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September 4th, 2009

Welcome to Maria's Guides!

Welcome to Maria’s Guides, a blog-based Web site I built and maintain to offer support and additional material to the folks who read my books and articles and watch my video training courses.

The topics you’ll see covered here include Mac OS, Microsoft Office products, blogging tools such as WordPress, and social networking services such as Twitter. I’ve written about or created video training material for all of these topics. As I work on new topics, you’ll see them covered here, too. I write about what interests me and I think you’ll find that my interests are relatively mainstream, covering the software that most people use on a regular basis.

There’s a lot of material here — I’ve been archiving content since 2004. Some of that might be a bit out-of-date for the average user, but there’s always someone using older systems or software that can benefit from it. You can use navigation bar links to zip right to a specific book or video and get information about it, as well as links to related downloads and articles. Or you can use the Topics and Tags links on the left side of the window to go to a specific topic that interests you. When using these links, remember that content is listed in reverse chronological order, so the newest material will always appear at the top of the page.

Your comments are always welcome — although they are moderated to weed out spam and abuse. Use the comments link for any post to comment about its contents. You can comment on this post if you have some general thoughts about the site. And finally, if you want support for my books, be sure to check out the links on the Q&A pages; that’s how I can receive and answer questions about a book in a place where everyone can read and benefit from the answers.

February 8th, 2010

iTunes 9.0.3 Update Now Available

Information from Software Update.

iTunes 9.0.3 provides a number of important bug fixes, including:

  • iTunes no longer ignores your “Remember password for purchases” setting.
  • Addresses problems with syncing some Smart Playlists and Podcasts with iPod.
  • Resolves a problem recognizing when iPod is connected.
  • Addresses issues that affect stability and performance.
January 22nd, 2010

Snow Leopard Book Correction: Page 64

Wrong modifier key!

Just found an error in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide. Not a biggie, but you might want to know about it.

On page 64, the third bullet point under Tips tells you to hold down the Option key to change the Clean Up command to the Clean Up Selection command.

That should be the Command key, not the Option key.

The correction also applies to the caption for Figure 11.

Sorry about that!

January 18th, 2010

How NOT to use Twitter for Marketing and Sales

An example of social network marketing #FAIL.

I don’t follow many people, but among those I do follow is a person connected to a tourism publication that serves the Phoenix area. As the owner/operator of a helicopter tour and charter company, I thought it might be interesting to see if this person tweeted anything that could help my business grow.

On Thursday, January 14, at 4:03 PM, he tweeted the following:

There is still time to advertise in our annual Spring Training issue – it’s only 6 weeks away. Affordable exposure that drives results.

This is an exact quote. There are a few things wrong with it:

  • The tweet makes no mention of the name of the publication or the area it serves. So unless you know what publication this guy works for — and its name is not part of his Twitter name — you’d be hard-pressed to understand why this might interest you.
  • The tweet mentions the “Spring Training” issue, but neglects to identify the “6 weeks away” as the editorial deadline or publication date.
  • There’s no link in the tweet to take action. I suppose this guy thinks that if you do figure out what this is about and are interested, you’ll track him or his publication down and make contact. A link sure would make that easier.

As a former frequent business traveler, I’m very familiar with the publication. It’s available in all major cities. It might be a good match for my business to advertise in. But I needed more information.

I tweeted back with a direct (private) message about fifteen minutes after his initial tweet, at 4:20 PM the same day:

I’ll bite. Call me with your ad rates: 928/###-####.

(I obviously provided my entire phone number, which I don’t need to reproduce here.)

And then I waited. I didn’t sit around my computer. I had other things to do.

Almost an hour later, at 5:08 PM, he responded:

Maria… I’ll have my partner [redacted] call you – he handles sales, and I produce the magazine, videos & social media :)

But because I wasn’t sitting at my computer and wasn’t checking my incoming messages, I didn’t receive this response for a few hours. I figured I’d reply with some additional information that would help his partner get a better idea about my business before he called. So when I received this tweet a little after 8 PM, I replied:

Tell him it’s for http://www.flyingmair.com/

At 10:37 PM, he replied:

Will do :)

So from the time of his initial tweet about special ad rates to the conclusion of our discussion, more than six hours had elapsed.

