Wow, I still can’t believe how fast Taskmate has been moving forward in the past few weeks.

The main goal was to improve the initial version by adding some (minor) new features, track down any bugs … and most importantly adhere to the TextMate bundle style guidelines so it can make its way into the official TextMate review directory.

And this goal has been reached. The bundle has been commited to the review directory:

http://macromates.com/svn/Bundles/trunk/Review/Bundles/Taskmate.tmbundle.

I’ve just released a first version of the Google Analytics plugin for Ruby on Rails that I’ve done in the course of the offer to build custom plugins for Mephisto users.

You can grab the plugin and read more about it here: Ruby on Rails Plugin: Google Analytics (blue egg edition)

Eran Ben Sabat was the first to contact me about this offer and suggested that I could write a Google Analytics plugin which he was interested in.

By now there’s another interesting request by Thilo Thamm who asked for a plugin for allowing users to add blog posts. This sounds like another great idea for a useful plugin and I plan to tackle this one next.

I was totally thrilled how much fun it was to work with both Liz and Eran Ben Sabat on their plugins. So my offer still stands. If you have an idea for a nice plugin, don’t hesitate to drop me a note.

“Because home is where my editor is.” — ember

Taskmate is a small tool written in Ruby that enhances your text editor with some really simple yet powerful todolist’ish features.

You can read about my motivation to implement Taskmate here. And you can you can download and learn how it works here.

File this as either a bumbling, fingers-all-thumbs attempt at viral self marketing or the het up utterings of a developer playing with his latest mini pet project toy. ;-)

Ok, I love GTD. I’ve been addicted to it for about one and a half year now. I’ve read Dave Allens book more than just once and tweaked my implementation again and again, discussing with friends and collegues … and still I find myself helplessly stuck at times.

At the very least, over the time I’ve been able to identify quite accurately what requirements my perfect “trusted system” would meet and probably more importantly: what it easily could omit.

Year! I’m in the middle of relocating to Berlin: we’re going to pitch our camp right here.

I’ve been living in the drop-dead gorgeous Wendland (Lower Saxony, Germany) for the last 15 years now and I’ve greatly enjoyed it. But now the time has come that I’m goint to move to a large city again. There’s a multitude of (mostly personal) reasons why we chose to move to Berlin, but I’m very excited about the plethora of additional opportunities re: development, design, networking etc. that I’ll be able to dive into.

One big event that I’m particulary looking forward to is of course the RailsConf Europe which is hosted in Berlin this year.

So that’s all pretty exciting and thrilling!

If you’re ever going to Berlin please drop me a note so we can meet and have a few beers or so. Also, I’m going to offer my couch to nice people like you. So if you don’t know where to stay in Berlin, just get in touch.

PS: Please forgive me if some of your comments on my blog have been waiting inconveniently long!

PPS: I’ve already changed my hCard/address on this blog to show my new address in Berlin. Actually, we’re going to hit our new domicile on Monday next week.

Update: some of the links in this summary might not work anymore and some information may be outdated. I’ve changed some of my code repository structure and some of the code has evolved. I’ve set up a central page though which I’ll keep updated. You can find it here: Small projects, plugins, patches and stuff like that.

Those of you who are subscribed to my RSS feed might have noticed that I’ve updated some URLs to plugins and patches in recent articles. That’s because I’ve decided that it’s a cool idea to have an own repository for “stuff” like: plugins, patches, utilities and the like. You can find it at http://stuff.artweb-design.de/svn.

I’ve also set up a Trac for this repository just to be able to track commits at http://trac.artweb-design.de. I don’t think that I’m ever going to need the tickets and wiki portions so that’s rather oversized. But Trac is already running for other projects, so that’s been the easiest way to get something going.

I’m going to add more stuff subsequently. Currently there are the following bits and pieces checked in yet.

So I’ve switched, too. I’m feeling cheery to announce that I’ve spend the weekend to migrate my blog from Typo to the shiny Mephisto engine and … while I’ve been at it, largely redid the HTML/CSS underpinnings of the design.

You might see some noise in your feeds because of this. I apologize for the inconvenience.

I’ve just killed around 750 trackbacks – none of them hasn’t been spam.

Sigh. Ok, so I’ve deactivated trackbacks for all articles. UPDATE content SET allow_ping = 0.

Too bad.

Hum, interesting.

I don’t know if the “O’Reilly Web 2.0 Trademark case” will entirely become a milestone in the history of the internet. But I think it will be one of those cases that people will remember and refer to in future - like Tim O’Reillys complaints about the Amazon one-click patent thing.

Anyway. It’s kind of an interesting marketing lesson.

My old Wordpress blog had the option to turn on “moderated comments”. That means that I’ve recieved an email notification about every comment asking me to “please moderate this comment”. The email contained a link to instantly approve and a link to reject the comment.

Sigh. My blog never has been linked to that extensively that I’d expected comment spam to become a problem in the first place. I’ve been wrong. Wordpress seems to allure blog spam like a light bulb flies on a midsummer evening. I recieved some hundred mail notifications per week, asking me to moderate cheap perfumes, pills and online bets (for the world cup, lately). Finally my email spam filter caught up and started to sort out the notifications from my own blog. Hum.

Having switched over to Typo I was curious about Typos anti-spam measurements and came up with some thoughts about possible “joint-forces” strategies against blog spam.

Short note to myself. In case you’ve ever have to reinstall Firefox, immediately go and kill the line

19 <input name="meta" value="lr%3Dlang_de">

in <appdir>/firefox/searchplugins.

Do not wait. Just do it now. Quick!

I’ve been really annoyed by firefox’s internal search plugin which - I can’t remember since when - send me to www.google.de kindly “tailoring” the search results for German users. That means: practically ommitting every interesting page on the web.

As I’m usually looking for technical things this behaviour actually results in the opposite of what Google wants to achive - I usually got totally useless results for almost everything.

I’ve been a happy Textpad user for several years now [1]. I still consider Textpad the best Windows-only texteditor out there. Not that I’ve ever been that much religious about it. I simply found it to be the best-tool-to-get-the-job-done [tm].

I’ve tried several IDEs and editors but especially when it came to write non-Java/non-C++ code I’ve never found anything else that I’d actually use (and buy) - most of the IDEs being bloated beyond compare with tools that “nobody needs” [tm] and that I feel I can replace with tinier external tools far better. And most of the editors being total crap compared with Textpad’s power and simplicity.

But you certainly know. There’s always been that pesky devil sitting on my shoulder and telling me that to become a Real Programmer [trademarked also, of course] one simply *must* learn VIM.

This is the second part of my summary - some super-short notes about me & Microformats, Identity 2.0, Scrum, Domain Driven Design, Behaviour Driven Design and REST.

I’ve been busy recently. No! Really. Who’s not? ;)

But there’s also been a lot of interesting stuff, I probably should have blogged a short note about. Well, I haven’t. So I’m going sum things up retrospectively.

Here are some short notes about me & del.icio.us, Kupu, Javascript and PHP 5 …

For eCities and evolutionCms, to be put on the home page, in the “inhouse : Products” section. I like ‘em. :)