The book called “Pragmatic Programmer, The: From Journeyman to Master” about software engineering and best practices was first published in 1999. This book was written by two experienced programmers and writers Andrew Hunt and David Thomas who are both known for their big income in respectively agile techniques and Ruby programming language.  The Pragmatic Programmer tries to gather all the necessary characteristics of a programmer that creates high quality, easy to reuse and bug free software solutions.

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I just love this minimalistic and easy to use program that helps you to have your most used snippets in one place. I have written about it more on the article about other snippet programs. However, after some time it got to my mind that there are not any backup functionality. In my opinion, it is a big disadvantage of this program, but you can create a backup manually.

I have found that Snippely saves its database in catalog on Windows 7: C:\Users\{Your user name}\AppData\Roaming and you can make the copy of this file for some later use. I have tried to reinstall fresh copy of the program and the backup worked just fine.

Just do not forget to create those backups constantly!

I have already written about my favorite snippets tools Snippely, however I have had a strange bug recently. I opened the Snippely and it was showed on taskbar, but I could not get to my snippets or open the dialog box of this program.

After some research I have found that you need to press alt + space after you select the icon from the taskbar and then choose maximize from the pop up menu. That’s all – you can now use your snippets program as usually.

I hope this helps someone having the same issue.

I have found a great and simple Newsletter Tab on PrestaShop forum, however the author have not changed anything for couple years and adding tab like that was a pain in a neck so I have created a module to do this automatically and cleared some features of that admin tab.

Module features:

• Send emails to your PrestaShop customers
• Send newsletter email on their birthday
• You can use variables for your emails to make it more personal: %FIRSTNAME% – %LASTNAME% – %MAIL%
• Works good with your server because there is an ability to add delay on sending emails
• You get a detailed information about the process when it is finished
• You can check all checkboxes and the script will automatically filter duplicate emails.

Here is a screenshot:

Download: Newsletter Tab Module for PrestaShop 1.4.4 v1.1

UPDATE v1.1: 2011-06-22:

• Added automatic translastions to the admin tab class
• Added ability to choose parent tab for your Newsletter tab
• fixed some mistakes

UPDATE v1.1: 2011-06-29

• Mistakes regarding configuration and parent tab selecting form for 1.4.3 were fixed.

UPDATE v1.1: 2011-08-15

• Deleted some unnecessary functions for better and easier installation.
• Tested and works fine with versions 1.4.3 and 1.4.4.

Download: Newsletter Tab Module for PrestaShop 1.4.4 v1.1

Leave feedback and comments if you want more functionality or have problems.

Office workers constantly use a wide variety of documents for their job, designers have reviews of their work and programmers must prepare some specifications about their completed job or a plan before the start. And there is one solution for everything that I mentioned – cloud based documents review for free web application.

You do not even need to register in order to start using it. You can upload a file in a seconds or get a screenshot from the specified URL at once. Moreover, if you just want to try it, you can see available demos.

On every page you can add three types of comments. It’s functionality is similar to Microsoft Word comments where you just add a comment with simple click. In addition, at CrocoDoc you can mark an area of the document or if it is a text document, mark the text in it. You are able to draw lines and add colorful, different sizes text. You can even strikeout or highlight text if document type is right.

Try everything for yourself and visit Crocodoc.

WordPress has become widely used blog and CMS platform in recent years. However, with it’s functionalities and new capabilities users need to cope with less performance, bigger server resources and increased page-load times. However, we can make something to make the situation better and I will introduce you to many WordPress optimization tricks and tips varying from using less plugins to database and server optimization.

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mPDF is a simple and popular tool for shared hosting users to create and convert UTF-8 encoded HTML pages to PDF files. In other words mPDF is a PHP classes based on FPDF and HTML2PDF tools which purpose is the same – to create and manage PDF documents using simple PHP. It’s worth mentioning that on some basis mPDF is slower and can produce bigger PDF files than its predecessors, however it has many capabilities and simpler to use for daily basis.

By using mPDF you have to create an HTML file structure which will be converted to PDF format file. You can also use some CSS coding and improve your files. You can find all the supported CSS attributes in this classes documentation, but I can say that you can securely use most popular and common CSS attributes for your elements. However, there are some restrictions using HTML tables and styling text inside cells.

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Every amateur or advances programmer has some kind of code that he constantly uses and implements into different applications or projects. However, I was quite surprised that there are people who manages their snippets in folders with the readme files that help to get basic information about class or function. So I have decided to find some applications to help you better manage code snippets and fasten their usage.

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Lichess is another free game for chess players. You can not only play with people connected at the moment, but to also generate a unique link and invite your friend for a match.

However, the game is not the main purpose. I suggest you to view the source code kept in GitHub and see a live example of Symfony 2 and PHP5.3 usage. I think that this kind of example beats all the simple and sometimes written with mistakes articles and tutorials on the Internet. It’s worth looking and you might try Symfony2 for yourself if your hosting provider supports PHP 5.3.

If you ever wanted to make your WordPress browsing experience better for smartphone users, you should consider using WPtouch plugin.

After you have installed this plugin to your WordPress installation you will be able to choose default language for your website. Plugin comes with three languages (English, Spanish and French) by default, but you can translate everything by yourself because there is .pot file included (go to lang/src folder).

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