I’ve always been a member of Newsvine since it started a couple years ago. I thought it was a brilliant idea and wished I could have done something like that. Now look at them! They’ve grown to an outstanding size at a pace that blows most other news sites out of the water. You want up to the minute news on just about anything, you can go there, sign up, customize your own news area, and watch it all come streaming into your browser. Not only that, you can seed (get it? newsvine) any articles you want. And to top it all off, you can write your own columns/articles! How sweet is that! Now just about anybody can publish. Wait, is that a good or bad thing? I’ll let you decide, go check out what I have done over there so far. Nothing of my own, but I’ve created an area for Texas Tech (Newsvine) that’s so far just been mainly sports.

I’ve also taken out the Categories list below, and switched it to something I am toying with. I am mixing the newsvine site with my site, creating an always updated area for Texas Tech. I’ll eventually move this to my Texas Tech link, but for now this is a good way to test for future reuse. Just take a look below and you’ll see a list of items that you’ll see on the Texas Tech Newsvine site.

I am not going to turn this into a one vs the other or even a review of those that are most popular out there. I know there are tons, some full and rich with features and others that are super light and to the point (just editing text). But, when I am not at work using Visual Studio for my development, I am usually at home writing PHP, HTML/XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc…by hand.

With that, you usually want to find a nice editor that has the features you want and makes things as simple as possible to complete your task. Here’s a list of some very nice Text Editors for the PC:

Notepad++ (my editor of choice at the moment)
Intype
Crimson Editor
HTML Kit
Aptana
Notepad2
E Text Editor (they say will rival TextMate for the Mac, but I can’t justify paying for one when there are soooo many good ones out there that are FREE)
UltraEdit (again, why pay?)

The main reason I even started this article was because I was getting tired of the simple white backgrounds. Yeah, you can go in and change colors through some of the options, but it’s just not right. You can’t ever get the color scheme correct. So, I did a quick search for a nice theme for one of these editors…and since I already use Notepad++ as my primary Text Editor for my PC at home…I downloaded and installed Port of Ruby Blue theme. And let me tell you, this is one nice theme and it’s very easy on the eyes!!! I highly recommend this theme if you don’t want to spend endless hours trying to get your own theme complete.

Here are a couple I’ve used for the Mac:
Coda
TextMate
Bluefish

These two are kind of different in they are the WYSIWYG editor:
Amaya
Nvu (pronounced N-view)

And this is a nice little Suite of Products with both free Text Editor and WYSIWYG Editor: Trellian, Trellian WebPage, Trellian CodePad. They have a ton of other cool products too…go check them out!

Google released their new Web Toolkit last week…giving all of us JAVA Developers access to their coolness (or at least most of it that’s not still closed behind the labs at the Google Campus). I’ve finally downloaded it and run through all the documentation. Seems pretty easy…Install the latest JDK, Download the toolkit, unpack the packaged toolkit, start using the toolkit. Well, that’s what the site’s Getting Started page says.

So, getting started sounds easy…now you need to know how to set up, create a project…import this into your favorite IDE (Eclipse), and code away. They even give you a few samples (what they call the Kitchen Sink) to get started with and get use to before you start building your own apps.

There’s a lot more info on the site…so go check it out if you are interested in building great AJAX style web application using pure JAVA code that is compiled into valid JavaScript and HTML pages for final deployment.