When I installed Chrome on my MacBook Pro, Firefox was my primary browser. During the installation process of Chrome, you are asked if you want to import bookmarks, history, etc from another browser. I said yes to copy over my bookmarks and history from Firefox. This gives you the power of Google search on your browsing history.

This isn’t really anything “new”, other browsers have been doing history and providing search on your history for ages, but not with this type of interface, speed or accuracy! I was able to go back as far as Sunday – September 20, 2009. I just opened Firefox to confirm the depth of the history settings (waited 30 seconds for it to open) and it seems they took that level of control away. Now, it seems, you only have the choice of recording or not recording history. My guess is the range is something like 90 days. Oh well.

A useful hotkey (Cmd + Y) opens the Chrome history manager where you get complete information on your browsing history.

Keep in mind that the History page doesn’t store pages from secure websites, those you’ve visited in incognito mode, or those you’ve deleted from your browsing history.

Rakefile features:

• Clear and generate tasks that clear and generate new styles (via Compass)
• Preview, build tasks that preview and build the StaticMatic site using the default StaticMatic commands (I hate typing staticmatic over and over and over…)
• Deploy task using Rsync that clears the styles, generates new styles, builds the site, and finally deploys the site using Rsync

I also created a StaticMatic-Bootstrap that you are welcome to “watch” or “fork” on GitHub.

It supports: Haml, Sass, Compass and jQuery out of the box and comes with said Rakefile noted in this post.

Laziness is a trait of a good developer.

When I started to use Wordpress again, I WAS NOT excited about using the FTP protocol to ship off changes to my theme. I wanted a simple and easy use process to deploy updates to my theme and also automate a few processes that I needed to support as part of using Sass and Compass to create my CSS styles.

What’s the alternative? FTP? Nope. Typing the rsync command by hand each time? Nope again.

This is a simple Rakefile I wrote that helps me to do all this in simple and concise manner.

Features:

• Clear and generate tasks that clear and generate new styles (via Compass)
• Deploy task that clears the styles, generates new styles and finally deploys the theme using Rsync

It’s 21 lines and simple to use. Besides, $ rake deploy is much better than what most WordPress users are doing to deploy updates to their theme. Capistrano could work too, but IMO would be over-kill. Rsync is a much better fit, and using the --delete option ensures that you delete files that don’t exist on the sending side. Keeps it simple and clean.

This Rakefile is a bit opinionated and assumes you’re using Sass and Compass. You could fork and update this Gist to suit your own setup, but if you want the scoop on using Sass and Compass with WordPress check out the Compass-WordPress extension on GitHub.