Out with the old, in with the new. 2008 was, by far, the hardest working, yet most productive year of my life. I have been fortunate to discover an incredible useful array of different tools that have made my life as a web developer MUCH easier. Now, I want to share them with you!

Here they are:

Rescue Time

Over the past two months, I have been using an online tracking program called RescueTime which has allowed me to track how long I am working and how productive my work has been. Rescue Time allows you to assign numerical productivity values to different tasks, so it has ben useful to see how efficient my time spent on the computer has been.

You can use this to keep track of how often you are slacking off, or how long you are spending on a particular project.

Coda

Coda is a text editor + file transfer + svn + css editor + terminal + resource center. It is by a software company called Panic and it is only for Mac. Why do I use Coda?

It is extremely easy to manage and work on multiple projects with its visual CSS editor and built in file transfer. Combined with Apple Mail and Photoshop, Coda is my MOST used application. You can check it out how awesome Coda is here.

Twitter

Twitter is great for getting new ideas. I follow a wide variety of other talented web developers, so it is always interesting when they tweet what tools they are using to make their jobs easier. Many of the tools on this list I found only through following people on Twitter. You will see Twitter go mainstream in 2009, meaning it will receive significant press coverage and more non-tech savvy people will start using it. Don’t forget to follow me and UBD on Twitter!

1Password

If you are a developer that works with clients, you know the pain of having to keep track of hundreds if not thousands of passwords. 1Password is the solution for managing A LOT of passwords. Again, if you are not a Mac user, you are out of luck.

1Password is also universal across all the browsers on your system, so if you use FireFox and Safari, you have will have access to the same passwords in both browsers.

MAMP

The abbreviation MAMP stands for: Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP. With just a few mouse-clicks, you can install Apache, PHP and MySQL for Mac OS X! If you setup lots of client sites, you will appreciate the speed of being able to test files on your own system.

Since installing MAMP, I have saved a lot of time from having to upload to various test servers.

Those are my top 5 web development tools from 2008. What tools do you use that makes your job as a web developer easier?

I’ve been beta testing WordPress 2.7 for the past few weeks and I have to admit, I am impressed to my highest degree of geek. It is so much cleaner looking, has cool new functionality, and the fact that you can upgrade and download new plugins from with the WP Dashboard is pretty sweet.

Check out this video which explains how cool WP 2.7 actually is:

Most people are not comfortable with making big upgrades to their blogs, but I have been testing WP 2.7 pretty extensively with all of our WP Themes including Citrus Theme and the UBD Moneymaker Theme, and it has been working perfectly.

Download WordPress 2.7 Here

If you are using WordPress 2.7 now, what is your favorite new feature? Run into any weirdness? Tell us about your experience.

I was lucky to meet the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, at Blog World Expo last year.

Matt is one of the founders of Automattic, the company that makes WordPress. I wrote an article over a year ago about how Matt was changing the web at age 21 with the massive popularity of WordPress as the bloggers’ platform of choice.

I first started using WordPress back in November of 2006, almost two years ago. It is amazing how far WordPress has come in the past few years, both in regards to its software and how widely used it is being used. Major companies like Sony, General Electric, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal are now using WordPress for major sections of their websites. That’s quite the list of clients.

WordPress just stepped up the game, once again, with the incredibly quick release of version 2.6. – a full month ahead of schedule. Version 2.6 offers many more useful features, including:

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

Rather than tell you about all of the new features, check out this video:

The WP 2.6 upgrade for the UBD blog and my blog were absolutely painless. I strongly recommend everyone check out the new version of WordPress.

I’ve been playing around with another piece of Automattic software lately that is not as well-known as WordPress. I will be writing about that experience in my next post!

• Download WordPress 2.6 at wordpress.org.
• Upgrading? Read this guide on upgrading WordPress.
• Learn more about WordPress 2.6 here.