benrasmusen.com » Work

FriendFeedback.com - Quickly get anonymous feedback from friends

Ben Rasmusen — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 23:44:51 +0000

I’m proud to announce the launch of FriendFeedback.com. A simple application that lets you quickly and easily get anonymous feedback from your friends. The idea is that if you want some feedback on something from your friends, they may not always be willing to give you an honest opinion to your face. This application lets them respond anonymously and hopefully truthfully.

It’s certainly not anything life changing, but it was a fun application to build and design (yikes! I said it! I design the site, so forgive me if it makes your eyes bleed). Let me know what you think and feel free to comment here or contact me if you have any bugs to report or any features to suggest.

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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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Craigslist.org OPML Exporter

Ben Rasmusen — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:25:20 +0000

When I first started freelancing I was looking for a way to get an RSS feed of all the computer gigs on craigslist.org for every city in the USA. Since most of these postings were telecommunting position it didn’t matter what city they were posted in. But grabbing the feed manually from 300+ cities on craigslist was clearly not the best option. To solve this need I have written a quick script that loops through all the craigslist.org cities of your choosing and grabs the RSS feed for the query of your choice. This allows you to search for anything, not just computer gigs.

I hereby present: Craigslist.org OPML Exporter

Hopefully some of you will find this useful. Please don’t hesitate to contact me with questions or suggestions.

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Lorem Ipsum Bookmarklet

Ben Rasmusen — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:50:43 +0000

My thought was to create a bookmarklet that would insert a block of dummy filler text (Lorem Ipsum) in the input you currently have in focus. This would come in handy when testing form submission. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to do this for quite some time now without any luck. This is in part due to my inexperience in javascript and the lack of support for this functionality in most browsers. After a day of failed attempts I decided to get some other (and greater) minds on it to see if it could be done. I tweeted the issue to see if anyone had any ideas.

A friend and colleague David LeMieux has made some significant progress on this bookmarklet and has released it for all to use. Unfortunately due to the aforementioned browser limitations this bookmarklet only works in Firefox 3 Beta 5. But if that’s what you use for testing then it’s a great tool to add to the arsenal.

If any readers have any ideas on how to make this more cross browser compatible your suggestions and ideas are greatly appreciated. This doesn’t seem to be a difficult thing to achieve, but it does require a more skilled developer than myself.

I want to give a big thanks to all that spent any amount of time trying to get this working. A special shout out to David LeMieux and Ryan Cross for their help in thinking this through and for the time they spent making some great progress on it.

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Find and Replace Regular Expression

Ben Rasmusen — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:33:04 +0000

I find myself creating a fair amount of forms for websites. I normally want to grab the $_POST variables and assign them to local variables. I found a relatively easy way to do this using the power of TextMates Regular Expression Search and Replace. Once the form is created I submit it, dump the $_POST array between some ‘pre’ tags and grab the output. Paste the output into your file and do the following search and replace. Don’t forget to check the ‘Regular Expressions’ box.

In the ‘Find’ Box:
\[(.?*)\] => (.?*)

In the ‘Replace’ Box:
\$$1 = $_POST['$1'];

Turn this:
[field_1] => asdfa [field_2] => sdfas [field_3] => dfasd [field_4] => fasdfasf

Into this:
$field_1 = $_POST['field_1']; $field_2 = $_POST['field_2']; $field_3 = $_POST['field_3']; $field_4 = $_POST['field_4'];

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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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The New Office

Ben Rasmusen — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:27:26 +0000

After a month or so of working from home I’m back to working an office. This week I secured about 100 sqfeet of office space all to myself. It’s small and at the moment doesn’t even have a desk, but it’s got some nice windows and most importantly it’s quiet and my own space. I spent half a day working here yesterday and it was amazingly productive. Not having a desk has put some strain on my neck and back, but my work is getting done. It’s really nice.

It was awesome spending all day with my family and squeezing work between conversations with Amber and play time with Noah, but it’s nice to have some separation again. After just one day of having the office I already feel an emotional relief. Having a space I can go outside of the house and have a good chunk of time to just work has made coming home a lot more enjoyable. I’m able to get home and just enjoy being home with out having to find some time to work. I just put in my time at the office and head home to enjoy the family.

This may seem to be contrary to the whole reason I wanted to freelance, but I think that it’s right inline with it. I wanted to be in control of my time and now I am. Granted I’m moving back to a more traditional way of working, but if I have things that need to get done that fall within the traditional work day I can still decide to do them. I don’t have to be at the office at any specific time but having a place I can just focus on work is very helpful.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of the work paradigm needs to shift. How far away from traditional work situations should I get and what parts if any should I embrace. I guess all life needs some structure, well at least my life. More on this later…

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My Absence from Blogging

Ben Rasmusen — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 01:29:54 +0000

I know that my readership is in the single digits, and therefore not many people have actually realized that I haven’t blogged a thing since September, nearly a three month absence. The emails begging me to continue posting never came. But it’s to be expected, this is a personal thing that I’ve kept up when I had time, and although some of the posts may have been of interest to some, it’s certainly not techcrunch.com.

Anyway, I somehow found myself at benrasmusen.com and wondered what happened to my blogging? Where had my urge to bore people with personal and geeky uninteresting blurbs about things going on in my life and beyond, gone? And I couldn’t find an answer. I think I woke up to the fact that I didn’t have a unified theme, that my posts were all over the place and that they didn’t seem to have much in common. That along with the fact that my life has become a lot more interesting since my last post and I don’t feel the need to fill time writing random things.

And so, I’m here. Writing again. I’m trying to decide on the direction of this blog, I’m in the middle of a redesign of benrasmusen.com and I’m wondering if there is a place for such a hodgepodge of a blog. I’m thinking I’ll split it up into at least two separate entities, one professional and the other personal, that way the reader all 5-6 of you can decide which to follow if any. Hopefully that will bring some order to it.

A lot has been going on recently in my life both personally and professionally and I hope to get back into the swing of things and update more often. Look for the new site and ensuing content. And let me know if you have any suggestions for the direction I should take.

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Blueswarm.org It’s LIVE!

Ben Rasmusen — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 15:02:47 +0000

So after 3 days with only about 10 hours of combined sleep we have released our private beta of blueswarm.org. If you’re interested in checking it out send me a note and I’ll get an invite out to you. Or go to the home page and check it out. If you want to see my blueswarm profile got to blueswarm.org/users/benrasmusen. I can’t believe it’s out in the wild. I hope you guys like what we’ve done. Please send me feedback good or bad, it’s all appreciated.

Also, thanks to everyone for all your support, my family specifically Amber and Noah for being patient with me and for being so awesome overall. And thanks to all my friends for putting up with my absentmindedness and for putting up with being ignored while we busted this thing out.

Now time for a nap… well, first a couple more bugs to take care of… THEN it’s nap time…

http://www.blueswarm.org

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pdftotext - Thank You

Ben Rasmusen — Tue, 08 May 2007 20:29:47 +0000

Due to the nature of my job I spend more time than I’d like making product pages out of PDF documents. Needless to say this process is quite tedious. The simple way would be to use Preview to open the PDF and use the text-tool to copy and paste any relevant text into the aforementioned product pages and then HTML-ize it, but this only works half the time. For some reason every now and then the text just doesn’t copy well. Enter pdftotext a nifty command line tool that converts any PDF document into a text file, simplifying the copy and paste operations. After installing a simple:

/usr/local/bin/pdftotext /path/to/document.pdf

in the terminal and were all set. For the increased productivity and reduced headaches, I thank you pdftotext.