Category Archives: Call Me a Geek

The things I do and think about computers.

New Mac mini

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Small is beautiful.

Two weeks ago, when my old G4 went into a coma while serving up 10 Web sites, I thought it was going to require extensive (read that “expensive”) surgery to revive. If the Mac doctors had told me that, I would have let it die a dignified death and would have replaced it with a Mac Mini. With a pretty fast G4 processor and plenty of hard disk space, I could have added a bit more RAM to make it a good little server. (Emphasis on “little.”)

Mac MiniLucky for me, my sick G4 only required about $400 worth of parts and labor to bring back to near-new condition. I didn’t feel lucky then, when I was handing over my credit card, but I do feel lucky today. Why? Because Apple just released a new Mac Mini with an Intel Core Processor.

If I’d bought a Mac Mini last week when the new machine wasn’t yet available, I would have been very ticked off today.

Trackback Test

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Ignore this message.

Don’t mind me. I’m just playing with the trackback feature of WordPress to figure out how to use it properly. The linked article appears on another one of my WordPress sites, wickenburg-az.com. It’s an article I wrote a few years ago about the museum in Wickenburg.

The Desert Caballeros Western Museum is One of Wickenburg’s Treasures

NateMail

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A good e-mail form processing tool.

While I’m praising software developers, I really ought to take a moment to mention Nate Baldwin, author of NateMail. NateMail is an excellent PHP script for handling e-mail forms.

Here’s the problem. E-mail harvesting robots are programs used by spammers to gather e-mail addresses posted on the Web. They go through Web sites and pull in anything that looks like an e-mail address — for example name@domain.com. (That’ll cause some spam bouncing.) That address gets added to their spam lists and the addressee gets spam.

It doesn’t matter if the address is visible to a Web site visitor as text on a Web page or encoded as a mailto link in the source code of the page. The robot will find it and grab it.

This poses a challenge for Web site developers who want to include a contact method on their sites. If you enter your e-mail address or provide a link to it, it’ll be gathered and spammed.

Enter NateMail (and other programs like it). They work with e-mail forms like the one you’ll find on my Contact Me page and the Contact Us page on wickenburg-az.com. My e-mail address does not appear anywhere on the form, either visible to the site visitor or in the page’s source code. Instead, the form calls NateMail, which has the e-mail address embedded in it. Because NateMail is located where the robots can’t find it (outside the Web directory), my e-mail address remains invisible to the robots. This prevents my e-mail address from being harvested for spam, thus greatly reducing the amount of spam I get.

NateMail is easy to configure and use. Of course, it does require PHP to work, so if you don’t have a PHP compatible server, it’s of no use to you.

One of the neat features of NateMail is that it supports multiple e-mail addresses. So a form can include a menu of addresses and NateMail will send the form to the addressee that’s selected by the sender. You can see this on wickenburg-az.com, where I used it to allow mail to be sent directly to the site’s regular contributors.

NateMail is free, although donations are always accepted. I liked NateMail so much that I bought Nate’s other program, ProcessForm, for $15. It does what NateMail does and more, including accepting file attachments. When I have time, I’ll set it up on wickenburg-az.com so visitors can e-mail photos for publication on the site.

Hard Disk Project Done

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And problems gone (knock wood).

If you’ve been following this topic, you know that I was having hard disk problems and decided to resolve them by reformatting my hard disk and reinstalling all my software from scratch.

After some problems getting Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger to install properly — I think there were scratches or dust on the disc — I was finally able to start installing software on my hard disk. iLife ’06 went first because I needed to work with iWeb for a project and I wanted to get my iPhoto library back online. One by one I pulled out the original program discs for my big software products: Microsoft Office, Photoshop, and InDesign. And then I pulled out the archives I use to save the original installers for downloaded software like Fetch, Nicecast, Audacity, and others. It took me most of the day last Wednesday to get the job 75% done. I’ll do the rest as I need to.

One thing that disappointed me was that I couldn’t find my original Auto F/X Photographic Edges disc. I use that product to add interesting edges to photos on wickenburg-az.com. But I poked around on the Web and found an old article (and here’s another one) that explained how to add interesting edge effects with various built-in Photoshop filters. I created an effect I liked, turned it into a Photoshop action, and can now apply it without the overhead of the Auto F/X package.

It took quite a while to get all my music and photos from the backup hard disk to my nice, clean hard disk. But everything transfered over without problems and I can access everything just like I could before the reformat.

The result of all this work and worry? My computer is running great, with no unexplained pauses, unexpectedly quitting applications, or lockups. Was it worth it? Of course it was!

WordPress Power

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I start to tap into the power of WordPress for Web publishing.

WordPress is an Open Source blogging tool. At least that’s how it’s promoted. But it’s so much more than that.

WordPress is a highly customizable Web publishing platform. With WordPress, a server, and a little ingenuity, you can build a Web site with nicely formatted static and dynamic pages. New content can be added by anyone you give access to. Site visitors can add comments — if you allow them to. Best of all, because it’s based on a blog engine, blogging features apply: date-based content display, automatic archiving of content, support for pinging and trackbacks — the list goes on and on.

I started getting a real feel for WordPress when I started rebuilding wickenburg-az.com, a Web site I have been maintaining since 1999 to provide information about the town I live in, Wickenburg, AZ. I started off keeping it simple, choosing a nice looking theme called Connections by Patricia Muller to control the appearance of the site. I immediately started tweaking the theme, changing the link colors and the header image. Then, after I had some content added, I continued tweaking by adding more features: automatic article author images, Webcams, random list of articles on topics pages, random header images, site statistics, weather, donation button, calendar of upcoming events, and Technorati tags. I added some “under the hood” features, too: comment spam protection, automated database backup, and sticky posts (which can glue a post to the top of the Home page until I release it). Right now, I’m trying to add the Users Online feature I have on this site, but I’m running into a page formatting problem and still need to work out the details to get it to work.

Every change I make to the site teaches me something about the way WordPress works. I learn more about HTML, PHP, CSS, MySQL, and Apache every day. For years, I’ve avoided digging deeply into advance Web publishing coding because I knew so little about it. Now I’m forcing myself to learn by working with it daily. I love the challenge. And I love applying the things I learned yesterday to the things I do tomorrow.

I’ll be writing more about WordPress in the weeks to come, so if you’re a WordPress user or are just curious about it, I hope you’ll keep checking in. Together, we’ll learn more about this great Web publishing tool.