As you know if you’ve been reading One Thing New, yesterday was my birthday, and while I intended to take the weekend off, I wanted to post this quick suggestion for the Wordpress team. With the next release, lets have an easy option for disabling the auto-formatting within posts.

I realize there is a plugin that can disable the wpautop filter for posts, and I have it installed on all of my Wordpress sites. But some unwanted paragraph tags still get through from time to time. I haven’t poked around Wordpress’s guts very much, and I’m not sure how difficult it would be to disable this feature myself. But based on some searches I’ve done in the WP support forums, I know I’m not alone in wanting it done.

Now, before the open source police come to berate me for criticizing a free application, I can assure you that is not what I’m doing. I’m merely suggesting this feature be included in a future release of the platform. I love Wordpress and have started using it on all of my sites. But as a developer who likes to code everything by hand, I would like to see this feature added so that I can have total control over my content.

In the interest of full disclosure, I had a crappy day at work today, and my mind isn’t really in a blogging place right now. But I thought I would share with you several things I’ve been thinking about lately that may or may not end up as full blown posts down the road.

1. Podcast reviews
I’ve been listening to several new podcasts recently, and I’m thinking about offering my thoughts on new and established podcasts. Yesterday, I discovered that Kevin Smith has one, and there are a few others that I’ve followed sporadically that I’ve been thinking about subscribing to again. It’s a really exciting medium that I need to become more familiar with.

2. Blogs about blogging
As I gain more experience as a blogger, I plan to offer some advice and tutorials about the art of blogging. At the moment, I’m far from an expert, but I think my experiences as a fledgling blogger might be of interest. One of the first topics I plan to tackle in this arena is my response to one point that Joshua made in his “9 Lessons for Would-be Bloggers” piece: Everything is beta. His post is still pretty fresh, and I’m going to ponder it for a day or two before I respond.

3. Follow ups
I’ve got several projects in the air right now: losing weight with Web 2.0, Project Opus, redesigning roblindsey.com, and getting my fantasy baseball league started. I’ll be following up all of these with posts in the near future.

4. Linux pre-installed on Dell and HP computers.
I’m a big believer in the open source software movement, and Linux is what started it all. Recently, I installed Ubuntu on my old Windows HP, and I’ve been playing around with it a good bit. I plan to write an article with my opinion of the potential for Linux to be pre-installed on factory computers. I need to do some more research first. So that post will be down the road a ways. Maybe by the time I get around to it Dell or HP will confirm that they’re doing it.

5. St. Patrick’s Day or, as I like to call it, my birthday
As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m turning 30 this year. Though I’m typically a pretty even-keeled guy about stuff like this, I can feel some thoughts about this milestone bubbling in my brain (or maybe I’m just having a stroke!). Nonetheless, I’ll probably forgo my Weekend Web Developer piece on Saturday in favor of a meditation on turning 30.

So there you have a look into the future of One Thing New. I’m pleased with the work I’ve done so far. I realize that the scope and focus of this blog is sometimes nebulous and kind of abstract, but I hope it’s at least been interesting. Thanks to all who have been reading.

This weekend, I’ve been redesigning my personal Web page, which I plan to relaunch either tonight or tomorrow, and as I was taking a break this afternoon, looking around the Web for something to write here, I found this article listing six tools for better Web design.

He lists a couple of sites that I haven’t used such as the Typetester which seems like it will be really helpful. And he takes the concept out of the box a little by listing Mountain Dew and listening to music as tools. So I started thinking about the tools, both concrete and abstract, that help me design Web sites.

1. Smultron - After I published a post about creating Web sites from scratch a few weeks ago and trumpeted Notepad and TextEdit, I realized that I needed to get a grown-up text editor. I’m a Mac owner, and I went to download TextMate, not realizing that it costs 40 bucks. So, I started hunting for an open source solution: Enter Smultron. Compared to TextEdit, it’s in another league. It has some limited syntax coloring, and it preserves tabs between lines. But my favorite thing is that it lets you open multiple files in one window. That really helps keep my desktop less cluttered.
2. dafont.com - This is a great repository of free fonts. The interface lets you input custom text to be rendered in every font face. And they have categorized the fonts for easier browsing. For me, it’s been an essential tool for designing logos and other graphics.
3. Hex Hub - For a site that deals with color, Hex Hub is pretty ugly. That aside, they have a ton of Web-ready color swatches and their hexadecimal equivalents. I use it when I need to find lighter or darker shades of colors. To be fair, I’ve never used Color Schemer, but it costs $50. Hex Hub is free.
4. Web Developer Extension for Firefox - This is a great tool for any Web developer. It adds a toolbar to Firefox that lets you have easy access to all levels of the DOM from your browser window. You can turn off CSS or resize your window to see what your sites would look like at different screen resolutions. There are also links for validating all aspects of your code. It’s an absolutely essential tool in my Web development environment.
5. Sleep - If you’re stuck on a problem (like I was last night) and you’re deadline will let you break for the night, a good night’s sleep will do wonders for your tired brain cells. I’ve always heard that your brain keeps working while you sleep. So if you feel like you’re at a dead end, go to bed, and your brain will probably figure it out by morning.
6. Crystal Light Raspberry Green Tea - Mountain Dew doesn’t do me any good because I’ve been off soda for almost five years now. But I still enjoy sweet tea (I’m a Southern boy, after all). Well, since I’ve been on my diet, I’ve been drinking Crystal Light Raspberry Green Tea. It’s still new, and I couldn’t find a link to it anywhere, but it’s out there. It’s extremely refreshing, and it boosts your energy naturally. Good stuff.

