Unfuddle's forums has a discussion on alternate Subversion clients for Mac users.

SCPlugin is a free Subversion plugin that integrates with the Finder, and works similar to TortoiseSVN (a Windows SVN explorer plugin). Syncro SVN is a commercial standalone SVN client ($60) that works on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Most Mac users use the svn command line program, but I know from experience how handy TortoiseSVN is for me to visually view the state of my working folder, compare files, and other operations.

TechTarget has an article on how to set access control lists to define default file permissions. This came in handy for us, as we have several developers who work on our sites. The default file permissions would get annoying, as developer A would create some files which only he could edit, so developer B would have to use sudo to change the file permissions to a developers group.

With the TechTarget article, now all newly created files in our code directory are owned & editable by the developers group, making shared development much easier.

If you need to recursively FTP files (e.g. you're pulling down data, or doing offsite backups), take a look at lftp. It's normally available on Linux boxes. One nice thing is that by default it will only transfer changed/new files. You can use it in a script or cron job.

Rimuhosting has a nice FTP overview on how to use it.

ncftp is another, more powerful FTP client that is also worth checking out.

Another helpful page, using the Unfuddle API. Now users can submit a ticket into an Unfuddle project without having to log in.

We've been using Unfuddle for a while and have been pretty happy with it, although we always felt that the built-in RSS feeds didn't have enough information. Recently they released an API, and so we decided to make a new Unfuddle Project RSS feed, using PHP, that displayed richer information like times, people, and comments.

To install, edit the settings near the top of the PHP page to use your domain name, login, project id, etc, then load onto a friendly local PHP server. It requires PHP 5 due to use of the SimpleXML extension.

One thing to note -- the file doesn't contain any caching mechanism because different PHP hosts have different things available. So feel free to add in caching support, or lmk & I'll upload a version with caching included.

So I ran across a 7-month-old blog post from Guy Kawasaki on how Truemors.com cost him around $12,000 to launch.

Basically, it's a straightforward site where people can submit news, rumors, buzz, etc. It's a modified version of WordPress, allowing anonymous posting, and it's nice looking. A few thoughts based on the article:

• Note how even though the post is "old", the message is still relevant.
• Note how 30-40% of his costs were on legal fees (!)
• Note how he didn't have to spend a ton of money on development -- he whipped together a simple, easy, user-generated content (UGC) web site by modifying existing packages. That's what we do for building social networks, and it saves our clients a ton of money.
• Note how he didn't do a big up-front plan -- he just did it. Then again, the cost was so low that it probably wasn't worth doing a large business plan.
• Note how the site took off due to his contacts and connections (and a bit of luck?), not due to any killer feature.

Next Open Coffee Club meeting is on January 23rd, downtown stumptown, at 10am. Meet up with other web-savvy folks and have a great cup of joe, too. A win-win!

Read more here: http://eventful.com/events/E0-001-004481519-5

And at www.opencoffeeclub.org

As an IT manager, you'll have team members who initially aren't able to get things done as quickly as you or other experienced team members can. A good portion of that productivity gap is due to their lack of your codebase, development process, etc. So one way you can speed their progress is to ensure that they have access to domain knowledge through a wiki, training videos, documentation, shadowing other programmers, etc.

There's an old joke about how knowledge is most of the battle.

There was a business whose expensive machine suddenly stopped working. Since the machine was vital to daily operations, they called in an expert to do the repairs. The expert looked at the machine, checked a few settings, pulled out a hammer, and rapped the machine lightly on the side. The machine instantly sprang to life and the business was able to move forward with its work.

The delighted business owner said, "Great, what do I owe you?" to which the expert replied "That'll be $100."

"100 dollars?" the owner cried. "But you were only here for 5 minutes! $100 for one swing of a hammer doesn't seem worth it."

So the expert quickly wrote up an itemized invoice and handed it to the owner. The owner reviewed the invoice, sighed, shrugged, nodded, and paid the expert his $100.

On the invoice were two line items:

Swinging the hammer -- $1
Knowing where to swing the hammer -- $99

One of the things I do is help new team members know "where to swing the hammer" by suggesting approaches, resources, or even the particular modules, files, & functions that they would probably be working with. I ease up on that direction as they come up to speed, but I feel it's valuable initially to help new people focus in on the problem and still get things done. I'm not robbing them of a chance to learn the systems, since I'm only providing a high-level suggestion, and they'll still be working on the code in depth.

Happy New Year folks. And, here's an interesting link to some Joomla! 1.5 performance testing. I find it interesting because

1. Joomla! 1.5 beta 2 was slower than good ol' Joomla! 1.0.13 RC
2. There were discussions of a number of PHP caching techniques which can be applied to any PHP system

The caching techniques covered were "file caching" (which sounded like filebased output buffering aka Cache_Lite_Output to me), Alternative PHP Cache (APC), eAccelerator and Memcache. xcache was mentioned in the comments but not tested.

So if you're interested in a quick overview & comparison of some PHP cachine techniques, go ahead and read the article ... I found it interesting that despite memcache's reputation, its performance fell behind other caching methods.

When search results are displayed on Google, the descriptive text below the page title is called the snippet. See example below:

Matt Cutts from Google recently videotaped a bunch of impromptu tech-oriented videos (I think he stole the idea from me <g>), one of which was how Google comes up with the snippet. Hint: it's not always your meta description tag, and sometimes it's even your DMOZ description! :/

You can view the video, or view notes courtesy of Eric Enge. I personally prefer to skim notes in 2 minutes instead of watching a 10 minute video, but that's just me...

I recently ran across three Facebook application generators that allow you to quickly generate a Facebook app from your existing Clearspring widgets, Widgetbox widgets, or Dapps (content feeds).

Clearspring's Facebook App Generator

Widgetbox's App Accelerator 

Dapper's Facebook App Maker 

Building a Widget inside an existing framework can be helpful for developers, as you can leverage existing APIs and distribution channels.

Thx to Mashable for the info. ;)