Maria’s Guides

Don’t make the font size larger — zoom it!

Yesterday, I reread a blog entry I wrote earlier this year about my failing eyesight (”The Eyes Had It“). My far vision has always been bad, but now I’m beginning to lose my close vision, too. Miraz, my co-author on the WordPress book, commented that she’s going through the same thing and now uses a larger font size when working with Word.

As a writer, I spend a good portion of my workday in front of word processing or page layout software. I have a 21″ Sony monitor at my office — you know, one of those enormous super VGA CRTs that weighs about 80 lbs. I have the screen resolution set so I see a lot on my screen. But that means that most of what I see is small.

I found that if I received a document from someone with a normal font size — say 12 points — I just wasn’t able to view it comfortably at 100% magnification. So I needed a workaround.

There were two options:

• Change the screen resolution to a lower setting. On a Mac, you do this with the Displays preferences pane. On Windows, I think it’s also called Displays and its a control panel. I’m not sure what that big monitor at the office is set to, but my 12″ PowerBook is set all the way up to 1024 x 786. If I dropped that down to 800 x 600, everything on screen would look larger and I’d probably have a better time seeing it. But I’d also get less on my screen. And some Web sites — like Flying M Air, for example — actually require a high resolution setting of at least 1024 x 786. So that isn’t the optimum solution.
• Zoom the contents of windows. Most applications have a zoom feature. For example, in Microsoft Word 2003 for Windows and 2004 for Mac OS, there’s a Zoom drop-down list right on the Standard toolbar. Choose an option from the menu or enter a new value in the text box there and press Return or Enter. I usually use 120%, unless the author of the document formatted it at some crazy font size like 9 points. Then I pop it up to 150%. I even had a document I worked on at 200% because between the small font size and the font design itself, I just couldn’t read it comfortably at any other magnification. Other programs, such as Excel, Adobe Reader (and Apple Preview, for that matter), Photoshop, and just about any other graphics or page layout program you can think of, have zoom features. I even have keystrokes remembered in some apps to toggle magnifications as necessary.

It’s odd because on one book I worked on, I’d submit Word files I’d been reading at 120% magnification and get them back from the copyeditor at 92% magnification. I’d have to pop them back up to read them. The benefit of using the magnification feature rather than simply changing font size is that layout isn’t affected. Document magnification settings can be set at anything and it’ll always have the same word wrap (except in Word’s Online Layout View perhaps) and it’ll always print the same. If you change the font size, however, you also change the word wrap and layout.

Of course, if you have trouble reading a printed version of the document, font size is just about the only solution.

But I’m not quite there. Yet.

Technorati Tags: excel, vision, Word, writing

Take all the effort out of backing up.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article explaining how to back up a WordPress database. This is something that all WordPress users should be doing regularly.

But if you’re like me, you just don’t think about manual backups. I went through a spell where I backed up one of my databases every time I remembered to do so. That turned out to be once every month or two. With the sheer quantity of blog entries that appear on my blog-based Web sites, that’s a lot of content that would be lost in the event of a system crash.

Enter WP-Cron. This WordPress plugin by Scott Merrill is basically a one-trick pony: it’ll automate the completion of a task, performing it once a day. I use it with Scott Merrill’s WordPress Database Backup, which is part of a WordPress 2.0.x installation.

Keep in mind that WP-Cron (and WordPress Database Backup, for that matter) only work on a server installation of WordPress. If you’re using WordPress.com, the folks who run that server are backing up your database for you.

Setting up WP-Cron is simple.

1. Download, install, and activate the WP-Cron plugin. (If you need help or more information about plugins, consult our WordPress book, which covers the plugin installation process extensively.)
2. Log in to WordPress and open your dashboard.
3. Click the Manage button in the first row of buttons. The Manage Posts administration panel appears.
4. Click the Backup button in the second row of buttons. The Backup administration panel appears.
5. Scroll down to the Scheduled Backups area.
   
6. Beside Schedule, select Daily.
7. Turn on the check boxes for each table you want to include in the backup. These are in addition to the blog-related database tables, which are backed up automatically. The tables in the list will vary depending on plugins. I usually turn them all on, although that can make the backup files large.
8. Enter an e-mail address in the Email backup to box. This should be an e-mail address that can receive large files. (For example, my marialanger.com site backup file is about 1.8 MB.)
9. Click Submit. After a moment, the screen should refresh with a message at the top saying that your options have been saved.

From that point on, around midnight your WordPress database will be backed up and e-mailed to you. You’ll get these backup e-mails daily, so you want to be sure to check your e-mail at least a few times a week. I usually keep the last two backup e-mails for each of my blogs and discard the others. Be sure your e-mail is set up to remove messages from the server when they are deleted or you may quickly fill up your allotted e-mail space on your ISP’s server.

My only gripe about WP-Cron is that you can’t set the backup period. Although daily is a good option for MariaLanger.com, which can get up to 10 new posts a day, it isn’t necessary for my wickenburg-az.com blog, which gets, on average 2-4 new posts a week. I’d like to be able to set a custom backup period for each blog to minimize server workload (although it isn’t my server anymore) and delivered e-mail.

Otherwise, WP-Cron is a must-have plugin. I highly recommend it for anyone who is serious about keeping their blog content safe.

Technorati Tags: backup, howto, WordPress