Painful as it was, we have completed the move of Nerd Vittles to BlueHost with new links for RSS and Atom feeds. Everything is once again perfect in paradise. Right! For those that are contemplating a blogging career, here’s some advice. Don’t! But if you must, quit your day job! Since we don’t have a 9-to-5 job (other than Honey Do’s, of course), this wasn’t a problem for the Nerd Vittles’ staff of one. There were some lessons learned though. And we thought it might be good to share a few of them just in case anyone else ever gets the itch to contribute something to the public good.

Lesson #1: Think First, Then Build. When you create your blog or any other web site for that matter, build it on the assumption that it’ll be moving somewhere else soon. Stated another way, be sure you have complete access to and control over all of the components that make up your blog. If it’s in a proprietary format (ours wasn’t, thankfully), you’re stuck with no control over escalating costs and really very few options. And don’t do anything stupid like hard-coding web links and images in your articles that may not work when you change the domain of your blog. We’ve still got a few weeks of cleanup to go so hang in there with us as we put Humpty back together again.

Whenever anyone tells me what a great deal Google Mail is for email with 2 gigs of storage for free, I always have a little private chuckle wondering what will happen the day that Google decides a better business strategy might be to start charging for stuff. Just think of the revenue stream that $10 a month per account would bring in. Now think of $20, $30, you name it. There’s a reason that open source is a good thing besides being free. It gives you technology independence. Look at all the poor folks running Windows XP that are totally dependent upon Microsoft. And now Microsoft wants to get in the antivirus and anti-AdWare business. Gee, that’s a shocker! The people in those businesses might want to talk to the WordPerfect folks to find out how much fun lies ahead competing head on with the company that totally controls the operating system under which your application must run. But, remember, Bill has spoken. Windows updates will always be free. Heh heh!

Lesson #2: If It Sounds Too Good To Be True. Yep, always remember the old saying that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Particularly with Internet Hosting Providers, the competition is unbelievable. Makes you wish you could see a little of that in the petroleum industry, doesn’t it? We’re pretty good at scouring the Internet for good pricing, but there’s a big catch to great pricing. Most of them don’t really mean it. Unlimited bandwidth: don’t ever believe it. As soon as you start using it like it was, you’ll get the boot. Too-Good-To-Be-True bandwidth: ditto. When you find providers that are offering more bandwidth than you could ever possibly use, don’t get the warm and fuzzies. If you start actually using all the bandwidth you’re paying for, expect "issues." Simply put, some hosting providers are a bit like the banker in Mark Twain’s old adage: "A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain."

Having been on both sides of the ISP and IHP support fence, I’m sympathetic to the nightmares of being a provider in today’s technology world. There are lots of abusers out there just looking for a free ride and an opportunity to trash any system they can get their hands on. But we at least like to think we’re different. We run a blog that actually helps people with technology, and it doesn’t cost users anything … other than an occasional whine for a donation. Anyway, you get the idea. This is business from the host provider’s perspective, plain and simple.

The bottom line goes something like this. An Internet hosting provider buys a $2000 server and expects to house 200-400 people’s accounts on that box. When you start using that server’s resources like you own the place, your days are numbered. This isn’t necessarily a bandwidth issue, but the two are certainly related. If your site is consuming 100+ gigs of bandwidth a month, you’re not going to make a lot of friends with your 399 co-tenants unless they each happen to have a two-page web site with family pictures. And, when they bitch to the hosting provider, guess who becomes the expendable commodity in this financial equation.

Lesson #3: Don’t Mix Business and Personal Sites. Tempting as it may be to keep all your eggs in one basket, DON’T! We learned this one the hard way. When the friction begins over the business site, your personal stuff is also at risk. That means your email and, more importantly, the email of the Little Mrs. and the kids is in jeopardy. It’s one thing for your non-revenue-generating business site to go down for a day or two. Your family doesn’t really mind that. It’s quite another if access to all their personal stuff gets cut off. So, to put it in crystal-clear perspective for you, mundy.org/blog is no more… except for a few redirectors. It’s nerdvittles.com now. We’re still on speaking terms with our old provider, and the new provider is delighted to have us as a customer including generous ad support for our site. That’s a WIN, WIN in our book!

