This software is an example of a thing that everyone wants but doesn’t exist until a great idea suddenly comes and voila! it appears!

There are a couple of new features committed to GitHub that you can play with if you like.

Hotkeys

In the feature/hotkeys branch¹ in the ui submodule, you’ll find some additional keyboard shortcuts:

• shift+h = navigate to home
• shift+n = new entry
• shift+f = set focus to search field

Make sure to update submodules as the jQuery Hotkeys library has been added.

Capsule Server Queue

In the feature/queue branch you’ll find an implementation of a very basic “send at least once” queue so that pushing posts to Capsule Server is no longer a blocking action (it makes saves faster). Another benefit to this feature is better support for using Capsule while offline. Saved entries are stored in the queue and sent to Capsule Server once Capsule is online again. To test this out, you’ll need to update your Capsule Server to the latest code in the develop branch.

We’ve also fixed a few bugs and incorporated a few submitted enhancements. Thanks to everyone who has contributed.

As Capsule is a product in a nascent category, my biggest concern was that people wouldn’t immediately see the benefits it could provide. That clearly has not been the case. Capsule appears to be a solution to a problem people (at least subconsciously) knew they had; and they appear ready to embrace it.

It’s also been wonderful to see a few feature requests, bug reports and pull requests on GitHub already. Capsule is aimed at a developer audience, and it’s wonderful to see the community already pitching in.

Capsule Permissions

WordPress has a capability in it’s permissions matrix called unfiltered_html. You need to have this capability in order for certain things (like <?php ... ?>) not to be stripped from your content on save. On our demo site, this capability is quite obviously not available to the demo user.

This shouldn’t be an issue in most real-life situations as Capsule is designed to be a single-user journal and it’s reasonable to expect that the single user account is an admin account (which does have the unfiltered_html capability).

Where this has appeared to be problematic is on WordPress multi-site installs. It’s been reported to me that only the site-admin role has this by default. I haven’t dug in to confirm this, but I’d guess that’s accurate. I think it’s likely that existing plugins solve this and Capsule probably shouldn’t do anything to muck around with WordPress capabilities and permissions, but I’m open to creative ideas. Here’s the GitHub issue if you’d like to chime in.

My Capsule Usage

I use Capsule as a Fluid app, allowing me to invoke it easily from Launchbar and keep it out of my mess of browser tabs.

I have Capsule installed locally rather than on a remote web server. I find myself working without internet from time to time (coffee shops, airplanes, etc.) and don’t want to be without access to my notes. I have a CRON job that backs up my Capsule database hourly to Dropbox.

A number of people immediately thought of Capsule as a code snippet library. It may well be suitable for this, but that’s not how I use it. I do put code in it, but more of my entries are notes on implementation and architecture approaches (especially rejected approaches).

I primarily work on a laptop with an external monitor. I keep Capsule on my laptop screen while I have my code and browser on my big monitor.¹ Thinking, planning and notes happen on the secondary screen while main dev happens on the big screen.

Thinking and coding are two different acts. For best results, you want to be doing one at a time. Having things on separate screens helps me shift between these modes.

Capsule replaces the scratch document you have open when you’re coding. Instead of throwing away those notes, code snippets, API responses, ad-hoc todo lists, and outlines, Capsule creates an archive of your development artifacts.

Capsule is a free, Open Source (GPL) product. We chose to build it as a WordPress-based app. I’m on record saying that WordPress isn’t a great general purpose app platform but it’s ideal for journaling apps; and I’m very pleased we were able to use it for Capsule.

With Capsule you’re using a web app, not managing a traditional WordPress website. You never need to go into the WordPress admin to manage your content – the code editor loads right in the front-end and you create and edit posts inline.

Metadata is a love note to the future.

You designate projects and add tags via simple @project and #hashtag syntax directly in the content. No fiddly checkbox selection or choosing from dropdown menus. It’s the freedom and simplicity of a text file with the future benefits of metadata.

