I finally made the switch from PC to Mac. My previous machine was an old Sony Vaio purchased in 2005. It was top of the line then, and actually worked great until about a year ago, when it inevitably began dying a slow, complicated death. The time to finally buy a new computer was fast approaching..

Continue Reading

In my article, Associate Extensionless Files with Notepad, I explain how to navigate the labyrinthine maze of Windows dialogue menus to assign Microsoft’s Notepad text editor as the opening application for files without extensions. In this post, I’ll show you how to associate any file type with any program (including Notepad) in less than five seconds.

Ready? Don’t blink, you’ll miss it.. ;)

Modify any file extension association in five seconds

Open the Windows command prompt and enter the following command:

assoc .extension=fileType

It’s that easy. What is happening here? Let’s break it down, just for fun:

• assoc — Windows file-association command
• .extension — the extension of the file for which you would like to associate
• fileType — the type of file that you would like to associate with your extension

Continue Reading

I checked my Feedburner subscriber count on April 2nd and was surprised to see that the number of RSS subscribers had dropped from around 1800 to around 1100. The next day, my subscriber count decreased again, this time to around 700. Today, my Feedburner statistics increased slightly to around 1000 subscribers. So, in the course of three days I lost around 40% of my loyal readers, according to Google Feedburner. Will I get these subscribers back? Will my Google subscriber count return to normal? Why did my Feedburner count drop in the first place? Let’s explore the issue and try to answer these critical questions.

Continue Reading

Thanks to a complete (and I mean complete) collection of screenshots graciously sent in by Brent Terrazas, I have been enlightened as to my need for Linux. Looking over the screenshots, I see a great deal of variation — more so than any of the Mac or PC browsers at my disposal — in terms of how designs are rendered on various Linux-driven browsers. The obsessive-compulsive designer in me suddenly sees an incredible need for my own Linux setup — not only for design-testing and cross-browser compatibility purposes, but also because I have always wanted to learn the ways of the Jedi..

Continue Reading

As my browser of choice, Firefox provides all the functionality I need for web design, application development, everyday surfing, and much more. With a handful of choice extensions installed, Firefox is a lean, mean “get-it-done” machine. Plus, I am always looking for new ways to boost productivity and increase efficiency. Of course, an excellent way to do this involves learning and using as many mouse and keyboard shortcuts as possible. Over the past few years, I have collected oodles of shortcut snippets for Firefox. Thus, in an effort to purge my constantly growing stash of notes, I decided to round up all of the Firefox shortcuts I could find, clean them up a bit, and post the collection online for everyone to enjoy. Drum roll please: now presenting 85 Firefox Shortcuts for Mac and PC! Enjoy..

Continue Reading

When frustration builds, and finally reaches its the boiling point, it’s nice to be able to express yourself to someone. Although I really don’t enjoy ranting about things, but when it comes to certain aspects of Yahoo!, I just can’t he’p myse’f. So, thanks to recent attempt at using My Yahoo!, it’s time to get some of this off my chest, clear the decks, and give Yahoo! (yet another) chance to clean up its act. Here are a few complaints I have against various aspects of the Yahoo! enterprise..

First and foremost, Yahoo! sends virtually zero traffic. I know this sounds painfully selfish, but I don’t understand why the top-ranking search engine finds Perishable Press worthy of around 2000 referrals per day, but Yahoo! can’t seem to justify more than a few each week. I mean come on, even good ‘ol MSN/Live manages to send a few hundred uniques per month ¹.

So that sucks, and honestly doesn’t win Yahoo! any golden biscuits from me, not that it needs them. But perhaps more relevant and disturbing is Yahoo!’s relentless army of Slurp bots. I have never seen so much unusual, unexpected, and unwanted crawl behavior from any other legitimate search-engine robot. Seriously, some of the URL requests recorded in my arsenal of Web and error logs are like from another planet or something. Where are they coming up with some of this stuff:

Continue Reading

I recently twittered my intention to switch from the Firefox browser to the sleek, new Opera 9.5. I have always used Opera as a secondary browser, especially handy for speedy jumps into cyberspace, browser testing, and taking up space on my hard drive. I have always wanted to switch completely to Opera, but for many reasons, Firefox just keeps pulling me back into its comfortable grasp..

