Mac Software
Over the weekend, I came across two ‘must-have’ pieces of software for Mac users, so I thought I’d let you all in on the secret.
The first is Typinator, a little program that allows you to automate repetitive key strokes. For instance if, like me, you visit a lot of websites where you have to put in your email address to log-in, you could use Typinator to create a keyboard abbreviation to save you having to type it every time. Or you can use it to insert an image of your signature at the bottom of letters. It also acts as a correction service, too, with built in sets of commonly mis-typed words.
Basically, it’s the Auto Correct function from Microsoft Office, but applied on a system-wide scale. So far, I haven’t found any applications where it doesn’t work.
You can buy Typinator from their website or you can do what I did and get it free from MacHeist.
If you’ve spent a lot of time using Windows systems – like I have – you’ll have got used to your Home and End keys working in a certain way. And you’ll probably be quite annoyed by the fact that they don’t work like that in OS X. Previously, I’ve used KeyFixer to solve this issue, but it’s not perfect and doesn’t seem to work with every application. Which is why I’m so happy to have found Double Command, a donation-ware utility, that does.
I’ve been using Double Command for the last couple of hours and so far haven’t found any application where the remapping doesn’t work. As well as remapping Home and End, it also gives you freedom to make other changes, too.
If you’ve got any tips for ‘must-have’ Mac software, drop me a comment.
Getting my geek on
Regular readers will have noticed that there’s been a distinct lack of posts over the last couple of weeks. I’ve been busy wasting my time playing about with all sorts of techy stuff, and it has been great!
First off, I’ve started playing about with virtual machines on my iMac. In case you don’t know, a virtual machine is way of running another operating system in a separate window, with no need to partition your drive, re-boot, etc. For the Mac, the market leaders are Parallels and VMware Fusion but I’ve been using an open source alternative called VirtualBox.
The ease of use means that setting up a virtual machine is a question of a few clicks of a mouse and then finding the install disk for the guest operating system. Once it has loaded, you’ve got a fully functioning Windows (or LInux or whatever) machine that’s accessible from your normal desktop.
There’s also a variation on this theme called CrossOver, which allows you to create what it calls bottles to run individual programs without needing to install the whole operating system. So, for instance, I can run Internet Explorer 6 to test web pages or Word to edit documents but without the Windows desktop environment.
Neither of these ways of running Windows programs gives you the full Windows experience – virtual drivers can only do so much – but if you have an occasional need to run a Windows program, they’re an excellent way to give yourself the option.
For instance, I was doing some work on a website the other day and was able to test it on FireFox 2.0 and 3.0, Opera, Flock, Safari, IE6, IE7 and IE8 on three different operating systems using just one lot of hardware.
So what are my three operating systems? OS X, Windows XP and (fanfare please) Windows 7. I’ve never had the chance to really play about with Vista, so have no idea whether it’s as bad as people say (the brief use I have had, it seems fine to me) but so far I’m loving Windows 7. The problem is, I don’t know what is new to Windows 7 and what is already available in Vista.
I can’t test some of the more advanced graphical stuff – like the Aero interface – because the virtual machine does not support it, but I am quite liking the Windows 7 desktop experience. It’s crisp and clean, easily readable and uncluttered. In many ways, I’d say that Windows and OS X are moving closer together in the way that they present themselves to the user; for me, as someone who prefers to use OS X but has to use Windows at work, I think this is a good thing.
I like the changes to the Windows Explorer, presenting me with the information I need and hiding away the stuff I’m not interested in; I like the new Start menu; I like the fact that the whole system seems more security conscious.
Some of the things I’m used to using in Windows seem to have been moved about, particularly in Control Panel, but still seem to be there. So far, all the software I’ve tried to install seems to have worked fine. I haven’t yet found anything that is too annoying to live with, which seems to be a major step forward for Microsoft.
Over the next few days, I’m going to carry on geeking out with Windows 7 and I’ll let you know if it all goes terribly wrong!
Solving a problem with ecto
Since I updated the theme a few days ago, I’ve been giving The New Wolfs Howl a bit of spring-clean. I’ve been getting rid of the clutter (no more adverts, etc) from the visitor side and I’ve been streamlining the admin side, getting rid of unwanted plug-ins and so on. Hopefully, you’ll have seen an improvement in the response times of the blog as a whole because of all this.