By this time, I was asleep. Since he’d received my phone number after 5 PM, I wasn’t expecting a call that day anyway. But I did expect one in the morning.

But I didn’t get it.

In fact, it’s now Monday, January 18, almost four full days since his initial tweet, and I have not received a phone call from his partner.

So in addition to the poorly composed tweet, here are a few other ways this person failed at social network marketing:

  • When he posted the initial tweet, he was obviously not monitoring Twitter for immediate responses like mine. It took nearly an hour for him to respond.
  • Although he had my phone number in hand, he didn’t use it to contact me — even to tell me to expect a call from his partner. Instead, he relied on direct messages through Twitter — not even text messaging directly to my phone! — which relied on me checking for such messages. This stretched out an initial contact to more than six hours.
  • Although our contact was made on a Thursday afternoon, no follow-up contact was made on Friday (a work day) or the weekend. At this point, I don’t think any contact will be made at all.

In short, this person attempted to use Twitter for marketing, actually got a lead (!), and still dropped the ball by failing to follow up in a timely manner. This is a perfect example of a failure to use social networking for marketing purposes.

The result of all this:

  • I will stop following this person. There doesn’t seem any reason to continue to do so.
  • If his partner ever calls, I’ll tell him I spent my advertising budget on Friday, when I expected his call.

What marketers need to understand is that in this economy, few people actually need their product. It isn’t enough to make a half-assed attempt at reaching customers and expect them to do all the legwork. And it’s absolutely inexcusable to fail to call a potential customer after that customer has requested a call.

All the tweeted smilies in the world can’t fix that.

I call that #MARKETINGFAIL

January 13th, 2010

Help Wanted: Troubleshooting a YouTube Video Problem

A recent bug report to Apple and plea for help from readers.

I’m publishing this here in the hopes that readers who use Macs can confirm or deny the suspected source of this problem.

It might seem like a stretch, but please hear me out.

I was unable to view the YouTube video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzySHcWuRqw (the same video I just embedded in a post on my personal blog) from my iMac in either Firefox or Safari. The video appeared to be loading but would never play. I tried other videos on YouTube and had no problem. No one else on YouTube (per the comments) seemed to be having trouble with the video in question.

I attempted to watch the video in Firefox on my 13″ MacBook Pro. It worked!

I attempted to watch the video in Firefox on my older 15″ MacBook Pro. It didn’t work.

I tried to determine how the little MacBook differed from the other two computers. All three are running the latest version of Snow Leopard. What I discovered on running Software Update is that the little MacBook Pro was NOT up to date. Of the uninstalled updates, the Java for Mac OS X 10.6 was listed. (So is Airport Client update 2009-002, Bonjour Update 2010-001, Remote Desktop Client Update 3.3.2, and Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 2.7.) Java seems like the likely culprit, but I could be wrong.

Can anyone out there confirm or deny this?

Here’s how you can help me:

  1. Use your Mac running any Web browser to view the above video. You don’t have to watch the whole thing — if you see Randi talking, it works and you can stop.
  2. Installed UpdatesRun Software Update. Click the Installed Software button to display a list of installed updates. Compare your list to what’s shown here.
  3. Use the Comments link or form for this post to answer four questions:
    • Which Web browser are you using?
    • What version of Mac OS is installed?
    • Did the video play?
    • Is Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 1 listed in the Installed Software panel?

    If you like, you can also list which of the updates in the red box are not installed.

I appreciate any help I can get with this problem. It drives me nuts when something doesn’t work right on one of my Macs — especially when it works fine on another with an almost identical software configuration.

January 1st, 2010

Beware of Smith Micro Mac Software

A quick warning to Snow Leopard users.