After a quick Opera-9.5 download, I decided to install Opera in its own directory instead of upgrading my current 9-point-whatever version. Unlike some browsers, multiple installations of Opera require nothing more than separate directories (as specified during the setup process). Within moments Opera 9.5 was loaded up and running tuf. The new darker default interface is sleek and sexy, inspiring me all the more to continue my quest to switch from Firefox.

As I began configuring the new Opera with imported bookmarks, speed-dial, home-page settings, and tab groups, I found myself digging up passwords that I haven’t had to remember in years. I know that Opera is equipped with its own “Remember Password” functionality, but you still have to enter each password at least once in order for it to work. Not a big deal, and certainly nothing against Opera, but it would have been great to have been able to import all of my saved Firefox passwords (if that’s even possible). In any case, after loading up and logging in to my core collection of tabbed sites, I spent a majority of the day using Opera instead of Firefox for all of my design, admin, and surfing needs.

Continue Reading

This is great. A couple of weeks ago I twittered that I had canceled my LinkedIn account. Without going into detail, suffice it to say that my original account signup information was no longer valid and the LinkedIn support staff was unable to even locate my account, let alone reset my password or provide login access. I know the account was there, but no matter what I tried I could not login. So, without being able to update my information, my only choice was to delete the account and start over ¹.

The following week, I was finally able to setup my new account. Everything went very well, and I managed to send out LinkedIn networking invitations to quite a few people on either my Monzilla Media or Perishable Press email/contact lists ². After a successful round of building up my network, I signed off for the week and returned to my regular “offline” job as a Lab Tech.

Continue Reading

Monitoring your computer’s Internet activity is a powerful tool, enabling you to:

• keep an eye on background processes
• reveal viruses and other malware
• expose unauthorized access
• monitor running programs
• log process activity

..and much more. The best part? It’s super-easy. Here’s how I do it on Windows XP:

1. Open the command prompt and type “netstat -n 5 > scan.txt”
2. After a minute or two (or any amount of time), press Ctrl+C to stop monitoring
3. Type “scan.txt” to open the log file and check the results

Continue Reading

This unfeatured post provides information for (re)establishing wireless Internet access from AT&T/Cingular Data Service (via WAP or MEdia Net) for the HTC/AT&T 8525 mobile device. Or something. This information is useful if you are unable to connect to the Internet and receiving error messages similar to the following:

Error: Your Internet connection is not configured properly. Please verify your settings in Data Connections.

Note: Use of the following settings enables the AT&T 8525 to access MEdia Net (WAP) pages using the MEdia Net connection profile. Additional features such as Wi-Fi and device based e-mail along with other 3rd party applications may not be compatible with the proxy settings associated with the MEdia Net profile. If there are connection issues with e-mail and/or Wi-Fi, configure and use the My ISP profile to resolve connectivity issues. Please note that, configuring the AT&T 8525 to use My ISP will disable MEdia Net (WAP) web pages when My ISP is used for connectivity. However, regular Internet (HTML) web page browsing will function as normal.

Continue Reading

Oooops! Didn’t really mean to add that particular word to the Firefox custom dictionary. Better remove it now before it causes problems later on..

As one who takes full advantage of the custom dictionary in Firefox, I occasionally find myself adding nonexistent or misspelled words to the dictionary by accident. Not wanting to deal with a false negative down the road, I always take the time to stop what I’m doing, locate the custom dictionary, and remove the erroneous term. Finally getting sick of trying to remember the esoteric location in which Firefox stores the personal dictionary, I decided to make a few notes and post the information here for easy access when it happens again (and it will happen again;).

Continue Reading

This article will help beginners understand a few “feed” essentials: what they are, how they work, and how to use them..