Lesson #4: Expect the Worst. Ah, yes, life’s other little lesson: "When It Rains, It Pours." Just be prepared to suck it up and weather the storm once it begins. Here’s life’s guarantee. It won’t just be moving your blog that’s a problem. It’ll be a few other personal things rolled in for good measure. You can dream these up yourself, but expect some of them to happen. And, of course, you can always count on a new version of Asterisk@Home hitting the street during the move. And it has. We’ll get on it shortly with our good sense of humor restored … assuming the pioneers don’t discover too many new problems here and here.

Want More Projects? For a complete catalog of all our previous Asterisk® projects, click here. For the most recent articles, click here and just scroll down the page. Get your Headline News the easy way: Planet Asterisk, Planet Gadget, Planet Mac, and Planet Daily. Quick read, no fluff.

Got a PDA or Web-Enabled Smartphone? Check out our new PDAweather.org site and get the latest weather updates and forecasts from the National Weather Service perfectly formatted for quick download and display on your favorite web-enabled PDA, cellphone, or Internet Tablet. And, of course, it’s FREE!

Who Is This Guy? Ward Mundy, the author of this Asterisk@Home series of articles, is a retired attorney who spent more than 30 years providing legal and technology assistance to the federal courts in the United States. Today he serves as a principal in Ward Mundy & Associates, a technology consulting firm in Atlanta, Georgia.

Today we’re providing 50 of our favorite Mac mini resources on the web that will tell you anything and everything you ever wanted to know about Mac technology. There are sites for news, reviews, tutorials, tips and tricks, troubleshooting, blogs, forums, hacks, rumors, and loads of additional applications. So, while we’re taking it easy this summer, visit a few of the sites you haven’t already tried and learn something new. We’ll even wave to you from the beach. Any Mac running at least Mac OS X v10.3 aka Panther is a suitable candidate for taking advantage of most of these web sites. In case we missed a few, feel free to add your own favorites as comments. And, for the math geniuses, you’re right. The number of sites doesn’t quite add up to 50, but a few sites weren’t that great so we’ll leave it to you to figure out which ones shouldn’t be here. And be sure to check out our HOW-TO Bonanza: 50 Great Summertime Applications for You & Your Mac Mini.

Favorite Hacks

Favorite Tech Sites

Favorite Mac mini Sites

Favorite Mac News Sites

Other Mac News and Reviews

Favorite Mac Applications

Favorite Mac Mags

Favorite Mac Rumor and Gossip Sites

Favorite Mac Weblogs

Favorite Mac mini Forums

Favorite Mac Troubleshooting Sites

Favorite Mac Tutorials

Favorite Gadget Sites

For The Other Side

When 50 Just Isn’t Enough

It’s been a week since Tiger was released, and we finally got our copy even though it was several days late. Apple more than compensated for the delay by offering up a free copy of iWork or iLife. Class act, that Apple. Our project for today is to upgrade your Mac mini to Tiger. Then we’ll send you over to Tiger Vittles to upgrade the Top 10 ISP-In-A-Box projects that we built earlier this year so that they all work again. Sounds like a whole weekend project, doesn’t it? Think again. Believe it or not, it took a little more than an hour to upgrade Panther to Tiger and about one more hour to get all ten of the following applications working. If you’re from the Windows World or have any familiarity with any server platform other than Macs, you know just how incredible that is. If not, just count your blessings, twice. Tiger is a must-have upgrade. And, if you happen to have two to five Macs in your household, it’s just about the best deal on the planet. Imagine Exxon selling you gasoline for 50¢ a gallon just because you own five automobiles.

Prerequisites. For purposes of this article, we’re assuming your Mac mini came with Panther preinstalled or that you’re upgrading another Mac that already has Panther installed. You also should have installed whichever applications above that you want to use while still running Panther. Stated another way, this tutorial won’t necessarily help you if you install Tiger and then attempt to install some of the applications above. We haven’t tested new installs on Tiger yet. So, if there are some applications you want that you haven’t installed, click on the appropriate links above, and do the installs before upgrading to Tiger. You also should make certain that any of the applications you need already work under Panther. Don’t upgrade to Tiger until they do. Finally, you’ll need $9.95 if you want to enable any or all of the email servers using PostFix Enabler for Tiger. Hint: You only really need the SMTP mail server if you’re planning to use the Email Reminders or the WordPress blog.

