I use two computers for development – a portable (MacBook Pro) and a desktop (Mac Pro). It’s helpful having the two different environments, and it’s helpful having a backup in case one of them has a problem. It does open up all sorts of issues about keeping things in sync.

I primarily use Firefox as my development web browser, for reasons I’ll get into in another article. I keep a set of bookmarks in Firefox for all the blogs and web sites I’m working with, as well as other online tools that I use (Google AdSense, Google Analytics, LinkShare…), and Firefox remembers login information for all my accounts.

It’s a pain in the ass duplicating things across instances of Firefox.

That’s where Google comes in. Google has provided a free Firefox extension which will synchronize Firefox’s bookmarks, cookies, passwords, history and even open tabs and windows, across instances of Firefox.
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I’m working right now on designing and implementing a Wordpress theme from the ground up. Once it’s done I’ll use variations of it here, on the Apocalypse Blog and on Shiny Things.

The basic layout I want uses three columns. The right-most column has information about me and the blog and short lists of recent articles from the other blogs. The middle column is the article(s). The right column is meta-information, subscription links, tags, stuff that lets you know about this article or lets you navigate around the blog.

There’s also a header with the logo and search box, and a footer with a contact link, a help link, and copyright information.

It’s going well, and I’ll write up some notes about developing your own Wordpress theme once I’m done. But the 3 column thing is really difficult to do well with CSS.

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Download Squad has a very useful checklist of things to do following a Wordpress installation. Some of them are obvious, like setting the name of your blog; others, like updating the permalink structure, may not be so obvious to Wordpress newcomers. If you’re setting up Wordpress for the first time, or are running a blog using it but aren’t a Wordpress expert, I highly recommend this article.

WordPress: The Complete Post-Install Checklist – Download Squad
[tags]wordpress, checklist, download squad[/tags]

There are so many kinds of widgets out there now that I can barely keep track. There are Yahoo Widgets (the widgets formerly known as Konfabulator), Apple’s Dashboard, Google Widgets and now Opera has them too. And of course, they’re all different.

My primary interest in widgets from a development perspective is that they can be a good way to help connect people with a web site.

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