Read on for more about how Capsule works and the hows and whys of various features (and how you can use Capsule Server as a collaboration hub). More of a “try it for yourself” person? Jump over to the online demo and try it out. Or you can download it (or grab the code from GitHub) and set it up for yourself. We created Capsule as a WordPress theme – simply install it as usual and you’re set to go.

The idea for Capsule started about a year ago when my friend and Crowd Favorite alumni Gordon tweeted this out:

Keeping a dev diary has been really helpful.Start each day with a fresh .txt. Jot down TODOs, notes, decisions, things learned, as I go.

— Gordon Brander (@gordonbrander) April 9, 2012

The idea of a code journal resonated with me immediately. I’ve been blogging for more than ten years here, and the act of journaling – of writing things down – definitely helps with introspection and to cement important lessons.

At Crowd Favorite we believe in the craftsman approach to web development. We believe in constantly learning and sharing knowledge. The idea of a code journal seemed like an obvious and useful tool.

Gordon talked about using text files, but I wasn’t sold on that implementation. I wanted a system that had the simplicity of using text files, but I also wanted to be able to add some structured data to make it easier to find my notes again later.

I like thinking about how systems and apps can work and fit together. The more I thought about the idea of a code journal, the more I realized that the information I would be recording about what I was building would be useful information to share with my colleagues. Likewise, what they recorded during their development would be interesting and useful for me and other team members. And it just so happens that my team and I are pretty handy with this little Open Source system that’s designed for journaling…

We brainstormed about how we’d want to use the system and firmed up a feature set. These included:

• must be incredibly low friction (it will be competing with using text files)
• no titles for entries (titles are friction)
• a good code (text) editor (after all, this is a developer code journal)
• ability to designate an entry as being part of a specific project
• ability to add tags (keywords) to entries
• ability to keep some entries private, but share appropriate entries with the rest of the team

As a daily user of Capsule, I’m proud to say we’ve accomplished this goal and I’m very pleased with the smoothness of the user experience.

While we are releasing version 1.0 today, we’ve had a functional version Capsule on our GitHub since early May of last year and I’ve been using it while we’ve been building it. As we’ve been implementing features, we’ve also tweaked the design and implementation based on our actual usage. It’s always handy to be your own use case.

Capsule Server: Use Capsule With Your Team

We’re actually releasing two products today, Capsule and Capsule Server. Capsule is the code journal that each developer can set up for themselves. Capsule Server is a collaboration hub that can accept Capsule entries and make them available to other team members.

I really like the way Capsule and Capsule Server interact. Developers can connect their Capsule install to as many Capsule Servers as they like. They can choose which entries get shared to which Capsule Servers, and which entries stay private – all of this with the same no-friction approach that makes it so easy to include useful metadata in Capsule entries.

When you set up a Capsule Server, you define the projects for that Server. When you connect to a Capsule Server, you can chose how to map your local projects to the Capsule Server’s projects. Any entries for projects that are mapped to a Capsule Server are replicated to that Capsule Server whenever they are saved.

Imagine that WordPress set up a Capsule Server for core development. Perhaps another for plugin development. I could connect to both of those, plus the Crowd Favorite Capsule Server. I would still be journaling in one place, with one tool, but I’d be sharing my notes with all the various folks I want to collaborate with.

I think Capsule an excellent solution to a problem many of us don’t even know we have. I hope that it will become a valuable tool for you and your development team.

Enjoy!

I woke up to a bit of a scare when some of my alexking.org Gmail accounts were unable to log in to Gmail. I was afraid the accounts had been compromised and the passwords changed. I had secure passwords, but had been lazy about turning on 2-factor authentication for several of them – that’s all fixed now.

As it turned out, the hiccup ended up being due to a Gmail disruption.

I’ve also turned on 2-factor authentication for this site using this plugin (make sure to enable the app key if you use iOS or Android apps to connect to your site). Note that the Social logins for commenting still work without 2-factor authentication.

I’d recommend taking similar steps for your sites. Waking up to an “uh-oh” feeling is no fun at all.