Upgrading from Panther to Tiger. The first thing you need to do before you begin the upgrade is to read HOW-TO: Prep Your Mac for a Tiger Upgrade on our Tiger Vittles site. Then you need to review the software compatibility lists on our Tiger Vittles site: Tiger-Ready Applications: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. If there is some application you absolutely have to have and it’s on our Bad or Ugly lists, then you probably will want to hold off on upgrading for a while. If you need VPN software to connect to your office, that’s probably a deal-breaker. Virtually all of the VPN clients are broken with Tiger at the moment.

In a nutshell, the upgrade process we used went like this. We obviously can’t guarantee that it will work for you because we don’t know what is on your system or what condition your system is in. So proceed at your own risk and call Apple if you run into problems. They get money for this. We don’t.

Go have a snack while your Mac is indexing. Then meet us over at Tiger Vittles today to upgrade the first ten ISP-In-A-Box server applications to work with Tiger. And, while you’re there, check out how your other favorite applications are doing with Tiger.

Nerd Reminder: Don’t forget to call your mama this weekend. Flowers would be a nice touch.

Using MySQL and PHP, we created a new WordPress blog on your Mac in our last installment. Today, we want to lock it down so that evil people don’t fill up your MySQL database tables with comments about Viagra and gambling casinos. We also want to show you a few tricks for customizing WordPress to better meet your needs and those of your readers. Comment spam has become the new cottage industry in the blog world, and it’s something you need to deal with up front, or you’ll be sorry within a few days of launching your new blog. There are some exhaustive articles on the tools that are available to assist you. But, let me save you a lot of time and disappointment. There’s one tool that really works, and it’s easy to install. My advice is simple: try my solution and look elsewhere only if you continue to see problems. Once you begin adding multiple filters, you have to worry about conflicts so, if one tool works, stick with one tool. WordPress HashCash works, period. It dynamically generates an MD5 hash each time a comment form is submitted. This effectively kills spambots dead in their tracks. If you want to read more about how it works, here’s the link that tells all. The hardest part is getting HashCash downloaded, but here’s how.

Downloading WordPress HashCash. Here’s the current link for WordPress HashCash. What used to be two files is now combined into the .php file. Read on before downloading. Because of the nature of this file, it doesn’t download in the usual way. Here are the steps to get the actual file. First, click on the link above. Then, read the information about the various versions and match the one you need to your version of WordPress. Once you select the correct link, scroll down to the bottom of the displayed web page. Next, Ctrl-Click (or right-click) on the link labeled "Plain Text." Choose Save Linked File As and provide the file names shown above to save each file to your Desktop. Using Finder, click on your local hard disk and move to the following folder: /Library/WebServer/Documents/blog/wp-content/plugins. Now click-and-drag each of the two downloaded files on your Desktop to the plugins folder. Finally, open the Admin section of WordPress: http://127.0.0.1/blog/wp-admin. Click on the Plugins tab and Activate WordPress HashCash by clicking on the appropriate link. Now you can sleep well knowing your WordPress blog is in good hands.

WordPress Beautification. WordPress 1.5 has only been in production a couple of weeks so the number of available skins (known as Themes in WordPress 1.5 lingo) to change the appearance of WordPress are not as numerous as with previous versions. But there are a number to choose from and most of them are available from Alex King’s web site. Installing them couldn’t be much easier. Go to the web site and view each of the various Themes by clicking on its name. Then click on the Download links for the Themes you like. Theme folders will be downloaded to your Desktop. Now repeat the steps shown above to navigate to /Library/WebServer/Documents/blog/wp-content/themes. Then click and drag the Themes folders on your Desktop to the themes folder for your blog. Choose the Theme you want to activate by opening the Admin section of WordPress (just as we did above). Click on the Presentation tab, and then click Select for the Theme you wish to make your default. Click View Site and your new Theme will appear for your very own blog. How simple is that?

