Helpful Coder

This is a problem I run into fairly often, because I do a bit of hand-coding HTML from word files or other content that clients send me. When you cut and paste the items for a bullet list into an html document, they often come in one per line with no formatting (or sometimes they have a "*" at the start of each line. Obviously you can create a macro to automate the process of putting <li> tags around each item, but there's an even faster way to do this using vi's powerful regular expression tools. Of course, this will only be useful if you can use vi, a command-line text-editor. If you're on shared hosting or something, you may be out of luck. There is a windows version of vi, but I haven't really done more than mess with it a bit. If you're on OSX, you're probably in luck - you can use the console, and I think that it has vim installed, although it's been like eight years since I used OSX regularly. First, figure out the lines that you w...

One of the hosting companies I work a lot with has just gone through and redone all of their VPS hosting plans . They've simplified the number of plans, and improved them significantly, increasing the amount of storage space, bandwidth, RAM available at each price point. They've also updated their support for a wider variety of operating systems (including Windows ) and web control panels. A Virtual Private Server is essentially the same as a dedicated server, except that it's running on "virtual" hardware. In other words, the physical server that hosts the VPS is running virtualization software that allows it to host one or more virtual machines, and the VPS plans are set up on these machines. This has a number of benefits - it spreads the cost of the physical server out over multiple clients, making for cheaper hosting. At the same time a VPS server has many of the same benefits of a dedicated server, such as greater stability, security and flexibility when com...

I think I'm a pretty organized guy, at least compared to some of the people I've worked with over the years. But what with a full time job, my own side business, and another business-related project - plus being a homeowner with all the little tasks that entails, I'm starting to feel like my current system may not be adequate. On the work side, I have multiple web projects spread across three broad categories, plus other non web-related tasks. Of course most projects have multiple sub-tasks and information. And then on the personal side it's the usual stuff... bills that need to be paid, things that need to be fixed/replaced, etc. My current system pretty much totally relies on email, at least for the work-related stuff. This system has worked well for me for years - emails stay in the inbox until responded to or the related task is completed, at which point they're saved in the appropriate folder, depending on the task/client they're related to. For offline stu...