Also, I fixed the Plugin site. No more annoying test posts, and now space for my Chrome plugins!

I read an interesting article on Weblog Tools Collection today, and I thought I’d throw you my thoughts on the subject.

As all of you probably know, I seem to have some kind of issue paying for stuff online. Not that I can’t pay, but that I don’t want to pay. We were talking about this in a Flash Game Monetization thread on the forums, and you remember how I strongly opposed any kind of payment for a flash game. I don’t know why my mind is set like this, it just is. And as you can guess I’m also against paid Wordpress plugins.

I’m going to take you into some crazy metaphor now, that’s probably going to end up sounding crazy when I’m done writing, but that still illustrates my point somehow. Let’s say I want to buy a chair for my apartment/house. The vast majority of the public would go to either a furniture or a chair maker and buy one. But instead, let’s image that I know how to make chairs. If I own a large area of land with a bunch of trees on it, I could get the wood and make my own chair if I wanted to. Obviously these are skills that not everyone has, but since I know how to do this I want to use it to my advantage. So instead of going out to a furniture store, I’ll make the chair myself. Sure it might take a little longer and it might not look as nice as someone else’s could, but I have the chair I wanted and I didn’t have to spend any money.

Now let’s go back to the real world. Let’s say I own a WP site (how many do I run now?), and I want to extend its functionality in some way. I’m just like the chair maker above. I know how to make a plugin, so why should I spend my money on having someone else make it for me? Now there’s no point for every single programmer on the internet to do this, so instead I’ll post the code online for someone else to use. And if some other designer makes the same thing that I want, who am I to say no?

Now I’m not saying I can make anything. Akismet is probably the best example of this. It’s gotta be the most useful and most complex plugin out there, and I respect it for that. There’s no way I could replicate that on my own, and I accept that. But if tomorrow they decided to start charging for it, I would not pay. Yes it means I would have to moderate every individual comment I get, but this wouldn’t be an issue considering a day when I get more than 2 comments is peak traffic. Larger sites, with better business models, could afford this though.

And I guess this brings up another point. By definition, plugins extend Wordpress, they don’t provide its basic functionality. So if a plugin decides to start charging, I can just give it the boot. I’m running 19 plugins right now, but I honestly don’t consider any of them essential enough to pay for. And any of them that I really want, I could just make myself. Heck, I could make WP Ajax Edit Comments if I really wanted to. Not saying that I plan to, but I could if I wanted. (Fun fact, that plugin is charging people to use any newer version, although they left their last version online for anyone who wanted it. That’s what I use, and I hope it never breaks.)

And even if plugins do start charging for their use, there would be ways around this. As I’ve probably said before, the internet simply cannot be used for making money except in some special circumstances. People (like me) are always looking for ways to not spend money, and in most cases pirating a plugin would be easier than the alternative. Personally, this is where I draw the line, as I would rather go without something than have a pirated version of it, but not everyone is like this. I mean, if you look at programs like Photoshop, Flash, or any expensive software, you can find places to download the gigantic EXE online, so obviously a 5 KB .zip file wouldn’t deter people. Obviously this isn’t my ideal view of the internet, but these are the facts.

While I’m not saying that as a web designer I should be privileged into getting free plugins, or that furniture stores should start handing out free stuff to carpenters, hopefully you’ll understand my mentality toward the subject a bit more.

Why is it that nobody’s made one program to serve as an all-purpose multi-language web editor? You’d think there would be tons of these programs out there, since everyone would want one, but I can’t find any (for free anyway, maybe that’s why).

Let’s start with the first editor I used (besides HotDog Professional), which was CoffeeCup HTML Editor. It worked great as an HTML Editor until version 9.0, which for some reason broke a bunch of things that were never fixed. It was very good with highlighting Javascript and CSS, but has serious issues when dealing with PHP. And by issues I mean the entire page loses its syntax highlighting and CC thinks that it’s all Javascript. So I haven’t used that for a while, except a few standalone .js files.

After I began migrating away from CoffeeCup, I tried PHP Editor (creative name, I know). It had great support for PHP, and I still use it occasionally. Despite this, it only had meh support for HTML, Javascript, and CSS. It could do some syntax highlighting, but it still wasn’t great. Although it’s the second best in the list I’m giving here.