Reader’s Choice. You may decide, as we have, that you’d like your visitors to be able to pick the Theme they prefer to read your blog. After all, the whole purpose of page layout is to enhance the viewing experience for readers, not for you. So why not make it easy for folks to choose a viewing style that is most comfortable for them. The default viewing theme gets saved as a cookie so the next time the person visits your site, they’ll see your blog in the Theme chosen on their last visit. With WordPress 1.5, implementing Theme Switching for your blog is a no-brainer. Go to boren.nu and download the Theme Switcher. This will download a file to your Desktop that will decompress into theme-switcher.php. Using the procedure we’ve used in the previous examples, click-and-drag this file into /Library/WebServer/Documents/blog/wp-content/plugins. Now open the Admin section of WordPress: http://127.0.0.1/blog/wp-admin. Click on the Plugins tab and Activate Theme Switcher by clicking on the corresponding activate link. With most of the new themes, your visitors will now get a listing from which to choose a preferred Theme to view your blog.

WordPress Configuration. There are a number of things you can control with your blog. If you haven’t figured it out already, you get to these settings using the Admin control panel of WordPress. To get you started, we’ve listed below some of the settings we use for Nerd Vittles. You may want to do other things with your blog which is perfectly fine. You always can change these settings as you get more comfortable with WordPress. But, the settings below will protect your blog from outsider control at least until you get your feet wet. As with any configuration changes, you’re better off making one or two adjustments at a time and viewing the results. Then, if something unexpected happens, it’s much easier to figure out what went wrong and fix it. Enjoy!

So you want to be a BlogMaster, but you want to host your blog on your very own Mac rather than paying a managed hosting service such as Blogger or TypePad. And you’ve elected to ignore our previous advice to use a hosting provider that offers MySQL database management, PHP, and blogging software as part of their feature set for free. Well, good for you! And you’re in luck because today, rejuvenated from our Spring Break cruise aboard the good ship Disney Wonder, we’re going to install the brand-new WordPress 1.5 on your Mac. This is the latest and greatest version of the blogging system that we use for Nerd Vittles which just happens to be what you’re reading now. In naming WordPress as the Web Application of the Year, ArsTechnica put it this way:

Let’s face it. Blogs are in fashion, and why not? Vanity knows no bounds, and there are some people who actually do something productive with theirs. From the influence of blogs on the coverage of the US presidential elections to every random teenager who has problems with their partner/parent/teacher/cat, blogs are out there allowing your most intimate feelings to be shared with random people at wifi hotspots. WordPress is the most prominent rising star of weblog software, completely free and with a large and active community. Styles, plugins and hacks are readily available, with problems such as comment spamming being addressed far more rapidly than competing applications.

We couldn’t have said it better. So let’s get started.

Prerequisites. Before you can bring up WordPress and begin your blogging career, you first need to figure out what you want to write about. Hopefully, it will be something in which others have an interest. And with Dan Rather now retired, conservative bloggers will actually have to come up with something new to whine about. But, who cares, right? You can always change your mind tomorrow, and the next day, and the next if you install and manage your own blogging system. On the hardware and software side, you’ll need a Mac running Mac OS X v10.3, aka Panther. And you also will need to install and activate five of the applications we covered in previous sessions before you begin this installation. You’ll need the Apache Web Server, the Postfix SMTP mail server only, the MySQL database server, and PHP and PhpMyAdmin. Once you complete these tutorials, read on. Don’t attempt to install WordPress prematurely, or you’ll make a big mess, and we don’t provide mess cleanup tutorials! For a complete list of our HOW-TO articles and Mac mini resources on the Net, click here.

