The opening salvo of a sales pitch for a new FTP application that is part of the current MacHeist bundle offer, begins by criticising users for continuing with a tried, tested, trusted product that I have used for many years:

Are you still using Transmit, an app that dates all the way back to MacOS 8? Well, if so, then it’s time to make room for the new kid in town… Flow

That’s right, they open their sales pitch in that way, and continue with snipes at Transmit with reference to Transmit’s very basic text editor:

And we’re not talking about a gimped editor…

Panic’s Transmit is one of those apps that I never hesitate to upgrade. Along with hardened, mature tools like BBEDit, they have remained at the core of my day to day development work (BBEdit is even set to auto boot when my Mac starts).

Am I behind the times in my choice of tool? When I find a new tool that stands the test against those I trust, I’ll make the switch. But strip away the bells and whistles of most new tools and I generally find poor substitutes for those that already enable me to do my job.

Of course, tool choice is a personal one and there are many who would never make the same choices as me. But to go so far as to be critical of a user’s choice is an immature, insecure and ignorant form of marketing. Not the kind of company to which I want to make a professional commitment.

MTECH410 10% discount on your entire order [copy code or use]

MTECH411 20% off your order over £35 (~$56) [copy code or use]

MTECH125 25% off your order over $100

MTECH412 30% off .com domain names (can also be used on renewals and multiple year registrations) [copy code or use]

MINOR20H1 gets 20% off web hosting [copy code or use]

MINORSSL standard SSL certificates for $12.99 [copy code or use]

Click any of the above codes to have the discount automatically applied. Your discount value will be clearly displayed on your shopping cart at checkout. You may try different codes to see which one provides the best discount, but only one code can be applied to a single order.

GoDaddy codes are used at checkout, entering them into your shopping cart before you complete your order. There are no limits on the number of times you can use them, but some products and services are exempt form the discounts – in particular, items that are already on discount promotion on the GoDaddy site.

If you already have them, these older codes are no longer valid:
10% MTECH8
20% MTECH9
30$ .com’s MTECH10
25% MTECH25
10% discount MTECH1
20% off orders over £35 (~$56) MTECH2
30% off .com domain names & renewals MTECH330

What’s changed

Wordpress 2.6 compatibility: a bug that sometimes created multiple post revisions has been fixed.
Admin Interface: now looks and behaves like a WP2.6 interface
Ajax bugs: This one was particularly welcomed. The ajax elements on post write and edit pages failed to operate do to some incompatibility. Now fixed.
Formatting Filters: by default, Feedwordpress protects th original formatting of the source content. Now, we can disable this to allow the local Wordpress to apply whatever formatting and filtering it needs.
Tags: when Feedwordpress syndicates a post that has a category not available in the local blog, you can now elect to have that category created as a tag associated with th post.

There are more changes and additions, detailed at the Feedwordpress home page.

Why Feedwordpress?

Thre are a multitude of plugins available to do a similar job, but Feedwordpress has the edge for one particular function. It enables the additional insertion of Custom Fields to each syndicated post. The type and content of such fields are customisable uniquely for each source RSS feed.

This is useful for customised blog themes, such as this one. The SEO WebMonkey theme pulls details about each post from custom fields, and applies certain content and formatting rules based on those fields (the image associated with most posts, for example). For me the ability to add Custom Field content is hugely useful.

Grab Feedwordpress from the developer’s site, or the Wordpress plugin repository.

Both services enable web developers to test their web pages across multiple platforms and multiple browsers (even many versions of those browsers). Each service takes a web address and generates a screenshot of the page at that address for each of the selected browsers.

Browsershots.org free versus paid

The basic service at Browsershots.org is free, but this sometimes means you could wait for half an hour or more for your screenshots – usually depending on the browsers you have selected, and sometimes simply on how busy the network of rendering machines is at any time.

For $15, you can get priority processing which usually means 20 or so screenshots rendered in around 3 minutes (there’s a discount option if you pay for a whole year up front).