I just spent the past day and a half working on a 4,000-word article for one of my publishers about ways you can reduce hard disk clutter. (I’ll share the link when the article goes online in about a month.) As part of the article, I checked out two Smith Micro software products: Spring Cleaning 10 and Internet Cleanup 5. I don’t think I’ve ever regretted installing any software as much as I regret installing these two products.

First, I should mention that the process of obtaining a 30-day demo copy of Spring Cleaning 10 requires you to provide a credit card number up front. Although the Web site offers a PayPal option, it simply does not work — and customer service is clueless about the problem. It took me three tries to get the software. In the end, after two hours of frustration, download instructions finally arrived. Even those weren’t clear; I still had to hunt around for the download link.

While I’m not sure which of the two products caused the problems I encountered, I suspect it may have been Internet Cleanup. This software purports to help protect you from malware and spyware. It installs files all over your computer, including files that interact directly with your system files. After installing either it or Spring Cleaning, my Mac began suffering kernel panic crashes every time I shut down.

If you’re not familiar with a kernel panic, it appears as a sweep of darkness over the face of your computer screen, from the top to the bottom. The computer becomes completely unresponsive. A message in four or five languages appears, instructing you to shut down your computer by holding down the power button until the computer stops running. You can then restart. When I restarted, a dialog asked if I wanted to report the problem to Apple. Clicking the Show Details button in that screen displays some gibberish that helps Apple’s tech people understand what went wrong. In every case, the name SmithMicro appeared among the gibberish — proof that the software was causing the problem.

I uninstalled both programs. For Internet Cleanup, I used AppZapper, which appeared to delete all the files. For Spring Cleaning, I used the uninstaller that came with the program. Unfortunately, the kernel panic errors continued to plague my system.

Even a “genius” at the Apple Store was baffled. In the end, he reinstalled Snow Leopard from scratch for me. The problem went away. Two files appeared in an Incompatible Software folder after the reinstallation. Both referred to Smith Micro software.

I’m writing this post to warn users of potential problems. No one wants their computer screwed up so badly that a system software reinstallation is necessary.

I’ve written to the folks at Smith Micro to advise them of my experience. I have not received a response. Customer service did tell me that my credit card would not be charged for the software, which I have since fully deleted. There is no mention of Snow Leopard compatibility — or incompatibility — for either of these products on the Smith Micro Web site.

December 28th, 2009

Blogging Basics: Comment Spam, Part III

Part III: Identifying Comment Spam

One of the challenges of being a serious blogger is dealing with comment spam. While I believe that every blogger should install and enable comment spam prevention software — I use Akismet and Bad Behavior together on my self-hosted WordPress blog — I also go the next step and review every single comment before it’s posted. This ensures that no spam gets through the cracks and appears on my blog.

I also, however, review the spam caught by Akismet to make sure it really is spam. Today, on this blog, I got the usual collection of machine-generated and posted spam comments with an extra helping of comments that might appear, on the surface, to be real.

(Note: Although I originally wrote this as a stand-alone post, I realized it would make a good addition to a series I started about a year ago. So I’ve slipped it into that series as Part III.)

The Goal of Comment Spammers

To understand what a spam comment is, you need to take a look at the goal of spam commenters. The majority of comments that appear on my blogs have one or both of two goals:

  • Create comment content with clickable links to one or more other sites. Since different blogging platforms support different link notation, some of these links appear as actual links while the rest appear like URLs surrounded by gibberish.
  • Create a link from their name — which isn’t actually their name — to another site. This is pretty easy on a WordPress blog, since when a commenter fills out both the Name and URL field, the comment displays the name as a link to the URL.

Either way, the site the spammer is linking to could contain products or services they want to sell, be part of a black hat SEO project, or even install malware on visitor computers. They often have nothing to do with the post they’re commenting on. There’s no reason in the world why I’d want those links on my site. Hence, they’re spam.

Once you know the goal of these spammers, identifying what might be a legitimate comment as spam becomes easy. Here are a few examples taken right from the Edit Comments administration panel on this blog.

