Howdy, this is my personal online journal for whatever I feel like writing about.
A fix for Textile on Wordpress
Sometime a few months back DreamHost and BlueHost upgraded something that broke the Textile plugin for Wordpress. I finally found a fix with a beta Textile upgrade. Set it to “classic mode” and it all works great.
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Flash loader for Linksys WRT54G v5
Found a way to upgrade the newer routers. It’s a hack that allows you to flash over linux. Be warned, I couldn’t get the TFTP push to work on my Mac, but it worked fine from Windows. Actually, it was from Windows running on my Mac via Parallels.
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How to make your blog more conversational
Excellent article from Editor and Publisher, aimed at more traditional websites, but equally applicable to blogs. Gives some good pointers on how to encourage readers to participate, ask questions, comment and so forth.
Any time you can get people engaged in a conversation you are going to drive more traffic, create a community, and benefit from the network effect.
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The Benefits of Posting on a Regular Schedule
I was talking to a successful blogging friend of mine at Gnomedex today about his thoughts on whether or not posting frequency and timing was important. Basically, I’ve been wondering if I’m only going to post 7 stories in a week, is it better to post them all at one, metered out 1 per day, or does it matter?
His thinking is that posting on a regular schedule “trains” Google’s crawlers to expect your posts and look for them more frequently. If you go a week or more between posts for example, the Google crawlers won’t bother checking back with you daily.
Of course this is all conjecture, but the theory is sound. Google’s got a lot of crawling to do, and they can’t crawl everything every day, so it make sense that they are going to have some sort of heuristic based on update frequency.
My friend’s blog shows up within 24 hours, and he’s been posting at the same time of day for the last couple of years, so this would seem to support his theory.
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The Importance of Backlinks
Having a good backlinks (a.k.a inbound links) is a very important part of getting your website noticed by not only the search engines, but the public at large. There’s an excellent article over at webconfs.com that covers this quite well:
Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Also knows as Inbound links (IBL’s). The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.
The article also provides a warning about the popular practice of recipricol linking:
There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal linking. In the last Google update, reciprocal links were one of the targets of the search engine’s latest filter. Many webmasters had agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges, in order to boost their site’s rankings with the sheer number of inbound links. In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while the irrelevant inbound link was ignored, the outbound links still got counted, diluting the relevancy score of many websites. This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.
Other goodies include pointers to some backlink tracking and analysis tools, discussion of the important of link text, and more. See also the article on building backlinks.
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Access your Mac drive under virtual Windows
If you have been using the Parallels Desktop virtualization software to run Windows XP on your Intel Mac you may have noticed that their hacky “PSF Network” solution to accessing your Mac drive under Windows blows. Don’t get me wrong – I’m very impresses with the rest of the package, and you can’t beat the price. But it just flat at doesn’t work.
Turns out that’s ok, cause there is an easy work around. Just use the Mac’s built in support for Windows file sharing (via samba) to access your drive. Under Mac OSX just enable “Windows File Sharing” from your Sharing preferences pane. Then, under Windows I mount my home directory by accessing \iMac\duane, enable reconnect at login, and ta-dah.
Yes it seems a little odd to share files between two operating systems running simultaneously on the same computer, but hey – it works great.
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Selecting an Apple Boot Camp disk format
I recently installed Boot Camp on my new Intel iMac, and it works fabulously. The big dilemma that I (and others it seem) have is how to best allocate the drive space between the Mac and Windows partitions. So many variables to deal with. I want to have enough disk space in Windows to get my work done, but I’m also stingy and don’t want to give away too much of my Mac drive’s space since it is my primary operating system. In this post I’ll try to explain what I learned and what I came up with.
Continue reading “Selecting an Apple Boot Camp disk format”
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Sharing a Printer between Mac and Windows with Bonjour
While in theory, if I have enabled printer sharing on my Mac, the printer should be available to Windows machines on my local network. In practice however, I’ve never been able to get this to work. I can get Windows to think its submitting jobs, but they never make it into the queue. I’m not sure if the problem is on the Mac side or the Windows side, but I’m putting my money on Windows being at the heart of the problem.
In any case, I finally found an ideal solution with Apple’s Bonjour technology (formerly Rendevous). Bonjour lets you create an instant network of computers and devices just by getting them connected to each other. The computers and devices take over from there, automatically broadcasting and discovering what services each is offering for the use of others. This is the same magic that makes iTunes auto-discover other iTunes clients on the network. With Bonjour services installed on your Windows machine, you can magically discover your shared Apple printers on the network. It’s a brain dead setup/install process:
- From your Mac’s Sharing preferences pane, make sure that Printer Sharing is enabled.
- On your Windows machine, download and install Bonjour for Windows
- After installing, click on the “Printer Setup Wizard” shortcut installed by Bonjour on the Windows desktop
- Select your printer from the list of network devices found by Bonjour
- Select “Generic PostScript Printer” (the default) as the printer type
I’m not too clear on why you need to use generic postscript driver rather than the native driver, but you do. I tried using the native driver for my Canon i960 but it failed to print. I’ve seen several other folks reporting this as well. It’s even selected by the Wizard by default. In any case, it works well with full color support and so forth.
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Speed Reading Techniques
Ran across an interesting post on speed reading techniques the other day that was particularly interesting. More than just techniques, it presents several strategies and even philosophy shifts that can make reading not only faster, but better. For example, consider this advise on “pre-reading” the book before beginning:
Take ten minutes or less and pre-read the entire book. Go ahead and try this if you’ve never done it before. Treat a book like a jigsaw puzzle. Dump it out, then organize all the pieces first before putting it together. Read the dust cover and any cover reviews. Then look through the author blurb. Move to the Table of Contents and see if you can figure out the whole book from this page. Page through the entire book, page by page and glance through all summaries, tables, pull-out quotes, diagrams(especially), and scan through all the section titles and you go.
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MacOS X Sleep Problems with USB Hubs
Why can’t I find a USB hub that will let my computer sleep properly? I recently bought a USB 2.0 hub when I upgraded to the Intel iMac. The hub works great, but it keeps the computer from sleeping while idle. I had the same problem on my G4. It took me about a half dozen hubs (USB 1.1) to find one that worked properly.
That old hub works fine on the iMac,but it is of course USB 1.1. That’d be fine except I have an external drive connected which is pretty much worthless at USB 1.1 speeds. Swapping in the new hub is the problem. D-Link claims that it fully supports the Mac, but I guess their flexible on this point. To me, its a show stopper.
I do NOTWANT to leave my Mac on all the time. I WANT it to behave! Anyone have any brand/model of USB hub that they have had success with? The D-LINK DUB-H7 hub I’m using is powered, and seems to be pretty high quality. It’s got 6 of the 7 ports used (scanner, printer, UPS, keyboard/mouse, card reader, drive), but nothing else magical.
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