As part of this spring clean, I wanted to go through all the posts and get rid of all the clutter from the end of each one. This clutter has changed over the months – different RSS badges, Digg badges, etc, different disclaimers and so on – and I’ve never gone back through all the posts and made them all the same. As a result of this, some of the posts ended up with two lots of clutter as the theme template now adds that sort of stuff in.
Part of the reason I’d never gone through and cleaned all the posts up is because I’m lazy and I knew that there were lots that needed attention. But, as I now use ecto to write my new posts, I thought it might be a bit easier – just pull them all down into ecto and I could edit them easily and then re-publish them, without needing to get all bogged down in the inadequacies that plague the Wordpress editor.
At first, all was groovy. I had the most recent six or eight months of posts already in ecto (where they’d originally been written), so I could easily check those and edit the ones that needed it. The problem came when I wanted to download the ones prior to those, the ones from when I first started blogging back in March last year. They’re all up on the server, but ecto wouldn’t access them; it kept me giving me an “Is the access point correct?” error and that was it.
Looking at ecto support forums pointed me towards the answer. Apparently, my server was disallowing the downloading of my posts because I was exceeding the limit allowed for my installation of PHP. Looking at the ecto console log, I saw that I’d tried to download more than the 32MB allowed by the server. So I thought I was stuck. Then I remembered a similar problem with importing XML files into Wordpress – where the file size limit of the server could be changed by altering the .htaccess file.
Referring to my previous post, I went to my server’s cPanel and looked at PHP Configuration. According to that, the Resource Limit (a directive called memory_limit) is 32MB. But armed with the knowledge that I’d gained from looking at XML imports, I figured that I might be able to change that. I located my .htaccess file (in public_html), opened it and added php_value memory_limit 40M just before the final line and re-uploaded the file. It didn’t seem to effect the functioning of the blog, but the next time that I tried to download my early posts with ecto, I got them all. No errors, no fuss.
Having successfully got all my posts down into ecto, I’ve now re-edited my .htaccess file back to its original state (just in case).
If you’re having similar trouble and want to give my solution a go, just a few little things to bear in mind:
- Before doing ANYTHING, make sure you’ve got a working back-up of all the stuff you can’t afford to lose.
- Just because it worked for me, it doesn’t mean it’ll work for you. I only had about 360 posts that I needed to get down, and I was only about 1.5MB over my 32MB Resource Limit. If you’ve got more posts – or if they’re a lot bigger – you might need to change the 40M value to something higher. I have no idea if that will work or not.
- You could always try contacting your server host and seeing if they can increase your Resource Limit for you, so you don’t have to go hacking around in your .htaccess file.
- As always with the tips I give, remember that I don’t know what I’m doing. I just try things that I think might work; if they do, I write about them. In other words, I have no training in technical issues and I do not take any responsibility for anything that goes wrong with your blog / website / server / anything if you choose to follow my guide.
If you find a more elegant solution to the question of how to get all your blog posts down into ecto, please let me know.
Caffeine – good for you, good for your Mac
A little while ago, I wrote about my annoyance with watching the BBC iPlayer and having to keep changing my screensaver settings. I even went so far as to cobble together a piece of Apple Script to help me solve the problem.
Now, thanks to The Apple Blog, I’ve been able to ditch that script in favour of Caffeine, a neat little add-on that does exactly what I need it to – all with one click of the mouse. Excellent!
XML file too big to import
Part of “Going self-hosted with Wordpress : A Wolfie Guide”
On one of my older posts (Going Self-Hosted with Wordpress) Lisa has asked a question about how to import a larger than 2MB XML file into her new self-hosted WordPress installation, from her existing WordPress.com blog.
The first thing to say is that this is not a WordPress restriction, it is a restriction of the hosting company being used. If you have cPanel loaded on your host, take a look in ‘PHP Configuration’ and you’ll see that ‘upload_max_filesize’ is set to 2MB. (For some hosts this number may be smaller or larger; as always, your mileage may vary). There is a way that you can change this value, although I’ve only managed to make it 8MB on my server. (Before going ahead and making any of the changes that follow, please make sure that you have a working back-up of anything that you can’t afford to lose – just in case. I will not accept any responsibility for anything that goes wrong with your system and make no promises that any of these methods will work for you).