Downloading WordPress. If you didn’t already know, WordPress is free for the taking, but you still have to download it from here. Just click on the Download .tar.gz link. This should download the software to your Desktop and automatically decompress it into a folder named wordpress. If you just end up with a .tar.gz file, simply double-click on it to decompress it into a folder. Now click once on the folder name and change the name of the folder to blog and press the return key. Next double-click on the folder to open it. Then double-click on wp-config-sample.php to open it with TextEdit. Look for the DB_USER line and change the word username to root. Now move down to the DB_PASSWORD line and delete the word password but leave the single quotes that were surrounding it. When you’re finished, it should show two single quotes with no spaces between them. Now press Command-S to save your changes. Close TextEdit, and then single-click on the filename wp-config-sample.php. Change the filename to wp-config.php and press the return key. Close the folder. Using Finder, click on the local hard disk, and move to the /Library/WebServer/Documents folder. Now click-and-drag the blog folder on your Desktop into the Documents folder. This will make your blog accessible at any of the following addresses: http://localhost/blog/ or http://127.0.0.1/blog/ or http://your.internal.ip.address/blog/ or http://your.Internet.ip.address/blog/ assuming you have activated the security settings set forth in our Network Security article. In addition, you can access your blog at http://yourdomain.com/blog/ if you have completed the domain registration steps outlined in our Domain Names article.

Installing WordPress. Like many open source applications, WordPress is a PHP-driven application that stores its data in a MySQL database with numerous MySQL tables. So, in order to use WordPress, we first need to create a MySQL database named wordpress to house the data. We’ll do this using PhpMyAdmin. Open a web browser on your server and go to http://localhost/php/. At the top of the right frame is a field for Create new database for MySQL. Type wordpress in the space provided, change the collation sequence to ascii.bin, and click the Create button to create the new MySQL database. Close that browser window and open a new one. Now go to http://127.0.0.1/blog/wp-admin/install.php. The Welcome to WordPress screen will appear. Click on the First Step link. Fill in a title for your new blog and your email address, and then click Continue to Second Step. Surprise! The installation is complete. Just be sure you write down your username (admin) and the randomly generated password. We’ll change it in a minute.

Configuring WordPress. Now click on the login link which will take you to the login screen: http://127.0.0.1/blog/wp-login.php. Type your username and password that you just wrote down. The Admin Dashboard will display with all sorts of information about WordPress. But let’s do first things first. Click on the Users tab at the top of the screen. Type in your name and any other desired extras you want to publish with your blog. Move to the two fields provided to change your password, and type your new permanent password twice. Then click the Update Profile button. Log out and back in just to be sure everything is working as it should. In a new browser window, go to http://127.0.0.1/blog/ and Voila. Welcome to Bloggerville! From your blog’s main page, you can return to the Admin program by clicking on the Admin link. You shouldn’t have to log in again assuming cookies are enabled and functioning properly on your system.

From the Administration program, you add new articles to your blog by clicking on the Write tab. And you can View, Edit, or Delete articles by clicking on the appropriate link beside the article of interest using the Manage tab. That should be enough to get you started in your blogging career. In our next session, we’ll talk about Plugins and Templates and Themes as well as how to protect your blog from the bad guys. We’ll also go into further detail about many of the WordPress 1.5 features that have made it such a popular blogging system. Your homework is to pay a visit to Alex King’s incredible WordPress resource site. While you’re there, look through the Themes section and find a look you like for your new blog. Our personal favorite is Meadow (see inset above). We’ll walk you through installing it (or your personal favorite) in our next session. For now, get those creative juices flowing and blog your socks off!

If the simplicity and headline style of MacSurfer’s Headlines News and Technology News Network leave you wishing there were similar sites to handle your other favorite topics, then you’re ready for Really Simple Syndication, RSS. a lightweight XML metadata format designed to handle headlines and web content. Instead of a single talented company digesting web pages from thousands of providers as MacSurfer does, RSS uses a different paradigm. RSS decentralizes headline-building by encouraging all web providers to create regular "feeds" of their sites containing headlines and content. The content may be the same as the actual web pages, or it may be a subset with links to the complete web pages. Instead of your having to visit hundreds of web sites every day, you use an RSS Reader to do the leg work for you. All you have to do is tell it where to look periodically for items of interest to you.

