If you have an active Subversion repository with a few users, you may be interested in this article that will show you how to Server your Subversion activity as an RSS feed. The instructions are for OSX, but I’m sure with a bit of modification, it would work fine on any UNIX based OS.

I recently had to install GIMP on my MacBook Pro, and the step to install X11 temporarily stumped me. So I though I would share a little OSX gotcha that will help you install X11 if you should ever need to.

X11 is a UNIX windowing system that allow developers to create graphical user interfaces on the UNIX operating system. It also allows UNIX users to view these GUI’s. As OSX is UNIX based, X11 allows your Mac to run the thousands of applications that were created to use X11.

The steps to install X11 on OSX are pretty simple. Insert your OSX Install Disk #1. A finder window will open that will show you all the installers and folders on the disk. Here is the gotcha though - to install X11, you have to double-click on the Optional Installs package. However, due to the organization of the icons in the finder window, you must scroll down to find the Optional Install icon. I swear I missed this at least 3 times while trying to install X11.

Hope this tip saves you some time!

SizzlingKeys for Mac OS X lets you control iTunes from the keyboard using global hot keys.  You can pause the player, skip a track or rate a song by using simple customizable keystrokes.  You can also search your iTunes Library or Playlists with a simple keystroke.

iCarousel is an open source JavaScript tool for creating carousel like widgets.  Based on the MooTools JS library, iCarousel is a nice widget with lots of possibility for customization.

One nice feature of Flex Builder is the design view mode where you can visually create your UI’s dragging and dropping UI components onto a canvas.  If your Flex workflow doesn’t include Flex Builder (ie. you work from the command line) you should check out FLEXible.  It is a sweet Flex application by John Grden that lets you visually create your MXML for use in your Flex projects.  Check out the screencast to see how cool this is.

Softies on Rails has a great article titled - The Absolute Moron’s Guide to Capistrano - that will show you how to deploy your next Rails app using the popular Capistrano tool. Capistrano basically automates the SSH-subversion-checkout method for your application to a single and/or multiple servers.

Cal Henderson of Flickr fame has penned a great article for Vitamin that will show you how to  Serve JavaScript Fast!  As our web applications get richer and more interactive our JavaScript files seem to grow accordingly large.  Add on to that the weight of some of the popular JS libraries, and pretty soon your page weight is up over 100K!  Follow Cal’s tips to make sure you pages load as quickly as they can.

Meri Williams has a relatively new blog called Geek|Manager that is full of great information about project management for geeks. One of her first posts - Starting Out in Project Management - is particularly relevant to me as I start my new web consultancy. Project management has always been an area of weakness. It’s not that I cannot do it, it is more that I love solving technical challenges more! The article explains quite nicely how people end up in a project management roll and then discusses how to make that transition from production guru to a PM.

Kevin Hale from Particletree reminds us about Rediscovering the Button Element. I have to admit that I rarely use the button element, but after reading his article I think I’ll start to use it more. One perceived advantage is that it allows you to create buttons that render exactly the same across all platforms.

time.onrails.org is a free online time tracking tool.  It has pretty basic functionality but could be good for simple time tracking on a limited number of projects.  The service is hosted, but you can export your data at anytime to Excel (CSV) or XML.