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5 surprising facts about my OS Lion install

August 10, 2011

Last night I finally installed OS X Lion. What makes this surprising: I waited three whole weeks from the time of release! A new record of personal restraint in holding off from the pain and suffering of early adoption. The tipping point for me to finally make time for an install was a Facebook update [...]

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13 essential ingredients for your blogging setup

July 8, 2011

Just like a city needs roads and sewers, a blog needs its own infrastructure. Until you’ve got the basics in place, there’s no point in busting a gut to increase traffic: even if you succeed in bringing new readers to your blog, you won’t keep them coming back. So make sure you begin by getting [...]

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The 3 essential questions every blogger should answer

July 7, 2011

Any blogger — newbie or pro — should be able to answer these three essential questions about his or her blog.

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11 best practices for managing your social network memberships

June 8, 2011
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Between the WordPress.com hack, the Honda Canada hack and the Playstation hack, I feel like my favorite online identities have been seriously compromised. Nor am I the only one: the recent attack on PBS servers has also created potential identity risks for PBS employees. So these seemed like a good time to revisit the advice [...]

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Klexi is the cheap and easy way to transfer video to your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch

May 27, 2011

If you’re heading out of town or to the gym with your iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch, and you want to load it with videos for the road, you’ve got a couple of options for filling it up with those yummy, legitimately downloaded .avi and .mkv files (which I’m absolutely, positively certain you didn’t get via Bittorrent, because [...]

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How to quickly remove unwanted tracks from your iTunes smart playlists

May 9, 2011

I like to create new iTunes playlists for lots of different purposes: for parties, workouts, for a regular day of work. In principle, the smart playlists feature works great for this — just select a couple of criteria like “added in the past 100 days” and “BPM [beats per minute] in the range of 110-150″ [...]

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Search party: 10 tips for better searching on Google and beyond

April 14, 2011

Once upon a time, before Google became a verb, people used to do this thing called “searching”. Searching was similar to googling, except that instead of getting a list of links to information you wanted, you would get a list of links to information that might or might not have anything to do with what [...]

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How my custom URL shortener taught me the 10 principles of tech support

March 30, 2011

The computer that set the standard for tech support in MY house was invented in 1975. Over the years, I’ve come to see that good tech support makes all the difference between having a great time online, and feeling awful every time you switch on a machine.

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Fixed: Troubleshooting your Thesis upgrade to 1.8 from 1.6

March 14, 2011

The short version: Has your Thesis site gotten messed up after an upgrade? The problem may be as simple as some lost settings. Use Thesis Design Options to restore them to your previous or preferred choices. It won’t take long so you don’t need to panic. And don’t forget to include your Google Analytics tracking [...]

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Create a category-specific series box with WordPress, Thesis and Organize Series

March 3, 2011

I use the terrific Organize Series Plugin for WordPress, which I highly recommend for anyone who regularly posts multi-part blog series. You can see it in action on series all over this site, such as my recent series on 7 days to inbox zero. It lets you easily add posts to a series, manages the [...]

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Mac users, meet your menu bar

February 9, 2011

Can you recognize the signs of SMBB? Selective Menu Bar Blindness affects millions of Mac users, but has yet to be widely recognized as a chronic and debilitating condition. Patient X — let’s call her “Shmalexandra” — was treated for a classic presentation of the disorder. SMBB typically presents as occlusion of the left peripheral vision, causing [...]

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