Develop Websites with Bluefish

Linux is at the forefront of web development, and Ubuntu is a great distribution to use to build and design a website for the first time. Recently, I've been developing web applications using frameworks, and Linux in general makes these things quite a bit easier. Therefore, I figured I should present some of the basic tools you can use to create, develop, and host a website. This may abstract a bit away from the idea of "applications" in and of themselves, but I thought you may all be interested anyway.

The most logical first step for most users is selecting a development environment. Today, I'll highlight Bluefish. Later on, I'll focus on a WYSIWYG editor. (Which, by the way, is kind of difficult to find. Please, if you have any ideas, leave a message in the comments.)

Of course, to put your webpage on the Internet, you'll probably want to use a reliable web hosting. There's about a million out there, and it's hard to figure out the differences between them. I used to have a site on Bluehost, but I eventually cancelled because I thought their support was poor, and I didn't want to fax in a copy of my driver's license just to have SSH access so I could use Rails. I switched to ThinkHost a few months ago, and I've been really happy thus far. They offer reliable Linux hosting with unlimited bandwidth, space, and domains. Better yet, the servers are powered with wind and solar energy, and they plant a tree on your behalf.

Bluefish is a code editor, so users should have a basic understanding of XHTML and CSS, along with any other development languages. I learned HTML rather painstakingly from an outdated code reference, and I don't recommend you do it that way. Instead, try HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide published by O'Reilly, which can help even the most talented developer learn new tricks. In fact, it taught me all about the <label> tag, and I felt kind of dumb for previously embedding form labels in only a paragraph tag and wrestling with CSS, but alas...

One of the nicest things about Bluefish is that it uses 30 to 45 percent less memory than other editors. This makes quick edits less of a hassle. Sometimes, other editors can be too clunky, and I found myself reverting to a console-based text editor to make a minor change, but Bluefish should stop this from happening. It has built-in project support, so you can easily open multiple files and keep them organized in the right path. It has all the standard stuff, like line-numbers, search and replace, and code highlighting for languages like HTML, Ruby (go Rails!), Python, and PHP. Best of all, the menu bar allows you to instantly drop in code that developers use often.

Bluefish allows you to connect to a remote server and edit files, so here's a quick guide to using Bluefish with ThinkHost. This tutorial assumes you are using GNOME, though I'm sure you can do the same thing with KDE.

1. Click on the "Places" menu, and select "Connect to Server...".
   


2. In the dialog box, type in your FTP address in the "Server" box. You should be prompted for a username and password.
   


3. Now, open up the mounted server in Bluefish, and now you can easily edit and save all of your files on Thinkhost.

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Cook Tasty Meals with Krecipes

Krecipes is an Ubuntu linux recipe manager that has slowly saved me from starvation. Now that I'm in my first year of graduate school, I decided that I better learn how to cook so I can save time in between class. Because of Krecipes, it's been a long time since I've eaten Ramen.

So here's the skinny: yes, pun intended. Krecipes allows you to manage a complete recipe database, and lets you track calories and carbohydrates, which is important for pretty nerds. You can also generate a shopping list, so you don't wonder around the grocery store aimlessly like I do. It's based on MySQL, so it's flexible and you could easily extend it in the future.

Krecipes is installable from the official repositories. Search for "krecipes" in Synaptic, or click here, or type in the Terminal:


sudo apt-get install krecipes


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Save Your Amazing Ideas With Basket

Basket allows you to organize and take notes through a clean, accessible interface. This program is a must-have for any Ubuntu user in college, and definitely beats shoving all of your notes into a text editor or word processor.

It allows you to just click and type text. Further, you can paste links, images, files, addresses, and colors, which is useful for people in web or application development. Organization follows a hierarchy status, using baskets sorted by topic or project. All ideas support tagging, making it really easy to come back to where you were before and reconstruct previous notes. It allows password protection, and notes are automatically saved as you type them, so a power outage at the university will only bring glee at getting out of class early. This application is meant for KDE, so you may have to install some dependencies if you are a GNOME user. Install by searching for "basket" in Synaptic, by clicking this link, or by typing "sudo apt get install basket" in the Terminal.

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Create Killer Tracks with Hydrogen

Hydrogen is a really cool drum machine for linux. This Ubuntu application allows you to create professional tracks by programming drum patterns. It is multitrack enabled, meaning that you can add up to 64 tracks worth of music data to your beat. You can use 32 instrument tracks, and they are multilayered (meaning that there can be up to 16 samples for each instrument).

Generally, drum machines sound a little cold and really different from the way a real person would play the drums. Hyrdogen gets around that by adding in unique human velocity, human time, pitch, and swing settings, giving the song and drum track a much warmer feel. With that, you can make the perfect song to export to Audacious or Amarok.

Hydrogen is included in the official repos, so you can install it from Synaptic, by clicking this link in Firefox, or by entering the following command:


sudo apt-get install hydrogen




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