This post is part of the thread: Passwords – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

Any icon artists out there interested in creating an application icon for a free (GPL) WordPress-based app that @crowdfavorite is working on?

Turns out, it’s really easy. The heartbeat API looks excellent.

View the code on Gist.

I’ve just released an initial beta of Threads, a WordPress plugin I’ve been working on for about a year. The idea is simple: show posts that comprise a single overall story/topic in a timeline. Then link to that timeline from the posts so that your readers have a chance to get more historical context about a post without you having to link back to 20 previous posts.

Here are some example threads:

• Social
• My Hard Drive Recovery Saga
• Twitter Tools
• Passwords
• Weight Loss

As you can see on this site, the thread timeline is responsive and retina/HiDPI ready. Also included is a sidebar widget to show recently active threads and a shortcode so that you can embed a thread timeline in a page.

Give it a spin – I hope it works out well for you!

A quick note about support: As this is a free plugin released under the GPL I am offering only “Product Support” for this plugin. That means I will do my best to fix bugs and usabiity issues that are posted on the WordPress support forums. Contrast this with “User Support” which we offer for all of Crowd Favorite‘s commercial products. With “User Support” we do our best to troubleshoot and address each customer’s issues.

Developers, contributions are welcome on GitHub.

This post is part of the thread: Content Presentation – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

Social 2.8 (courtesy of MailChimp) was released today. This release was primarily to change over to using version 1.1 of Twitter’s API.

Why should you care? Well, for one thing – the 1.0 API was starting to break and not get repaired in places. For example, you might have noticed that Social was no longer reliably finding tweets that referenced your posts by URL. This was due to a breakage in Twitter’s 1.0 search API. However, it works fine in the 1.1 API – now that is “fixed”. Yay!

So we’re pleased to be on Twitter’s 1.1 API, and the great folks at MailChimp have made some additional changes to the Social Proxy to make it easier for us to maintain Twitter API compatibility going forward.

We also threw in a couple of little bug fixes, check out the changelog in the README for details.

Enjoy!

This post is part of the thread: Social – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

Use the Codex to get you pointed in the right direction, but always go to the actual core code as well. There are many good reasons for this, but the most important is that the documentation says what the code is supposed to do, while the code says what it actually does.

Documentation can also lag behind the actual code (especially when core patches are merged in).

Also, reading the code is a serendipitous opportunity. While looking at one thing, you may see several others that are helpful immediately, and some that might stick in your memory for future use.

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The more I think about it, the more insane I think it is to choose to do business with Envato given their current terms.

In order to put your products in their marketplace with a semi-reasonable revenue share you are choosing to completely subjugate your business to their whims. You can’t experiment with your product pricing, you can’t try other marketplaces, you can’t sell direct to your customers… you can’t even choose your own software license!

People actually sign up for this?

Crowd Favorite recently helped Backflip Studios launch a great new WordPress-powered website. Backflip makes mobile games, and they have awesome artwork. It’s always a treat to work with beautiful content.

This was a pretty straight-forward WordPress CMS site. We created a custom post type for their games so they can easily manage them (and add new ones, etc.). We also integrated Carrington Build so they can maintain the pages and custom layouts themselves.

We had a lot of fun implementing the front-end of the site. We made the site fully responsive so that its’s easy for visitors using mobile devices to get to the appropriate app store to download. We also made the site HiDPI (Retina) friendly for mobile devices.

See the full write-up here. And check out Backflip’s games – they’re fun and free!

This is a simple one-trick-pony plugin – it adds a Preview button to the fullscreen editor toolbar. Nothing more, nothing less. If you’ve been up late at night pining away for this feature, this plugin is your new best friend.

Enjoy!

A quick note about support: As this is a free plugin released under the GPL I am offering only “Product Support” for this plugin. That means I will do my best to fix bugs and usabiity issues. Contrast this with “User Support” which we offer for all of Crowd Favorite‘s commercial products. With “User Support” we do our best to troubleshoot and address each customer’s issues.

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I’d love to see http://wpappstore.com be that solution, with all major players getting behind it and helping make it great. A rising tide…