So far my favorite editor would be Notepad++. It has syntax highlighting for everything except <style> tags, and that’s what I’ve been using for everything lately. My issue with this one is that it’s trying to be too much. It doesn’t have features I’d really want like syntax suggestion, but instead supports 20+ languages. I’d rather have a specialized editor than this one.

I’ve heard good things about Aptana Studio, so I figured I’d download that one. It went really well, and its feature list looked really good, but then I found out it doesn’t support PHP at all! What’s worse is, version 1.5 did and the current version doesn’t. So after I spend all this time working to get the program running on my system, I find out it’s no better than CoffeeCup. Blah…

You’ve probably heard me praising FlashDevelop for its Actionscript editing. Let me say, this is the best program I’ve ever worked with for programming. I love its AS3 interface, it almost makes me forget how bad the language itself is. So I tried using it as an web editor. And while it does provide synax highlighting, it doesn’t have nearly as many good things as it did for the AS3 section. It wasn’t designed to be a web editor, and so I haven’t used it as one.

…and that’s basically where I am now. I’ve tried almost all the free editors on the web, and I’m not satisfied with any of them. Is there someone I’m missing, that is the heavenly program I’m looking for? I really hope so, if not I’m going to start building my own…

But that’s not all I have to talk about! As some of you may have noticed, I’ve been putting a bunch of web tutorials on YT lately. I think the quality has been progressively going up since the first one I did, and I’ve been putting more work into them now. I’ve even been getting viewers from people besides DaxterSpeed! With this in mind, I decided to start a new project (brilliant, I know), and a new channel. Check out AMPtutorials. There’s nothing there yet, but hopefully there will be sometime soon. Now I’m stuck regarding the tutorials I’ve put up. Should I delete them and reupload them on my new channel? Should I leave them up with a note to go to AMPtutorials? And should I finish up my WordPress tutorial on my current channel and then move over, or start uploading videos there, or put the entire series there? I’m not sure what to do here.

(Note: I’m not getting rid of andrewanimation, I’m just not posting tutorials there anymore)

1. Inkman
I’m ashamed to say I haven’t released a demo of this yet. But I will someday. I’m extremely close to making a demo, so you should be seeing it on websites soon.

2. This Site
I haven’t uploaded or finished the new design for this site, but for those of you who don’t know (namely everybody), I’m renaming my company, keeping the same domain though. And with that comes a redesign that adds some stuff I don’t like about the current theme.

3. WP Plugins
Funny thing, I’ve actually updated History Manager for 2.8.x, I just haven’t uploaded it yet. The reason is that I’ve been waiting to get a dedicated plugin site going, rather than just having it as a subset of AAG. But I think this is really cool: History Manager actually got a link here talking about how to implement an accordion.

Post History Manager is an oddly named plugin, but it does work great. It’s named post history manager because it’s a sidebar widget that manages 4 different kinds of “post history”; posts, comments, categories, and archives.

It’s simple, but it does work great. At first just the 4 headings are shown, but just click on any one for more and it will automatically expand “accordion” style vertically. Click on another, and the first one will contract and the next selection expand as in this example image:

Visit the Post History Manager home page

Pretty cool, eh? I’m still not too happy about its 3-star rating on the WP Plugin Repository, so if someone *cough*DaxterSpeed*cough* wants to download and vote it up, I certainly won’t object.

4. AlphAssemble
??? This is a game I’m making for a Mochi contest, and actually didn’t start until two days ago. The contest ends September 18, I’m hoping I can finish by then.

For those of you who used to follow me, you know I get really busy in September and October. But looking back…that won’t really be unusual, will it?

I know I said I wouldn’t talk about my personal life here, but this is sorta game related. I just had my last final yesterday, and summer vacation has started for me. What does this mean for you, the player? This means that for the next two months I’ll have nothing better to do (a bit of an understatement) than finish, after almost a whole year in development, Inkman’s Adventure. I’m not giving you a date on the demo, but hopefully it will be soon.

And I’ll try and get FPA into a movie this year.

PS. Best. Plugin. Ever. for Wordpress. I might just implement it here.