Well, it’s that time of the year again. The Nerd Vittles staff will be taking a breather for a bit to recharge our batteries. But, in the finest college tradition, we’re leaving you lots of homework. Here’s a listing of what we’ve built thus far in our Mac mini ISP-In-A-Box project. So, while we’re taking it easy, pick out a few projects you haven’t tried and knock yourself out. Any Mac running at least Mac OS X v10.3 aka Panther is a suitable candidate for these projects. Many also have been tested with Tiger. Visit Tiger Vittles for the Tiger update notes to many of these tutorials. Also be sure to check out our WHERE-TO Bonanza: 50 Great Summertime Web Sites for You & Your Mac mini.

And here are some of our other tutorials to keep you and your Mac mini busy:

And finally we and our friends at MacSurfer and Engadget and Gizmodo and MacOSXhints and MacDevCenter and Entropy and even Popular Science magazine have had a number of tutorials and links to other things you can do with your Mac mini or any other Mac in most cases. Give ‘em a whirl!

Last but not least, for PC users thinking about making the Switch to a Mac, read our article and this one. Then buy David Pogue’s book, and you’ll have everything you need. It really is a No Brainer!

We’ve gotten lots of terrific feedback and some great tips from many of you since we first began putting this list together in early spring, but we’d love to hear from the shy types as well. What did you like? What can we improve? What can we cover which would be of interest to you in the coming months? If you have a favorite open source application or a must-have tool that we’ve overlooked thus far, don’t be timid. Drop us a note or just leave a comment below. We do this for fun, not as a business fortunately, but we strongly believe that Apple should be doing something similar as part of their business plan. We, their loyal customers, deserve nothing less. Thanks for visiting NerdVittles.com. And do tell your friends about us. Finally, take a look at our Tiger Vittles site for the latest happenings with Mac OS X Tiger.

Who Is This Guy? Ward Mundy, the author of the ISP-In-A-Box series, is a retired attorney who spent more than 30 years providing legal and technology assistance to the federal courts in the United States.

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!