Blake Walters

With the introduction of iCloud, Apple quietly did something pretty special for nerds like me with a ton of machines - Back to My Mac was finally free.

Sure, you could open up finder, find your remote machine in the "Shared" list, click on it, wait, and then click on "Share Screen" or we can just use Alfred.

With this little extension installed, just fire up Alfred and plug in vnc followed by the name of a machine you have Back to My Mac setup on and that's it, you'll be screen sharing in no time.

Download the Back to My Mac Alfred Extension

Have you ever had a channel in an ExpressionEngine installation that required its own set of custom fields, but only needed one entry? Perhaps a homepage or an "About Us" section that needed its own custom content but wasn't a traditional list of posts? Single Entry can help. With a few simple settings, your control panel can be set up to easily create and edit these posts without the risk of adding new and unnecessary entries to these channels.

Once configured, Single Entry moves your single entry channels out of EE’s standard publish and edit workflow and into a new section of your content dropdown. From there, you’ll have quick access to creating and editing the individual entries in those channels without the hassle of navigating through the standard EE edit workflow or accidentally creating a new entry in a channel that can’t use one.

Best of all, your data and development workflow aren’t changed in any way. Single entry channels are still completely native and can be assigned custom field groups, category groups and statuses, and used in templates just like always. And through the configuration panel, even the name of the new section in the content dropdown can be customized.

Single Entry is Viget's first ever commercial ExpressionEngine Addon and available exclusively at Devot-EE

Nearby is a simple ExpressionEngine plugin that uses the GeoNames.org API to find places near a known zip code.

You can view the project over on github or download the plugin from devot:ee.

Installation

Place the nearby plugin folder in your ExpressionEngine installation's third_party folder (system/expressionengine/third_party by default).

Since Nearby makes user of the GeoNames API, a GeoNames user account will be required to use more than the demo mode provided. You can sign up for one at www.geonames.org/login

Once your account is created and activated, you will need to log in to the GeoNames site, click your username in the top right of the page to bring up the user control panel and then click the "Click here to enable" link under the title "Free Web Services" to enable API usage on your account.

Once your account is fully enabled, you can pass your username to the plugin via the "username" parameter or set your username in your config.php file with the code:

$config['nearby_username'] = "YOUR USERNAME";

Usage

{exp:nearby}

Parameters:

• zip (required) - the zipcode you'd like to search on
• limit - limit the number of results returned
• radius - distance in miles to search surrounding the desired zipcode
• username - your GeoNames username

Single Variables:

• {zip} - zipcode of result
• {placename} - plain text descriptor of result
• {latitude} - latitude of result, in decimal
• {longitude} - longitude of result, in decimal
• {distance} - the result's distance from the searched zipcode

{/exp:nearby}

This project contains the blank template of what I use for front-end development projects.

Why formulation? Because I've started to dislike the term "boilerplate", and formulation had a nice ring to it.

Front-End Formulation is based around the SCSS syntax of SASS and Compass for assisting in CSS development, Jammit for JavaScript packaging, and (optionally) HAML for writing markup.

Getting started is as easy as running bundle install to install all necessary gems (see the Gemfile to see what is actually included). Once that's finished, run guard to begin watching the directory for changes to files handled by compass, jammit, or haml.

MonthlEE is a simple ExpressionEngine plugin that takes in a number from 1 to 12 and returns the corresponding month name.

This plugin can be helpful in turning monthly/yearly archive urls into nicely formatted month names for headers. For instance, if you have the url http://www.example.com/archive/2011/06, month name can help create a nicely formatted header like:

Archives for {exp:month_name month="{segment_3}"} {segment_2}

Which will output Archives for June 2011

MonthlEE can be downloaded from its addon page on Devot-EE

I never knew the real joy of using the terminal until my friend Brian turned me on to ZShell. Ever since, I've customized my shell and my terminal workflow to make navigating and handling files and paths as simple as possible.

In my Github account I've posted my somewhat ridiculous dotfile configuration. There you'll find:

• My aliases and binding for things like zshell, screen, vim and git
• the ridiculous prompt i use that's setup to display current host, directory, git branch and the status of the working copy (is it ahead/behind the remote repo, if there are any uncommitted changes)
• a rake task to install it all

It's no secret I seriously admire Dan Cederholm and his work. Needless to say, getting to see him speak at An Event Apart was a huge moment for me. To honor this oh so special of occasions I whipped up a TextMate theme based around the color combinations from Dan's presentation. Enjoy:

Download Handcrafted.tmTheme

Update: I've recently been splitting my time between TextMate and Vim and am in the process of porting and configuring a Handcrafted Vim colorscheme. This is very much a work in progress but feel free to download a copy of handcrafted.vim.