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Townsquare.biz - the easiest way to get your business online

Ben Rasmusen — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:27:08 +0000

Gordon Brander and I are proud to announce the Beta launch of a new web application we’ve been working on for the last couple of months, Townsquare.biz. Townsquare allows businesses to create an online presence quickly and easily. The idea behind it is that there are a lot of small businesses that would like to have an online presence but don’t want to spend a lot of money or time having a website built. Townsquare gives them a clean semantic website with a very simple interface, so business owners can quickly get their business online as well as keep it up to date.

Here is a couple of the features currently available:

Complete control over the look and feel of the site via CSS
Add/Edit/Delete web pages
A blog, which can be used for project announcements or news
Embedded maps on the page
Clean, semantic, micro formatted code to aid in SEO.

Head on over and check it out and let me know what you think. All suggestions, questions and feedback are welcome. To view a sample page head to townsquare.biz/benrasmusen.

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Top 15 TextMate Shortcuts

Ben Rasmusen — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:55:33 +0000

TextMate by Macromates is by far the best code writing/development tool I’ve ever used. Not only is it awesome at face value, but the depth of features and extras make it the ultimate productivity booster when developing. What’s equally amazing is how it accomplishes this with no bloat. If you spend any amount of time editing code you need this application and the $62 will be well worth it.

So here is my list of top 15 most useful TextMate shortcuts that have saved me countless hours accomplishing simple tasks, and these just scratch the surface. Take some time to browse through the bundles to find ones that work for you. You can also create your own or edit the existing ones to suit your needs.

Shortcut	Description
1. projects	everyone should know about projects. create a new project and then drag files/folders into the sidebar or drag a folder into the textmate icon to create a new project. (thanks to Ben Lew for the tip on dragging a folder into the icon.)
2. regular expression search/search and replace	check the ‘regular expression’ box and put your regular expression in the find. regular expressions are hard for me, but once figured out they are a huge time saver. with textmate you can capture parts of the find and insert them into the replace. for full information go to their regular expressions page.
3. cmd+shift+f	find in project. useful for mass search and replace operations or just finding where a function is defined.
4. cmd+t	go to file. opens up a dialog box where you can type the name of the file as well as use up/down arrows to navigate to it (within the open project).
5. cmd+shift+t	go to symbol. this dialog box allows you to navigate to symbols within the open document. i use this a lot in php to navigate a large list of functions, or for css to navigate a long list of selectors.
6. option+selection	selection outside of line restriction. when you hold down option the mouse pointer turns to crosshairs so you can select a portion of multiple lines. this is helpful when eliminating a tag from the end of even lines, etc.
7. option+tab/option+shift+tab or cmd+}/cmd+{	indent/un-indent a selection of items. if you need to indent or un-indent a selection of items you can highlight them and then option+tab them. these two shortcuts seem to be the same, anyone know if there is a difference?
8. ctrl+shift+w	wrap selection in tags. select something and then invoke the shortcut to wrap it in open/closing tags. by default it’s a ‘ ’ but you can type any tag and it will add it to both sides.
9. cmd+shift+7	convert selection to entities. i used this one a lot in creating this list, just select something and invoke the shortcut which will bring up a dialog box with options on what type of entity you want to convert the selection to (i couldn’t get this to work properly via shortcut, but you can use the menu: Bundles > HTML > Entities > Convert Selection to Entities).
10. ctrl+return	insert a . i prefer to self close my tags, but by default it inserts a , you can change it in the bundle editor.
11. ctrl+shift+l	wrap selection in . hyperlink a selection. bonus: if you have the url already in the clipboard it will auto-insert it into the href.
12. cmd+shift+c	color picker. this is used within css files to select a color, once selected it dumps the hex or rgb code for that color into your document. you can also select an existing color code and toggle this window to have a starting point.
13. ctr+shift+t	to-do list. this feature scans your project for items labeled with ‘FIXME:’, ‘TODO:’, ‘CHANGED:’ and provides a list of them along with their comments and a link to that file and line. (thanks to Gordon Brander for this tip.)
14. kv ⇥	streamlined way of inserting key/value pairs for arrays. it has tab stops at the necessary spots. this goes well with ‘array ⇥’. create new tab trigger and add: '$1' => ${3:'$4'},$5
15. debugvar ⇥	dump php variables in ‘pre’ tags for easy reading. this is a custom tab trigger which out puts echo " "; print_r ($variable); die(" "); in your code. create new tab trigger in bundle editor and add: echo " "; print_r (${1:variable}); die(" "); (thanks to Ryan Waggoner for this tip.)

Post your most useful in the comments. Thanks!

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Bounteo.com

Ben Rasmusen — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 18:48:43 +0000

My good friend Ryan just launched bounteo.com a new personal finance and investment/personal development blog. Lots of great information available, be sure to check it out.

PHILOSOPHY
I believe that life is a gift and we can shape our own destiny through our choices, actions, and behaviors. This site explores how young people can make better choices and follow through with action to experience a life more abundant.

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Life Catalysts

Ben Rasmusen — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:43:40 +0000

cat·a·lyst -noun
a person or thing that precipitates an event or change

Life catalysts can either shock us into inaction or shove us into forward motion. These catalysts can be extremely joyful events in our lives or downright lame ones, at least on the surface. But both can either be detrimental or helpful depending on how we choose to deal with them.

In thinking about the advances in my life throughout the years I can see one such catalyst. I can trace a lot of forward progress directly back to this catalyst and without it I know my life wouldn’t be what it is today. It was when we found out that Amber was pregnant and we were going to have our first child. I’ve written about this experience previously, but this was the catalyst that whipped me into shape. It was at that moment that I realized the urgency in getting our finances and my career on the right track. We had been planning on getting back to living within our means, paying off our debt and me getting into a career that I enjoyed and that would pay enough for us to live comfortably. But without any pressure we weren’t getting much done to accomplish that. It was the realization that we now were responsible for a child as well as each other that we really started to get things inline. Less than a year later we are very close to being completely debt free, we are living within our means and I’m doing something that I both enjoy and that pays the bills.

Another catalyst has recently presented itself not in my life, but that of my parents. My Mom recently found out that due to political reason within the company she works for she was going to be asked to resign. Needless to say this was not a joyful catalyst. The prospect of being unemployed can be paralyzing. But there is a choice to be made, to accept it and be crushed by it, or to see it as an opportunity to move on and do something bigger and better. My parents have decided to choose the latter and so far have used this catalyst effectively to move forward.

Anytime a life changing catalyst comes into our lives we have a choice, to either let it crush us, or to use it to spur us forward. Unfortunately deciding not to let it crush us is only half the battle. The other half is actually implementing a strategy to use that catalyst positively. Just as with other overwhelming events in our lives, if looked at objectively and break it up into smaller steps it can be achieved, but more on that in another post.

I’m looking forward to my next life catalyst, realizing it’s not going to be easy, but excited about the forward progress that will occur.