Wordpress 2.8 is out! If you haven’t already you should go download it now.

As of this post Wordpress 2.8 has been downloaded 1,522,482 times, that’s pretty amazing.

I’m actually blown away every time I install a new version of Wordpress. It seems like they iron out a few more rough spots each release and the whole experience just gets that much better. As far as open source projects go, the Wordpress team definitely has their shit together.

In other news. I’ve been doing some contract work for a client, part of which includes getting them moved from Wordpress.com to a self-hosted Wordpress blog.

After getting Wordpress 2.8 up and running it was time to do some skinning. We decided that the Puretype Theme from Elegant Themes would be a good place to get started. After that, it only took a few hours to modify Puretype a bit to match the client’s website. It helps speed things up immensely when you have some pre-existing graphics to work with.

You can see the final result at blog.goodtugo.com.

Having the right icon set can make or break a web development project. Confusing icons will frustrate users and drive them away from your application. There is no excuse for using ugly icons or even no icons at all on your web application.

Fugue
For my last few projects I’ve been happily using an icon set called Fugue. Available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, the Fugue icon set is fantastically sharp looking and contains a broad array of icon types. Yusuke Kamiyamane, Fugue’s designer, updated the icon set as recently as July 3, 2009. As of today, Fugue is at version 2.2 and contains 2,200 icons. If you don’t wish to include an attribution on your site, you can purchase a royalty-free license for $49.95 USD.

Diagona
An alternative to the comprehensive Fugue icon set is Diagona, also by Yusuke Kamiyamane, which contains a mere 400 icons. You can purchase a royalty free license to Diagona for a meager $9.95 USD.

Silk

Runner up to Fugue is the always popular Silk icon set by Mark James. Silk contains 700 .png icons completely free of charge. That’s $0.00 USD people. Can’t beat that. Silk is also available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license and is currently at version 1.3.

Please let me know if you have any other favorite icon sets that you use for your projects!

I’ve been doing some Javascript tutoring this term and I realized that there are a few indispensable utilities that any budding web developer should know about.

Text Editor
The first thing you need is a good text editor. You can code anything in Microsoft’s Notepad or Apple’s Text Editor, but you won’t have any fun, that’s for sure. A good text editor is like a Swiss Army knife. Chances are you won’t use half of the features, but the ones you do use will save you an immense amount of hassle.

Text editors are useful because they display your source code in special colors to make it easier to read. This is called Syntax Highlighting. If you make a mistake, the text editor won’t highlight your code the way it normally would; this will call attention to the problem and save you hours of debugging.

Here are some of my favorite text editors:

• Komodo Edit – Mac, PC and Linux
• Geany - Mac, PC and Linux
• Smultron – Mac OS X
• TextPad – Windows

The first three are completely free of charge. I don’t like TextPad myself, but it seems to be popular among some crowds.

Mozilla Firefox
Real web developers will test their source code across multiple browsers and operating systems, such as Mac OS X, Linux and the various flavors of Windows. But if you’re just getting started, Firefox is the best browser to code in. If you get your site working in Firefox, chances are it’ll work nearly as well in most other browsers. At least until you start doing more advanced stuff. It also has an added benefit, which you’ll see in a moment.

Click the button below to download Firefox:

Firebug
Firebug is a Firefox plugin that allows you to view, edit and debug CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. You’ll quickly see how useful this is when it turns up your first Javascript error.

Download Firebug

After you first install Firebug you’ll notice a little “bug icon” appear in the lower right corner of your Firefox window (you’ll need to restart Firefox once for this to appear). Click on it to view the Firebug window pane.

If you’re working in Javascript then you’ll love the Console tab. Otherwise the HTML and CSS tabs are your best friends. The Script, DOM and Net tabs won’t be handy until you gain a little more experience.

For more help with Firebug, check out the tutorials and video screencasts at the bottom of the Firebug documentation page.

A Project
Now that you have all these great tools at your disposal, you’ll want a project to get you started. Try working through some of the great tutorials at HTML Dog first. If you finish those you can check out the tutorials at W3Schools. If you’re feeling brave, try the Javascript tutorials.

Ugh… So I’ve been working on a website for a student group at the University of Oregon. I’m developing a custom content management system for the site that uses jQuery UI and AJAX. It’s pretty spiffy actually.

Unfortunately I’ve always had problems maintaining $_SESSION data on the University web-server. For some reason my authentication class would work fine on my dev environment, but would randomly lose and then remember the $_SESSION data on the University web-server. This means that administrators would randomly get logged out when they were trying to update the site.

So after getting frustrated and avoiding the problem for several weeks, I finally found a solution here.

It turns out that the session.save_path value in php.ini was not set. The solution was to run session_save_path() at the top of my script and set the path manually to my home directory (one level below public_html).

<?php
  session_save_path('/home5/twadding/session_data/');
?>

This seems to have resolved the problem nicely. One caveat. Don’t keep your session data anywhere that is publicly accessible. Otherwise malicious users could access any of your session data on a whim.

Spending a week pouring over my code was incredibly frustrating, but at least my authentication class is nicely tuned now.

Thanks to turkguy0319 for the great image.