Ian Mercer » tools

Development Tools and Libraries I use

Ian Mercer — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:36:40 +0000

Libraries and Code Snippets

TweetSharp

Predicate Builder for LINQ query building: http://www.albahari.com/nutshell/predicatebuilder.aspx

Useful tools

LinqPad http://www.linqpad.net/

Source Control

Subversion with TortoiseSVN

Continuous Integration

JetBrains TeamCity, recently moved off CruiseControl.NET

Deployment

Subversion as a repository for binary images, custom deployment code

Web Server

IIS7

Useful articles

PHP: http://devzone.zend.com/article/627

WordPress Plugins I’ve found useful so far

Ian Mercer — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:55:10 +0000

Broken Link Checker
Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.

Flash Photo Gallery
Creates a Flash Photo Gallery like one provided in Adobe Photoshop CS2 Flash Web Photo Gallery templates.

Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

HeadSpace2
Meta-data manager on steroids, allowing complete control over all SEO needs such as keywords/tags, titles, description, stylesheets, and many many other goodies.

Next Page
Provides shortcodes and template tags for next/previous navigation in pages.

Page Flip Image Gallery
FlippingBook Photo gallery plugin with page flip effects.

Page Tagger
Enables tagging for pages. PHP 5 required.

Photo Dropper
Lets you add Creative commons licensed Photos to Your Posts from Flickr. By activating this plugin you agree to be fully responsbile for adhering to Creative Commons licenses for all photos you post to your blog.

Useful 404′s
Create more useful 404 error pages, including email notifications for bad links. See http://www.alistapart.com/articles/amoreuseful404 for the inspiration behind this plugin.

A better Tail program for Windows

Ian Mercer — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:49:00 +0000

‘Tail’ is a program that monitors the end of a log file, keeping the view at the end of the file. In the past I’ve used MTail to monitor log files but recently I switched to Baretail because it does a better job at monitoring multiple log files at the same time.

Measuring website browser performance

Ian Mercer — Tue, 19 May 2009 18:02:00 +0000

www.webpagetest.org is a great resource for anyone looking into web site performance.

Comcast woes and a new monitoring utility

Ian Mercer — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 02:28:00 +0000

I’ve been having lots of problems with my Comcast connection this week, rather than calling the Comcast support department to receive the usual ‘turn your PC, router, model off, now turn them back on, did that fix it?’ response I decided to do some more investigation.

I was able to easily hook up the modem’s diagnostics page (http://192.168.100.1) to my home automation system so now I have a complete log of all the key signal parameters.

I suspect rain is getting into the line somewhere so next step is to see if there is any connection between rainfall and these graphs. In the meantime I did move the ‘out of the box’ connection Comcast left at the top of my drive back into the metal box where it was out of the rain and so far today my connection has been rock solid, yeah!