CVS, SVN, Git, or whatever you use for source control are tremendiously useful for any serious developer. But the reason why I like Git is because of the awesome site GitHub. I've begun slowly adding some of my open source projects onto GitHub and thought it would be great to have a link from my site to my public GitHub repositories.  In order to do that I wrote an ExpressionEngine plugin that ties into the GitHub API to return the list of repos from any user.  Its pretty solid now so give it a whirl.

Uh oh! I just realized I haven't posted anything this year.

You may of noticed a nice coat of paint on this blog.  I've been working on a new look for a while and finally got impatient and just launched it without finishing it.  So if you see any weirdness its cause I'm still working on it.  I haven't implemented a responsive layout yet because I'm researching a bunch of frameworks and techniques.  I feel you need to do it by hand first then you can easily see the strengths and weakness of frameworks.

A few weeks ago I attended SXSW.  Maybe its because I've been before there before, but this year didn't feel as cool as last year.  I attended more technical sessions, but that's mainly because I did see as many inspirational sessions.  The parties were crowded and if you weren't a VIP then you pretty much had to wait to get in.  I'm not sure I would go again.  Maybe I just need to find a super geeky conference instead.

Once again I travelled without a laptop and only my iPad.  Its just an awesome device for attending conferences and travelling with.  Sure if I needed to do a lot of work there it would of been a pain, but that's not why you go to conferences.  Besides I found a decent code editor in Textastic, it's far from free, but it has a DropBox and FTP support.

I almost switched to Chrome earlier in the year, but I still get hung up on its quirks.  Not to say Firefox doesn't have its fair share, but I'm used to them.  If anyone knows how to give Developer Tools a shortcut or a toolbar icon and how to map command-enter to add www. and .com to url instead of control-enter please let me know.  I'm willing to give it another try, although I still think Firefox has a better bookmark and history setup.

Other than that I've been slowly experimenting with new HTML5 technologies.  Hopefully some of them will make it up on this blog soon.

If you haven't used a computer with an SSD you don't know what you are missing.  They are incredible fast.  A couple months ago I installed a Corsair 120 GB Force series into my nearly 4 year old Macbook Pro.  It feels like a new computer.  Apps start faster on the laptop then my 1 year old, top-of-the-line Mac Pro at work.  I will never buy another computer without a SSD.  Now that computer are starting to come with thunderbolt ports you can have an external hard drive to hold any overages from the smaller SSDs (unless you have a ton of money to buy a big one) without worring about speed.

Update: Ben Brooks just mention something similar in his latest post.

I just got back home from SXSW, one of the funnest conferences I've been to in a while.  In the spirit of trying new things, I decided to go without my laptop and instead opted to take only my iPad.  Overall, the iPad turned out to be a great decision.  I didn't have to lug around my Macbook Pro 15" and the iPad did everything I needed to do.  Now if my office needed me to work on something that would of been a different story, but chances are I wouldn't of been effective anyway (it was a very fun conference).

There where a few instances where I wish I had a laptop.  On the flight back here was free wifi if you clicked on a Flash banner ad.  Well obviously I couldn't get the activation code that way, but I did manage to help the guy sitting next to me and swiped the generic code in the process.  Also I realized that while the iPad sleeve I purchased years ago is fine at work, I needed a courier bag style case for carrying the iPad, headphones, power adapter and any swag I could get my hands on.