Disclaimer: IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer)

First off, I have to say that the majority of this is paraphrased/ripped off from a short talk that Jacob Kaplan-Moss ( @jacobian) gave to a local user group I had attended. Basically all of the credit goes to him, but I thought it was important enough to make sure it found its way onto the internet in some form or another.

License your code!

The default license for anything published in the United States (and from the US) is All Rights Reserved. That basically means that if someone copies and pastes code that someone uses as example code on their blog, later, if they feel like it, they can sue you. That is obviously very bad, and likely not what the original poster intended. However, the fix for this is simple. Just include a license statement, either with the code itself or a generic one (like the one at the bottom of this page) that gives a default license for code on your site. Even if your code is on GitHub, Pastebin, etc... the default license is STILL All Rights Reserved, which means you can't use it w/o fear of legal repercussions.

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A month or two ago a friend mentioned that Sprout Social was going to start charging her for notifications when a Foursquare user checked into the business that she managed. During the conversation it came up that she and other local businesses had a need for this sort of service. I had some time on my hands and a desire to get my hands dirty with a well-known API, so I decided to write her a script to do just that.

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I've become rather enamored with the Solarized color scheme produced by Ethan Schoonover ( @ethanschoonover) lately, more for the process and attention to detail he put in than even the output itself, although the output is certainly nice too. In order to help his efforts reach more people, I've ported Solarized to NetBeans.

Ethan has kindly linked my port to the main Solarized repo on Github, and you can also access just the NetBeans portion directly at https://github.com/fentie/netbeans-colors-solarized. The colors aren't as varied as the Vim or TextMate ports, but that's due to NetBeans' lack of specificity in their theme options more than the theme itself being incomplete.

Enjoy!