assume that this is an arcade site and the archive ends up at around 10GB since this happens to be the situation I found myself in.

Splitting it into managable chunks using split :
This is going to take a calculator, so open up calc or get one handy. For me, I wanted to split my 10GB file into 1GB chunks for easy movement. The way I like to use split is by telling it exactly how big in bytes I want the files (the last file created will be whatever is left over, so don’t worry about trying to be spot on with your calculations) so I use split -C 1073741824 sitename.tar sitename since I know that 1GB is equal to 1073741824 bytes (1KB is 1024 bytes, 1MB is 1024KB, etc.). This will split the file sitename.tar into 1GB chunks and call the new files sitenameaa, sitenameab, sitenameac etc. Depending on the file size of the file you’re trying to split, this is could take awhile.

Change the ownership of these files so you can access them through the web using chown :
The first thing you want to do is find out what owner and group your files normally belong to. Right now, the files you crated probably belong to the user root and the group root. Use ls -l to find the user and group that are given to files uploaded via FTP - otherwise you probably won’t be able to access them over http. You’re looking for the two words that come after the drwx- characters and the proceeding number. For me it is ftpusername psacln (this is Plesk specific). To change the ownership of the files I just created I would use chown -R ftpusername.psacln file1 file2 file3. The -R switch will go into directories recursively, you don’t need it here but it’s a habit. file1, file2 and file3 can be the the name of a file or folder (as long as you use -R) and you can have as many as you want. Now our files are ready to be downloaded.

Move the files to your new server with wget :
Navigate the the site folder of your site on your new server. For me it’s always Plesk of course, so it’s cd /var/www/vhosts/sitename.com/httpdocs. For you it will depend on what OS and control panel you use. Now it is as easy as wget sitename.com/filename. wget downloads files just as you would if you went to it in your browser. After grabbing all your files, you’re ready for the next step.

Putting it all back together with cat :
For our purpose, cat is the opposite of split. It takes split files and puts them back together. Because split creates files in the format filenameaa, filenameab, filenameac, filenamead, etc. that is how cat will put them back together. The command to do this is cat filename* > filename.tar. This will put all the split files that begin with filename and create filename.tar with them. This could take a while as well depending on how big your site is.

Final steps using tar and chown :
We’re almost there. Now that you have your file all transfered and put back together you’ll want to use tar with the extract switch instead of the create switch to un-tar your file. This is as easy as tar -xvzf filename.tar. When you’re done, use chown to make sure the ownership of your files are correct, otherwise there’s a good chance you won’t be able to view your site. The easiest way to do this is from within the root folder of your site with chown -R user.group ./*. Make sure you do not forget the period before the forward slash. If you do, your server is going to be useless to you.

A lot to take in if you’re new to SSH, but when you go through the process it’s actually fairly simple. Make sure you back everything up before doing this as a single misplaced character can wreak havok on your system. I had to have a server re-imaged because I used chown -R user.group /* instead of chown -R user.group ./* once, so be careful. Don’t forget your database(s) either. That’s another article in itself.

Next I’ll show you how to get around that pesky SQL limit you’ve run into when trying to upload databases larger than 2MB.