Earlier this week I put a Google Adsense banner above the first entry on the page.  Most of my traffic is RSS, and you may have never noticed, but if you came to the site to read an article… or you know… visit the old fashioned way, then you were probably greeted by it.  After looking at it for a few days, I’ve decided that those ads are just not something I want there right now.  I mean gah, look at this… how fugly does it get?

Want to see how fugly?  Keep reading.

EllisLab.com got a bit of an over-hauling yesterday by Rick.  The new site is much more spacious and clean, and well… sexier.  Now normally a site redesign would be a one line entry, or possibly no entry at all, but this new site brings something very, very cool with it.  It features what I consider (without overstatement) to be the greatest company profile pages of all time. Each of the EllisLab staff have been masterfully illustrated as a super hero.  The results are positively stunning.

Keep reading to see them.

BambooInvoice user Mikael Johansson has graciously translated the application into Swedish (thanks Mikael!) but also extended the translation to include all of CodeIgniter, so I now very proudly offer the Swedish Language pack for CI 1.6.x.

Still cleaning up a few things, but BambooInvoice 0.8.5 is looking pretty close to ready for release.  You a Bamboo user?  Nab it: BambooInvoice 0.8.5 for a look.

The biggest change is actually the installer, and several changes meant to make installing and deploying it easier.  There are a few features still to add, but I’m pretty happy.  Tomorrow I hope to write a bit about what I’ve learned recently in building a distributed app.

For update instructions, read on…

Yesterday I mentioned that a new release of CodeIgniter was right around the corner.  Well, today we made it official and released CodeIgniter 1.6.2.

As always, a lot of work has gone into it.  Thirty four (at last count) new features or enhancements are in there, notably including speed and security related code.  The File Helper has seen a series of new capabilities added into it, a Compatibility Helper was added for those of you still stuck on PHP4.  Also, the Zip library is remarkably faster.  Each of those last 2 contributions came from the community (thanks Seppo and StanleyXu) as well as many, many smaller fixes shared by the CI community.  CI rocks.

Paired with this release is the introduction of Tags in the Subversion server for version snapshots.  CLI geeks, starting with version 1.6.1, you can checkout/export full release versions directly from Subversion.

There aren’t any “earth shattering” changes here, but CodeIgniter should now run smoother, faster, and be more friendly.  Also, some groundwork has been laid for some larger changes in the next release.

I just wrote this on the CodeIgniter forums.

There’s been some notable work dropped into CodeIgniter recently. We’re working on finishing up a few things for a 1.6.2 release. A few noteworthy items include enhancements to Active Record, a new compatibility helper to allow the use of several common PHP5 only functions in PHP4 and come enhancements/behavioural changes in unit testing, form, url, directory and download helpers.

There have been several speed and security enhancements as well, in both CI “proper” (and various libraries and helpers), and of course, the usual round of bug fixes and doc changes. In fact the documentation has grown by 2 pages (Reserved names and Common functions).

If you want to leave a note, by all means feel free. I'm closing comments on this post to keep everything in one place (in this case, the CI forums).

Since I gave some dap to IE for getting a developer toolkit embedded into Internet Explorer 8, I feel like I should also give kudos to Opera for releasing the top-secret and closely guarded Dragonfly.  Opera annoyed the hell out of me at SxSW when they devoted an entire booth to promoting “Dragonfly”, but refused to tell me anything about it.

I’ve only had a quick look of it, but it does look like a pretty slick tool.  The main problem I see for them here, is that they are fourth in the market (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera) and fourth to get a developer toolkit.  Its hard to work from a position of weakness like that.  I hope they prove me wrong, since competition is always good for what we do, and I have to say, I’ve always had a soft spot for Opera.

If you have the chance to play, please leave comments with what you think of it!  How does it compare to Firebug?  How does it compare to IE?

Ever get so wrapped up in your work that you forgot to eat?  I found an alternate source of sustenance.  My cat.

Well, I was greeted pleasantly by my RSS feeds today, it seems that the jQuery User Interface project has officially released. 

This is great news, and I have to say (I’ve been using the UI components in beta) that they are brilliantly done.

I was thrilled to see that there was an update yesterday to the CodeIgniter Textmate bundle for CI 1.6.  If you use Textmate or E-Texteditor (Windows) then download it and give it a shot.  Nice work… thanks, I’m using it right now!

A few other little utilities I’ve been getting a lot of use out of recently.  The first is the excellent clipboard utility Jumpcut.  It keep track of the last 10 (that’s configurable) things that you’ve copied and makes them available to you.

There are also handy keyboard shortcuts to get at it.  Normally not super-useful, but I’ve been doing a lot of work that has needed me to copy and paste language keys, and this let’s me buffer up a whole page worth of

and paste it all at once.  Sure faster then copy > flip page > paste > flip back > copy > flip page > paste > repeat again and again.  Its also open sourced under the MIT License.

Another great little tool I’ve discovered recently is for my mouse.  I’m one of those guys that needs and uses the 4th and 5th buttons on my mouse.  The left I use for copying, and the right for paste (see a pattern here), but in Leopard, those buttons default to… jeez I don’t remember… Expose I think.  Reconfiguring them was a bit of a pain.  Fortunately, I found the excellent USB Overdrive, which you can use to re-program your mouse buttons.  Aside from having what might be the ugliest website I’ve seen this year, the little shareware application has been fantastic, and is well worth plunking down my $20 for it (although to be clear, the downloaded version is 100% functional and remains so).

On the topic, other little known utilities that I love include caffeine (temporarily prevent your computer from sleeping) and AppDelete (gets rid of stray files when deleting a program).  That’s hardly an exhaustive list… just 2 little quickies for anyone reading this ;)