And there you have six more Web development tools. There are a ton of great tools out there. I hope these suggestions point you in some good directions. Thanks again to Josh over at Tutorialaday.com for the idea for tonight’s post.

Having just upgraded my Wordpress installation because of a security flaw discovered last week, I’ve got Wordpress on the brain. And, while I’m still relatively new to the platform, I thought it would be fun to share with you the Wordpress plugins I’ve found useful so far.

When I decided to start a blog, one of the main features of Wordpress that convinced me to choose it over Blogger was its extensibility. Because Wordpress is an open source project, there is an immense community of developers tweaking and adding features and functionality to the platform. Here are the eight that I have installed right now.

1. Akismet - This is a plugin that comes bundled with a basic Wordpress installation. It’s function is to catch spammers who try to leave crap in your comments section. To date, Akismet has caught the only spam comment that’s made it through. My site is still small, but Akismet is batting .1000 so far.
2. Bad Behavior - One of the reasons that Akismet has only caught one spammer so far might be because Bad Behavior is turning a lot more away at the door before they have a chance to comment. Most of the time, spammers use programs or scripts that automate the spamming process. Bad Behavior analyzes the methods that spammers use to deliver their junk, and stops these robots from ever having access to your site. Just in the last week, BB has stopped 47 spambots from accessing my site. Good stuff!
3. Custom String Query - This one sounds scary, doesn’t it? All it does is let you control the number of posts displayed on your archive pages. I installed it when I thought I only wanted one post per day displayed on the main page. I’ve since changed my mind about that, but I still use CSQ to manage my archive pages.
4. Disable wpautop - In the interest of having full control over my code, I installed this plugin to disable Wordpress’s automatic formatting in their post editor. Also, I’ve never used a WYSIWYG editor before, so it’s easier for me to manually add HTML and CSS where I want it. I would assume that most folks wouldn’t care about this, but for me it was a necessity.
5. FD Feedburner Plugin - All this does is redirect users who type in onethingnew.com/feed/ to my Feedburner feed. This way, if I ever leave Feedburner, I won’t have to change the address of my syndication feed.
6. Obfuscate Email - I have no idea if this works because I’m not a spambot. But I have my email address in the sidebar, and this program is supposed to hide my address in the “mailto:” link from anyone who would automatically harvest it and add it to their annoying lists. I haven’t gotten and spam mail in my inbox, so I assume it works.
7. Social Bookmark Creator - Social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, and reddit seem to be all the rage these days. So this plugin generates link codes for easily submitting my articles to those sites. No one has used them so far, but I’m always hopeful.
8. Subscribe Me - Another plugin for easy syndication, Subscribe Me adds those little chicklet links to my sidebar. Click on those, and you’ll subscribe to my syndication feed in whichever service you click on. Easy as pie!

What’s so great about Wordpress is it’s a fluid platform with lots of room to play around. I still need to look into plugins for audio and video, but that’s down the road. I hope these plugins give you and idea of just how powerful Wordpress can be.

Firefox has been my Web browser of choice for a couple of years now. As an open source project, it allows for all sorts of plugins and extensions to add functionality and fun. But my favorite feature of Firefox is one that’s built in to browser itself: Smart Keywords.

Essentially, Smart Keywords allow you to run searches from Firefox’s address bar. Here’s how it works:

• Download and install
• Surf over to a site you use a lot for searching, such as Yahoo!, and right click (ctrl + click for Mac users) in the search box. Click on the option “Add a Keyword for this Search.”
• In the field marked “Keyword,” type an abbreviation for the site you’re using (example: for Yahoo!, my Smart Keyword is “y”).
• In the “Name” field, type the name of the site and the keyword you give it (mine looks like “Yahoo [y]”). It’s important to include your Keyword in the Name field because if you forget the Keyword, you’ll be able to access it from your Bookmarks menu. Otherwise, you’d have to go to Bookmarks => Organize Bookmarks and access the properties for each saved Keyword. Trust me, it’ll save you time down the road.
• Once you’ve saved your Keyword, type “y firefox” in your address bar, and you’ll automatically execute a Yahoo! search for “firefox.” The results page will be displayed in your browser.

The obvious advantage of using Smart Keywords is you get to cut out the middle man. You don’t have to visit the Yahoo! homepage to perform a search. I can’t tell you how often during the day I use Smart Keywords. And you don’t have to limit your Keywords to sites that do global searches. I have Keywords for Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon.com, and allmusic to name a few.

Props to Tug for turning me on to Smart Keywords.