MAMP Pro makes it very easy to set up a PHP development environment. It even makes configuring your Postfix mail server configured most of the way. If you are using Postfix as a smart host to send mail through your ISP or your business mail server and your mac username (shortname) is not the same as the username part of your email address then you have to set up the correct sender address in your Postfix configuration. Here is how you do it.

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If you are switching from Subversion to Git and want to know the best way to export your code similar to svn export then here is a great command to know about.

git archive -o ~/Desktop/project.zip HEAD

That will extract your most recent stuff in your current branch, zip it up, and drop it on your desktop. We do a lot of WordPress plugin development and with this single command we can get our plugin code ready for installation extremely quickly. Here is more information about git archive.

It is EXTREMELY easy to happily share files between your linux system and your mac. I use both Ubuntu and Mac OS X. Simply login into you mac desktop, open up your system settings and turn on Remote Login. This enables incoming SSH connections to your mac. If you want to connect while you are away from home, you can set up some sort of dynamic IP service like DynDNS.org. Open up port 22 on your home firewall or router and you can connect to your home mac from anywhere you go with an internet connection.

Once your mac has SSH enabled, log into your Ubuntu machine and click Places –> Connect To Server. Choose SSH as your Service Type. Enter in the IP address of your mac or whatever name you may have assigned to it in your /etc/hosts file or whatever. Use the username and password you use to log into mac and there you go. You can browse files on your mac with your Ubuntu machine in Nautilus.

I like using Safari and I’m a web developer. Sometimes I’ll be developing a website and then decide to rename a page. The problem is Safari will cache the old pages’ URL and then auto-fill the old URL as I’m typing. Then I hit enter and shucks, I’m getting a File Not Found error. In FireFox you can just press Shift-Delete to get rid of the outdated URL. In Safari, to delete one, several, or even all of your cached urls used by the auto-fill feature, just delete the offending URLs from your history.

To do this you can go to Bookmarks –> Show All Bookmarks. Then in the upper right corner of your window you can search for the URL you want to delete. I’m frequently typing the domain of our development server so I can delete all of the development URLs they may be outdated. Once you see the URLs you want to delete, highlight them and press Delete. This is a little more cumbersome than Firefox’s Shift-Delete but at least it can be done.

Note: Both History and Bookmarks are used for the auto-fill feature. So even if you delete all of your history, the URLs from your Bookmarks will still be used for auto-fill. Of course, if you have bookmarked a page that is no longer available you probably want to delete that too.

I Want Mulitple Gmail Signatures

I love using Gmail and I have several different email address for the various companies I work for. Gmail only lets me have one signature which is a bit of a problem because, depending on which from address I am using, I use different email signatures. There are a couple of Firefox add-ons that help with the problem but sometime I enjoy using other browsers like Safari. I have finally found the solution using QuickSilver and it’s Shelf feature.

QuickSilver And The Shelf

I’ve know about the Shelf on QuickSilver for a while now. It’s like a persistent clipboard. You can save snippets of text and then use that text later – like copying things to the clipboard but it stays there forever. So this was a good solution for my multiple email signature problem except that it took quite a few key stokes to get the text off the shelf and into my email. I set up triggers to do this but QuickSilver’s trigger display doesn’t handle the multi-line signature trigger very well. The name of the trigger spans multiple lines and overlaps the names of my other triggers. I hate that so I avoided using that as a solution. Also, it’s hard to think of enough unique keyboard shortcuts of each one of my five different signatures that don’t interfere with other shortcuts. So I created a trigger that just opened the shelf. Once the shelf is open I right-click the signature I want, then select paste from the actions menu. This was a fair solution, but the right-clicking and then hunting for paste in the pop-up actions menu was still a bit cumbersome.

Command Chains Can Be Stored On The Shelf

What I didn’t realize until today, was that you can store more than just text on the shelf. You can store chains of actions. So now my workflow is really nice. I have a keyboard shortcut that pulls up the Shelf then I just double-click on the signature I want and Blamo! my signature is in my email. Since this is a QuickSilver thing, I can use the signature for Mail.app, or Gmail and I can use any browser I want. It’s very nice. The one last tweak I wish I could figure out is how to get rich text in my signature because it seem that only plain text can be stored in QuickSilver’s shelf.

How To Store Command Chains On The Shelf

The huge realization I had today was that you can type Control-Enter rather than just Enter to make a chain of actions in QuickSilver. So I create the text (type . in the subject panel) for my email signature. Then tab to the action window and type paste the type Control-Enter and type Put on Shelf then click Execute. Now you can open your shelf, double-click your signature and it is pasted into whatever text area you were just in.

If anybody knows how to get rich text into the signature I would LOVE to know. I know that you can copy from Pages or Word or whatever and the bold, italics, links, etc come with you when you paste into Gmail. So I’ve thought about writing an AppleScript to open up a Pages document with my signature, copy the content to the clipboard, quitting Pages, then paste the clipboard. But the launching and quitting of pages takes too long and is more trouble than it’s worth.

Video Tutorial

Here is a quick video tutorial showing how to set all this up.

UPDATED 6/10/2009: The checker works again.

I like the option to check Google PageRank easily no matter what browser I am using so I wrote this quick little script to grab the PageRank of whatever page you are looking at and then pop open a little window to display the rank. All you need to do is drag the link below to your bookmarks bar on your browser.

Check PR

When using TextMate to code PHP, you may be annoyed by the way TextMate handles hitting the Enter key while in a PHP comment block. I would like the lead * to be continued on the new line. There are two ways to get this to happen.

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I’ve been asked a few times how to make a signature with a link in Mac Mail. I’m using Leopard and I agree that it’s not very obvious how to pull this off. The steps are fairly simple as long as you know what to do.

• Open a new mail message
• Create a link in your mail message
• Copy your link into your signature

Here is a quick screencast to show you how to pull this off. Not only does this work with links, but it also works with any other types of formatting in your mail message – bold, italics, fonts, etc.

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