So, I was looking around for a good ftp client because the ones I have used in the passed seem to be letting me down lately.  Not terribly, but little features go missing or some other excuse.  And, what I found was that fireftp turned out to be the quickest and simplest solution available in my quick search on the google.  Then, I started paying attention to the other applications that I have installed as add-ins to firefox, and some of them are among the best solutions available in their space, plug-in or not.

DownThemAll (dTa) - not really fair because you wouldn't necessarily need it without firefox, but still, this is one of the best ways to grab all the downloads on a page.

S3 Organizer - The best client for Amazon's S3 cloud.  I tried a bunch of them right when S3 first became available, but most were terrible, while there were few that were actually usable.  Maybe that is different now, but at the time, and most likely, this is still the easiest to use client.

Ok, maybe the title is misleading.  Not all the good apps are in firefox, but it seems that every time I search for a quick utility to knock something out, I end up installing yet another awesome add-in for firefox that's usually like 200k to install.

I kinda wish that I could have Firefox, the web browser, and Firefox, the application hosting shell.  That way, I could keep my browser super tiny and fast, and another resource that was basically every other application that I may need to use all loaded up in a pluggable application host.  I know you can do something like this using Firefox's profile capabilities, but I don't know enough about it yet to make it really simple to use.

And, keep in mind, that I haven't even gone into all the super handy development add-ins and tools, like User Agent Switcher, WebDeveloper, Firebug, DOMInspector, DustMeSelectors, Scrapbook, and Page Saver, that make Firefox a must have in a web developer's toolbox, and I'm not just talking about rendering compatibility testing, either.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

I usually don't get off on re-posting comics and images that have been posted all over reddit and digg, but this one is worthy.

http://www.xkcd.com/393/

Heck, I haven't even played D&D, and I thought that was great.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

In the open source world, there are zillions of resources and examples for developers.  Practically everything you need/want to do, there is an example, some documentation, or a demonstration project that someone has put out that either gives you the answer you seek, or leads you down the path to glory.  And, among these zillions of resources, you can find everything from bad code to just the right answer to truly inspirational.  Browsing around this weekend, I found some inspirational stuff that I think is worthy of my wicked awesome blog.

IDesign, and more specifically the downloads section, is awesome.  I'm sure that you have come across this before, but this was the first time I had seen this site, and the source is just awesome.  I had been trying to do exactly what the Dynamic Factory project does, and I never quite got it figured out, and then to see their concise, tiny, simple solution was inspiring to me.  I love it.  I also found a bunch of their threading helpers and service helper stuff really interesting.

Kigg is my second inspiring resource.  "Kigg is a Digg like application developed with ASP.NET MVC Framework, LINQ to SQL and ASP.NET AJAX."  In itself, its just a mvc website written in asp.net, but the way it was written, is awesome.  It is just simple, elegant, and I actually learned a lot from some of the techniques, namely their code benchmark class, and it inspired me to do a lot more interface based development.  And, in my opinion, the unit tests are really well done, and I had no idea you could reference an mvc application from your unit tests just as if it was an assembly.  (As you can tell, I am not on my a game in the area of unit tests.).

Anyway, I find it really interesting, and quite funny, where and how people find inspiration in different aspects of their lives.  These two projects/sites really seemed to get me on track again, like a new high quality resource tends to do, and maybe it will do the same for you.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

Yes, another BlogEngine theme.  Yes, I know more stuff than how to theme BlogEngine.  No, this has not turned into a BlogEngine only blog.  Fortunately, I am really into design mode these days, and it shows by the number of BlogEngine themes that I have put out here in the last few weeks.  The latest release is Natural Essence which was originally designed by Arcsin and can be found here.  Even though the inspiration for the theme came from Arcsin, and it looks almost identical, the underlying markup is the same as Envision, which I released last night.  So, the implementation is completely custom, and I am still going with my attempt to use the same markup on as many different designs as possible.  It may not mean much to you, if you are just looking for a quick BlogEngine theme, but it makes the design process more interesting, to me, at least, and it opens up a lot of customization opportunities down the line, but I will give you more details on that in a later post.

I think this will be the last conversion theme I do for a while.  I will probably do a few completely custom themes next, unless I find a design that's really hot that I just feel the need to work on.  And, I am curious if any of you have any suggestions on what kind of designs you might like to see here.  No promises or guarantees, but I am interested in what you may be looking for in a BlogEngine theme.  Feel free to drop me a line in this post, or on the contact page.

So, enjoy the theme, and drop me a line if you come up with any issues.

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Jesse Foster | jf26028

I have had enough fun for a while with my previous experiments with BlogEngine, and after watching a few of my friends jump on the theming bandwagon lately, I decided it was time to finish up some of my more functional themes that I have been wanting to release.  Envision is the first of a few themes that I plan on releasing for BlogEngine that all use the same markup for the layout, but rely on different styles for the design.  Hopefully, all the future themes that I release in the next few days will all be universally coded, and you could then enable the user to switch them out, just like you can with ThemeEngine.LayoutGala or ThemeEngine.NFL.

Envision was originally designed by styleshout, and was released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license, which is a really permissive license.  More details are here.  And, all the BlogEngine enhancements were released BSD style, so you can do whatever you like.

And, as always, drop me a line or drop a comment if you find any issues with this theme.

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Jesse Foster | jf26028