So you are a little new to the Web. As you surf around, you keep noticing these little orange squares and multicolored boxes placed next to phrases such as these:

• Subscribe via RSS
• Subscribe via XML
• Subscribe via Atom
• Subscribe via Feedburner
• Subscribe to My Feed
• Subscribe to Main Content
• Subscribe to Comments

..and so on. Although these invitations to “subscribe” come in many flavors, they are all basically doing the same thing: enabling visitors to receive information from the site without having to manually visit the site itself. By subscribing to your favorite sites, you can stay current with updated content delivered to the “feed reader” of your choice. There are many feed readers freely available around the Web. In many cases, you can even have feed subscriptions delivered directly to your email account. We’ll talk more about different types of feed readers here in a bit. For now, let’s examine a few different types of feeds and how they might be used.

Continue Reading

If you are using Feedburner to deliver your feeds, chances are high that most — if not all — of your loyal readers have subscribed to the Feedburner-specific version of your feed’s URL. This is not a good idea for a couple of important reasons:

• Complete content-delivery failure if/when the Feedburner service goes down
• Cohesive branding strategy impossible because visitors see Feedburner’s name in feed URL instead of your own

At this point, millions of feed subscribers have Feedburner-branded feed URLs listed in their feed readers. If/when the venerable Feedburner service should ever fail, the results would be disastrous. Feedburner needs to provide a comprehensive way for content producers to deliver their feeds through user-specified channels. Currently, Feedburner demonstrates that this is possible by enabling a partial method of redirecting feed traffic to custom URLs.

Continue Reading

As Firefox continues to grow in popularity, it is inevitable that more and more users will install plugins such as Adblock and Adblock Plus. As we know, such extensions work by filtering site contents through a list of predefined wildcard directives and other rules. Users may also customize the block-list by right-clicking on unwanted images or even subscribing to an automated filterset updater. Apparently, a significant number of Firefox users employ these extensions to help control the relentless flood of unwanted advertising around the Internet. This concept works great when advertisements are blocked, but what happens when users are unwittingly denied access to legitimate content?

The Two Adblock Extensions

As many are not aware, there are currently two suspiciously similar Adblock extensions for Firefox. As mentioned in the opening paragraph, Firefox users may install either “Adblock” or “Adblock Plus”, both of which are freely available via the Firefox Add-on pages. For many months now, I have been using Adblock Plus. If I remember correctly, I had replaced Adblock with Adblock Plus several months ago while resolving a conflict with some other extension (I should be keeping a log for such changes!). Since installing Adblock Plus, I have been noticing missing content from a significant number of visited sites. While not having the time (until today) to explore the situation in greater depth, I decided to snap a few screenshots along the way, capturing the Firefox view of any sites that seemed to present with missing content. Here are few of the more popular ones:

Continue Reading

I don’t know about you, but ever since the 2007 change in daylight savings time, my installation of Windows XP has had a difficult time (so to speak) maintaining consistently accurate time. Ever since the change, Windows XP has been randomly resetting its clock (as indicated via the Taskbar) to display time incorrectly. Specifically, WinXP will automatically (i.e., without user intervention) set the time to be one hour earlier than the actual time. For example, if the time is actually 3:00pm, Windows will suddenly display the time as 2:00pm. This has caught me off-guard on several occasions now, as I would work with an incorrect assumption concerning the time, only to find myself running an hour late to an appointment. Clearly, something needs to be done..

The first thing that comes to mind is to switch operating systems. For reasons that extend far beyond wonky time-keeping, I have been wanting to switch to open-source for years. If you have the luxury, time, and resources to accommodate such a switch, then perhaps Linux or Mac will serve you better with much more than the keeping of accurate time.

Continue Reading

up to snuff
or good enough.
you decide.
just can’t get enough
of that double-tough,
rough and tumble
business stuff.
so give me your hand
and get oust.
rrruuuunnn!!!

In the Beginning..

Over a year ago, I posted an article recommending over fifty “essential Firefox extensions.” Excited to have discovered the miraculous joys of extending Firefox with such amazing functionality, I loaded my primary copy of Firefox with just about every potentially useful extension that I could find. Several weeks were spent playing with new features, customizing preferences, and configuring options to gel together in an orchestrated chorus of blissful browser harmony. After experiencing the functional firepower of my newly equipped technological terror, I was completely convinced that I had assembled the ultimate collection of Firefox extensions. And, as the power went straight to my head, I was determined to enlighten the masses by publishing a complete, unedited list of 51 “essential” Firefox extensions.

Continue Reading