These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.
It turns out it’s quite a birthday day today. Â Not only GitHub is being five, but Gmail is being nine! Â Between the two of them, that’s a lot of my screen time right there. Â Anyways, happy birthday Gmail. Â Please stay free and awesome, and thank you for all the time you saved me with your excellent spam filters.
GitHub is five years old. Â I find it really difficult to believe that the service I rely on so heavily, both at work and at home, haven’t even been around so recently. Â I use GitHub both at work, and at home. Â In fact, every single piece of development I do, even if that’s just for a one time bash oneliner, I start it with a new git repository. Â And more often than not, that repository ends up being pushed to GitHub.
Happy birthday, guys! Â Please keep doing what you are doing. Â It obviously works for millions of people.
I just came across Alex King’s announcement of his new plugin – Threads:
I’ve just released an initial beta of Threads, a WordPress plugin I’ve been working on for about a year. The idea is simple: show posts that comprise a single overall story/topic in a timeline. Then link to that timeline from the posts so that your readers have a chance to get more historical context about a post without you having to link back to 20 previous posts.
This sounds like an excellent idea.  Some of things that I see it being used for are event coverage posts and live blogging.  There are, of course, already plugins for WordPress to  Organize Series of posts, and to do Live Blogging.  But they each have their limitations.  Live blogging posts easily get huge.  And series do have a navigational nightmare about them.  It looks like Threads plugin aims to address those issues.
OK, maybe not an IDE just yet, but it’s not just a social network or a version control web interface anymore. Â For a while now, you could create new files, and edit existing files. Â Now, you can also move existing files around.
The implication of all these features together is that now you don’t really need to have a local working environment. Â You can work on the projects using just the GitHub’s web interface. Â Of course, it’s not the most convenient way in the world, and you’d be missing a lot of commonly used features, but still, if you are on the go, or if you have an urgent change to make when away from your usual working environment, GitHub has you covered. Â Well done, guys! Keep it up.