In your public_html directory, there should be a file called .htaccess. This is a small text file that, at least on my server, looks like this:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
If you add the line php_value upload_max_filesize 32M just before the final line, then when you go to the import screen you’ll be told that the maximum file size is 8MB. Whether the system will actually allow you to import an 8MB file is a different question and I have not been able to test this. Assuming it does work, once you’ve uploaded the XML file I suggest re-editing the file to take out the alteration.
If that does not work, then as far as I’m aware, you can’t change this setting yourself but your hosting company should be able to change it for you. If they can’t / won’t, then you need to look at a different solution which involves splitting the XML file into several smaller pieces.
Once you’ve got your exported XML file (to get this, from your wp.com dashboard go to ‘Manage’, then click ‘Export’. You get the option to restrict authors, but this won’t apply to most people. WordPress then saves an XML file to your hard-drive), you need to open it up in a text editor. I use TextWrangler – because its free and because it helpfully colour-codes tags, etc – but anything should work, even WordPad. What you’ll see is a huge list of text, with lots of things in tags (which are things like <channel>, <rss>, <item>, etc). All this text is what WordPress will use to reconstruct your blog on your new installation.
But that upload limit is a bit of a pain. I didn’t experience this issue when I moved The New Wolfs Howl because the export file was quite small (even now it’s only 1.4MB) but after a quick search around the forums it seems that this is quite a common problem. Unfortunately, splitting the XML file is not quite as simple as putting the second half of the file in a different document; there are certain things that have to be in each file.
The first thing to do is to work out how many files you need to split the file into. If your upload limit is 2MB and you have an 8MB file, then I would suggest you need to have five files – I know that eight divided by two is four, but I’ve added one to take care of the overlap. That will then give you a rough idea of who much of your file has to be moved each time. For example, my XML file is just over 21,500 lines – so I’d want just over 5,000 lines per file.
Take a look at your XML file and at the top you’ll see there are various items of header code (instructions from WordPress, etc). From the top line of the file (<?xml version=…) to <wp:base_blog_url>http://… needs to be in every file. Scroll right to the bottom of the file and </channel> and </rss> also need to be in every file. So, before any content has gone in, you want an XML file that looks like this:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!– This is a WordPress eXtended RSS file generated by WordPress as an export of your blog. –>
<!– It contains information about your blog’s posts, comments, and categories. –>
<!– You may use this file to transfer that content from one site to another. –>
<!– This file is not intended to serve as a complete backup of your blog. –>
<!– To import this information into a WordPress blog follow these steps. –>
<!– 1. Log into that blog as an administrator. –>
<!– 2. Go to Manage: Import in the blog’s admin panels. –>
<!– 3. Choose “WordPress” from the list. –>
<!– 4. Upload this file using the form provided on that page. –>
<!– 5. You will first be asked to map the authors in this export file to users –>
<!– on the blog. For each author, you may choose to map to an –>
<!– existing user on the blog or to create a new user –>
<!– 6. WordPress will then import each of the posts, comments, and categories –>
<!– contained in this file into your blog –>
<!– generator=”WordPress/2.5.1″ created=”2008-07-12 05:47″–>
<rss version=”2.0″
xmlns:content=”http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/”
xmlns:wfw=”http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/”
xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”
xmlns:wp=”http://wordpress.org/export/1.0/”
>
<channel>
<title>Your Blog Title</title>
<link>http://yourblogdomain.com</link>
<description>Your blog descriptions</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:33:37 +0000</pubDate>
<generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1</generator>
<language>en</language>
<wp:wxr_version>1.0</wp:wxr_version>
<wp:base_site_url>http://yourdomain.com</wp:base_site_url>
<wp:base_blog_url>http://yourblogdomain.com</wp:base_blog_url>
[this is where the content will go]
</channel>
</rss>
So, now you need to get your content in there. In the first of the XML files, you’ll want to make sure that you include your categories and your tags; these are listed immediately after the <wp:base_blog_url> line. They only need to be included in one file. Then the rest of the file is filled up with content; just look for <item> and </item> tags and cut and paste information between files. Always make sure you only copy complete items, though, otherwise you’ll have an error.
This way of splitting files is a laborious process and will take a fair while, but will work if you do it properly. There are file splitting utilities out there, but I have not tested any of them for effectiveness (or simplicity).
Wolfs Helpers
