The closest that I got googling was this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gedit-plugins/+bug/348500 – which almost tells you but misses out the crucial bit of info.

So, I asked the fine folks in the #gedit room on irc.gnome.org and they enlightened me; you need to add this to your syntax theme file:

<style name="draw-spaces" foreground="tinted_grey"/>

Where tinted_gray is one of your theme’s colours. I would put it at the top somewhere, with the rest of the global stuff. You can look in the cobalt.xml file in /usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/styles for an example of a theme which does this. I thought I’d put this here so anyone else who get’s stuck trying to change this has a better chance of Googling an answer.

Download a modified version of the Gedit Twilight Theme, with this tweak added. To install, put the file into your ~/.gnome2/gedit/styles/ folder and restart Gedit. Then just select the Twilight theme in Preferences.

You can import create scripts (mysqldumps), build diagrams yourself, with full drag and drop etc, and export create scripts. You can also annotate with text and images and export the diagrams as SVG, PDF, PNG etc… Here’s the PDF for the MODx 0.9.6.3 diagram shown, along with the MWB (workbench) file. That diagram is just an imported mysqldump of a MODx DB – all I did was click the auto-arrange button.

It’s available for Linux (32 & 64 bit), Mac and Windows. I’ve been playing with the 64bit version in Ubuntu and it seems to work great! More info on their blog, or get it here: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/5.1.html

Download gcalc here: http://www.codeistry.com/assets/files/gcalc.zip

It’s a little python script that talks to Google, using it’s calculator syntax. You’ll get the same answers if you type the queries into google

To use the script, just download the zip file, extract the file inside and put it somewhere on your path; I’ve started putting these kind of things in ~/bin. I originally found the script here (http://vrai.net/page.php?block=scripts) but it didn’t work too well, so I fixed it up. I’ve tested it on Linux, but it should work anywhere Python is installed.

If you’re using that script on Linux, then chmod +x gcalc it to allow it to be executed. If you’re using Windows, you might have to add ‘.py’ to the end of the filename. Then the syntax is very simple:

gcalc “1 hour 5 minutes in seconds”
1 hour 5 minutes = 3900 seconds

gcalc “100 + 2 * 5″
100 + (2 * 5) = 110

gcalc “41000 yen in british pounds”
41,000 Japanese yen = 277.129372 British pounds

Here are complete instructions on the syntax that Google Calculator supports.

Also, in the screenshot above I’m using Fish, the Friendly Interactive SHell because it does nice syntax highlighting, amongst many other cool things. Fish is here, if you want it.

Have fun!

I’ve also souped up the metadata that gets output in the page’s code, so that I’m now outputting a meta description tag – this outputs whatever I’ve typed into the page’s Description field in MODx.

I’ve also started using MODx built in meta keywords system, so some pages now have some keywords set.

A little while age I also added a Creative Commons license to the page footer but forget to mention it on the blog. This means that the site’s content is now actually marked as copright of Codeistry now – which it wasn’t before. As I’ve chosen a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license, this also means that anyone can re-use, re-mix, translate or re-purpose any of the stuff on here for whatever they want, provided it’s non-commercial and they credit the original source.

Anyway, here’s the old footer:

and here’s the new one:

This list is intended to make you think about your own website and give you practical, actionable steps that you can take right now to improve things. None of these things are difficult and most of them can easily be done in an hour or two. Print this off, mark the ones that you think you need to work on, and tick off one a week.

See the 9 Steps to Improve your small business website article for the steps!

When you copy & paste from Microsoft Word, into web-based systems like Wordpress or MODx, MS Word tries to bring it’s internal formatting along for the ride. All text in MS Word is styled in some way – fonts, font sizes, alignment, etc… so when you copy & paste it into your CMS, blog or whatever, this formatting comes along too, like an invisible hitch-hiker… See the article for the rest!

Fixes

I’ve incorporated this fix which makes the hereClass work properly with weblinks in the menu and I’ve fixed the SQL query to work around the MySQL 5.0.51 sorting bug.

New Features

lastRowTpl

I’ve also added a new parameter called lastRowTpl which allows you specify a chunk to be used for the last menu item output. It works the same way as all the other wayfinder tpl’s and defaults to using rowTpl is it isn’t specified.

It’s very useful for little menu’s that currently look like this if you do them with Wayfinder:

item1 | item2 | item3 | lastitem |

and should look like this:

item1 | item2 | item3 | lastitem

Odd & Even classes

Finally, I’ve added support for even & odd classes on rows. These work like all the other wayfinder classes – you specify a class name in the parameter and this will be added to the wf.classes placeholder. These ones are only output on the appropriate rows, though – and you don’t have to specify both if you don’t want to – it’ll still work with just one.

These are really useful for menu’s which are supposed to be stripey, with every other item a different colour.

To implement this, I’ve modified both Wayfinder files. You can download the new versions from here (.zip) or here (.tar.gz).

I’m using these on live sites, because I’m a crazy fool, but if we can get some more testing from everyone, maybe this can be added to the repository as a new version and maybe then into the main MODx distribution, so that everyone can share the love.

What do you think – let me know in the MODx forum thread.

One of the ways I want to give back, is by getting more involved in the MODx community and to start contributing some of the snippets and code that I’ve created for MODx over the last year. This is code that I’ve created for my own use that I think would benefit others in the community and that we can all help improve. I’ve started this process already with the ChunkIf snippet (below) – but there’s lots more where that came from.

I realise that I have a pretty nice life, working for myself, working at home on my own schedule and doing OK, financially. So the other thing that I had in mind was helping those less fortunate. I’d like Codeistry itself to do some good for other people, as well as me. To this end, I’m planning to start investing a portion of the proceeds from each job Codeistry does into small businesses in need around the world. Small amounts of money can go a long way in Africa or rural South America and provide seed capital for entrepreneurs to start their own businesses, lifting themselves and their families out of poverty; this is called microfinancing.

Best of all, there’s a really simple way to do this called kiva.org – a site which makes it easy to invest in small businesses in the developing world.

The plan is for each Codeistry job to invest in one entrepreneur in the developing world, via Kiva. I can then link to the progress reports on Kiva and see how they’re doing – and maybe get my clients involved too, forming a connection between all our businesses.

New ventures

I’ve also got a few ideas for new web based businesses and sites which I want to get off the ground this year. I’ll be talking more about these later, so watch this space!

Build up Codeistry

In order to do all of these things, I’ll need to keep myself clothed and fed – which is where Codeistry comes in. We had a pretty good start but there’s lots of potential in my niche, so I want to do even better this year.

I’ll be blogging about progress with all these throughout the year. Hope you had a good 2008 and have a prosperous 2009!

• Updated AjaxSearch to version 1.8.1
• Update eForm to version 1.4.4.5
• Update Jot to version 1.1.4
• Duplicate TV associations when duplicating a template
• Allow ‘.’,'-’,’ ‘ and ‘_’ in TV names
• Amend the top username link to explicitly state a ‘change password’ link instead of just linking the username
• Added database version to MySQL DBAPI class and to the System Information report
• File manager can now handle files with illegal url characters (added urlencode escaping).

The latest version of MODx can be downloaded here.