• Code Completion: While you are editing an HTML, CSS, or PHP document, Taco HTML Edit can now suggest completions for the text you are typing. This assists in helping you remember tag, attribute, and function names. Suggested completions include a brief description of the suggested item and a link to additional documentation.
  
  
• Code Coloring: In addition to HTML and PHP, Taco HTML Edit now supports coloring for CSS and JavaScript documents. Coloring is completely configurable, and CSS coloring includes "formal" and "functional" schemes that are available.
  
  
• Tabbed User Interface: Taco HTML Edit now supports a tabbed user interface for both projects and standalone documents. The traditional interfaces are still available through Preference options.
  
  
• Enhanced Find and Batch Find: Taco HTML Edit\'s Find Panels now support regular expressions. Regular Expressions may be simple, which allows the use of an asterisk (*) as a wildcard character; alternately, the full Ruby regular expression language is available by setting a Preference option. In addition, the Batch Find has been enhanced in several respects, including improved performance.
  
  
• Open Quickly: Open Quickly allows you find files by name, without needing to know what folder the file is located in. You can choose to search only currently open files and projects, or to search your entire disk for a file. An asterisk (*) can be used as a wildcard; for example, you could search for *.php to find all files that end with the "php" file extension. Full disk searching requires Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or later with Spotlight indexing enabled. This feature is really useful! Make sure that you try it out!
  
  
• External Editor: Taco HTML Edit can now be used an an external editor for FTP clients. Please, contact the author of your favorite FTP client to make sure that Taco HTML Edit is available as an external editor.
  
  
• Finder Integration: Taco HTML Edit now supports drag-and-drop with the Finder in projects.
  
  
• Embedded Live Preview: Taco HTML Edit\'s Live Preview is now embedded into the document window. A separate window is no longer required.
  
  
• Automatic Updates: Taco HTML Edit can automatically check for updates, making sure that you have the latest features and fixes.
  
  

Click here to download the Taco HTML Edit 2 Public Beta.

The following screen shot illustrates what is happening:

I would like to start by mentioning that when I first discovered this problem, the only affected web page was www.tacosw.com. I then tried adding a permanent HTTP redirect to tacosw.com/index.php, and the result was the second spam result in the above image. Whoever is doing this is capable of adjusting quickly it would seem. The way I see it, there are two plausible scenarios for what is going on:

1. My web host (HostGator) is making money by inserting these terms as links into my web page when GoogleBot visits.
2. A spammer is taking advantage of a flaw in Google to modify search results

The first scenario can be eliminated as follows:

• Motive: HostGator would have little to gain and much to lose if it was doing this.
• Tests: I visited tacosw.com using the GoogleBot's user-agent, and no such spam links appeared
• The "www." prefix: The presence of the "www" prefix, when it probably should not be there, would indicate that this is the work of an outsider, not my own host.

From this, and in light of the previously described 302 exploit, I conclude that the second scenario describes what is happening. Someone is tricking Google to think that tacosw.com is linking to spam sites. This is presumably being done using HTTP somehow. The spammer wants to make it difficult to discover that this is going on, so it is leaving Taco Software's content intact, but just inserting spam links. The fortunate thing here is that Taco Software has not lost traffic because the spammer is leaving the content intact. However, Taco Sofware's PageRank on Google could ultimately be harmed if Google believes that Taco Software links to spam sites. Also, this could reflect badly on Taco Software if users discovered these strange terms seemingly appearing on our web pages.

If anyone can provide additional details about what is going on, or has advice about what I should do, feel free to send an email or post a comment. Your help is appreciated.

I ordered another book, Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming, which covers a little bit of everything as far as Mac OS X is concerned. It even has a couple chapters of C programming "refresher" that I desperately need (considering that I never have really learned a lot of the stuff in the first place). The book also includes information about CVS, compilers and debugging, exceptions and signals, and a bunch of other important-to-know things.

Taco HTML Edit 1.6 has the following new features:

• Improvements in Syntax Coloring, including support for PHP.
• PHP Support (requires installation of PHP Command Line Interface)
  • Preview and Live Preview of executed PHP code.
  • Check PHP syntax.
  • Check syntax of HTML from executed PHP code.
• Improved interface for syntax checking.
• Format Tags menu in toolbar for commonly used formatting tags.
• Support for transparent backgrounds.
• Shift Left and Shift Right indenting.
• Bug fixes

Well, I don't really have anything to do right now (except sleep), so perhaps it would be fun to take a look at user requests for Taco HTML Edit. Line numbers seems be a popular one. I've taken the easy route and added a "Go to Line Number" menu item in a previous release, but people want to see line numbers along-side the document. There's also spelling. For that to work, I think I'd have to find words myself and then run them through the spellchecker. By default, the spellchecker doesn't play nice with HTML (by ignoring it). It looks like someone would like to see a few more choices in the "Format Tags" menu. You know, when I removed what is now the "Format Tags" menu, and replaced it with what is now the "Quick Insert" menu, I thought that I was doing a great thing. It turns out that many people had become dependent on the "Format Tags" menu and its minimal functionality, so I put it back. I'm still surprised at the amount of feedback I got about that. Let's see ... people also want better CSS support, localization, ftp integration, better XHTML support, and better file handling in projects.

All of the aforementioned requests are pretty reasonable. The most common request for something that ain't happenin' is for Taco to be a WYSIWYG editor. It would take a team of full-time developers to do this. For those who don't know, the current live preview functionality is just borrowed from Safari.

So, what does the future of Taco HTML Edit look like? Well, uncertain at best, although I have said that before. The HTML editor market is a pretty boring one to be in because all HTML editors either do or strive to do the exact same things. As I've mentioned in previous posts, I'm going to be learning about network programming, so we'll see how that goes. The main purpose of the Taco HTML Edit project was for me to learn, and I've accomplished that; its getting to the point where most of the things I do with THE seem more tedious.

Now, I imagine that some of you are wondering, "Why don't you make THE open source?" That is a question I've heard quite a few times over the past couple years (yes, Taco HTML Edit is almost 2 years old). I would consider doing it if I knew that I no longer wanted to develop THE. However, I remain in a constant state of indecision, and the fact of the matter is that if I am going to develop THE, I want to be the exclusive developer and have the ability to charge for the product. Yes, just the ability to charge. Alright, forget the last two sentences: I'm stubborn.

Perhaps, the most interesting thing for me has been the market that Taco HTML Edit has seemingly had the most success. Now, I am aware that some power-users like THE, but THE has been especially popular with beginners with little HTML experience. I initially thought of the THE wizards (in the "Insert" menu) as being a sort-of convenience factor, perhaps revealing a few HTML features to users. Judging by all of the emails I have received from newcomers to HTML, it seems that these wizards and other THE features actually served as an important teaching device for some people.

Hopefully, I will be able to release Taco HTML Edit 1.6.0 within the next 24 hours. Thank you for your time, and a special thank you for everyone who has sent feedback in the beta testing process.