Empty Praise

In this first example, it appears, at first glance, that six different very friendly people commented on six different blog posts. They all have different names and different e-mail addresses and are commenting from different IP addresses. But the URL they’ve entered all starts with the same name, pointing to free blogs on multiple sites. They were all posted within 2 minutes of each other.

Spam Example 1

And when you read the actual comment content, it’s clear that it’s not real. Here’s what was entered as a comment about the post titled “AirPort Client Update 2009-01 1.0 Now Available“:

That is some inspirational stuff. Never knew that opinions could be this varied. Thanks for all the enthusiasm to offer such helpful information here.

Inspirational? Opinions? Neither of these words apply to this post.

Or how about the unlikely comment on “Turning Off a Plugin’s Update Reminder“?

I thought it was going to be some boring old post, but it really compensated for my time. I will post a link to this page on my blog. I am sure my visitors will find that very useful.

Not a likely comment for this post.

This isn’t the only spammer trying to fool me with complements. Look at this weird comment on my post titled “Bluetooth Adapters not the Same as Built-in Bluetooth” by someone with the unlikely name “[redacted] county limousine service”:

Very insightful post. Makes me move to Europe and learn as many languages as I can. How different the world we be if we could just get past our differences.

Huh? Move to Europe and learn languages? That’s a great way to avoid Bluetooth issues. Not.

These empty words of praise could fool someone looking for a pat on the back. Don’t let them fool you into including spam on your blog — even if their comments claim they’re going to link to you.

Questions

Another way comment spammers attempt to get attention for their spammy comments is by asking questions in the comment. What well-meaning blogger or reader can resist answering a question? Here’s a example from today’s batch of spam:

Do you do all your own writing? Or do you outsource some of it? I

(No, the hanging character “I” is not a typo on my part. It was really part of the comment.)

Or this one:

Interesting information. May I add this blog to my linkexchange directory ?

I’ve seen so many variations on this. They often start with a complement and then ask a question that seems to deserve an answer. If the comment is approved, the blogger or a reader may answer the question in another comment, thus drawing more attention to it to make it look legitimate. Or, worse yet, the blogger or commenter may click the link created by the URL for the commenter’s name (which could look legitimate) and wind up exactly where the spammer wanted him to go.

Or sometimes they ask a question that can be answered by a link in their comment, something like “Do you know where I can find good video rentals? I’ve been using blahblah.com (with link)” The object there is to appear to offer helpful information. But is it related to the post? If it’s spam, it probably won’t be.

Links Galore!

Here’s a good example of old fashioned, link-heavy comment spam:

Spam Example 2

And one where they weren’t taking any chances; they used two standard notations to indicate links, one of which just shows up as code characters:

Spam Example 3

If you can’t identify these as comment spam, you should probably turn off the comment feature on your blog.

It’s Not a Big Deal

In this post I looked at only three kinds of spam you’re likely to get. There others. If I find good examples, I’ll cover them in another post.

I know at least one blogger who has given up on comments because of the amount of spam that comes through. This blogger is probably not using good tools to prevent and capture spam.

As I mentioned at the top of this post, I use Bad Behavior, which prevents a lot of automated spam and Akismet which captures about 90% of the spam that gets past Bad Behavior. On each of my blogs, I seldom have more than one or two spam comments mixed in with real comments to review. But the potential spam list is always long and I very seldom find a real comment there. Usually a quick glance and a click clears out all the garbage.

In the next post of this series, I’ll explain how you can configure Akismet on your WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress blog.

Learn more on Lynda.com!

Get more from your software.

If you’re a WordPress user and would like to learn more about handling spam on your WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress account, I hope you’ll check out my WordPress courses on Lynda.com. The current titles of interest are:

We’ll likely be revising one or both of those courses in the coming months, but for now, you’ll find either one very helpful for working with WordPress.com or your self-hosted WordPress site.

And keep checking in here. As a very active WordPress blogger, I’m always offering tips on this site for using WordPress. Click the WordPress category link to find some of my recent posts.