Some RSS Readers are free, and some you have to pay for. For the Windows platform, we recommend NewzCrawler. There’s also NewsGator Outlook Edition which, as its name implies, creates RSS feeds in a folder within Microsoft Outlook. For your iPod (Yep, it’s true!), there’s Pod2Go. For your Treo 650 smartphone, there’s mNews. And, for your Mac or Mac mini, no one does RSS better than Ranchero’s NetNewsWire. Free and enhanced versions of Ranchero’s reader are available. The enhanced version is well worth its modest cost. Here’s how it works. Just define the web sites with RSS feeds that you’d like to track and tell NetNewsWire how often to retrieve the feeds. That’s it for the basics. What you’ll see is a 3-pane window (see inset) similar to many email clients. Your RSS sites are listed on the left, the headlines for each site appear at the top right, and the contents (known as an item in RSS parlance) for each story is shown in the bottom right pane. As with good email clients, NetNewsWire remembers which items you’ve read. And the dock icon shows how many unread stories exist in your feeds. You also can import and export your subscriptions for use in other readers, and there’s a Weblog editor which makes quick work of posting RSS content to your favorite blog. NetNewsWire also includes a Sites Drawer. It provides one-click access to hundreds of great RSS feeds. Here’s our own list of favorites in OPML format which can be imported directly into NetNewsWire to get you started. You also can find thousands more on the Complete RSS web site. There’s news, technology, sports, Fark, business and finance, Amazon, programming, humor, tech bargains, opinion, politics, entertainment, sex … well, actually, we just threw that in to see if you still were awake. Finally there are numerous scraped feeds or bootleg feeds. These are third-party crafted RSS feeds of web sites that do not yet (and may never) produce RSS feeds of their own such as WhiteHouse.gov and television program guides. There’s even a site that will create made-to-order RSS feeds for a modest fee. We’ll leave the legal issues these feeds may raise for another day.

Take a look at what the RSS feed for Nerd Vittles looks like. It’s not much different than the actual web page you’re reading here. Actually, with Complete RSS, it is the web page you’re reading here. NetNewsWire goes one step beyond the Complete RSS approach and actually builds the contents pane from the XML code without reliance on any of the page’s actual HTML code. This obviously facilitates off-line browsing. While RSS content originally was limited to text, all that has changed. You’ll see the same rich content (with images) that you’re used to with a web browser. Just like MacSurfer, the advantage in switching to RSS is that you can comb through hundreds of headlines in just a few minutes rather than waiting for hundreds of web pages (and pop up ads) to load. If you don’t yet own a Mac, there are dozens of other RSS readers available for almost every operating system.

The latest news in the browser and RSS universe is Firefox 1.0, the web browser that’s taking the world by storm. It supports RSS as an integral part of the browser. And chances are there’s a version for your computer right here. To use RSS within Firefox, just download and install the Sage RSS plug-in. All you need to perfect the reading of most blogs is a simple style file. Just Ctrl-click to download and save ours to your documents directory and configure Sage to use it (Tools, Sage, Options, Settings, Use Custom Style Sheet). Now you’re ready to start saving RSS links to read with Sage and Firefox. We recommend you create a bookmarks folder (Bookmarks, Manage Bookmarks, New Folder) just for RSS links since Firefox can periodically update your feeds. Here’s our RSS feed to get you started. Once you bookmark our link, choose Tools, Sage, and click on Nerd Vittles in your Sage-panel bookmarks folder. Voil√ɬ†!

Finally, there’s one unsung advantage of RSS feeds over traditional web pages that is huge in our book. With web pages, you never really know when the contents of a page have been updated. And with hit-and-miss web caching, you may not know even when you return to a site. RSS solves this problem transparently. When a page is updated, the link to the page in your RSS feeds list automatically changes back to unread. For those of us that write HOW-TO articles and don’t always get it quite right in version 1.0, RSS provides a great way to alert readers that something important has changed in the story. Give RSS a try, and you’ll see why millions are discovering that it’s a better way to enjoy the web.

[WM: And here's one of those updates I was talking about. Another great RSS reader for the Mac platform was released just yesterday. The betas of NewsFire got rave reviews. And, if money matters, it's half the cost of NetNewsWire.]