Maria’s Guides

A problem resolved becomes a new problem to resolve.

A while back, I complained that the ping and trackback features on my site wouldn’t work. I could get trackbacks and pingbacks, but I couldn’t send them. I even wrote a TrackBack Troubleshooting post about it which has become one of the most widely read posts on my site.

A while later, I moved my blogs to GoDaddy.com. Immediately, the trackback/pingback feature began working. And it’s been working ever since.

Trouble is, when I refer to a older blog entry in my own blog from a new blog entry, the new entry pings the old one, thus creating a trackback “comment.” The comments are ugly and relatively meaningless. Yes, they do provide a forward link to the new and related content, but they also appear in my recent comments list, thus making it look as if I’m the only one who ever comments on my posts. (Not true, but it certainly feels that way sometimes.) And I’m not convinced that the forward link is necessary.

So today I searched the help forums at WordPress.org to see if there was a solution. The answer appeared in a topic titled “How do I stop links to other posts in same weblog producing a pingback?”

There were actually several answers. The simplest was to omit the domain name from the link, creating a relative path:

To summarise, when linking to your own posts, use a relative path, not the full path.

So instead of

I wrote this yesterday

Use this:

I wrote this yesterday

Do that, and you won’t get a ping.

Sounds like an easy enough solution.

But my solution of choice was to use the No Self Pings Plugin available from blogwaffe.com:

Some people really like that WordPress sends pings from your own site to your own site when you write posts; it lets them easily leave a trail of related posts.

Some people do not like this behavior; it clutters up their comments.

So here’s a plugin to disable self pinging.

Two ways to do the same thing. Take your choice.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to delete all the self-pings that have accumulated on this site in the past few months.

Well, it only took me 3 years to notice this.

Sheesh. It always happens. I find errors in books I’m revising, after thousands of people have bought the book and consulted it, sometimes for years.

Well, that’s part of what my Book Support sites are about: to provide corrections and clarifications to the books. So here’s a correction on my Excel 2003 Visual QuickStart Guide.

Due to a cropping error in the layout (my fault), Figure 6 on Page 107 is incorrect. It should look like this:

If you find an error in any of my books, please don’t keep it to yourself. Use the appropriate Q & A post to comment on it. If it’s wrong, I’ll fix it and note it on the Book Support pages. If it’s not wrong, we’ll try to figure out why you think it is.

So you can get things done.

The biggest source of distractions for me these days is my computer itself. There are just so many other things to do with it (blogging, researching stuff on the ‘Net, e-mailing, playing with images, etc.) than the things I should be doing (working on my Excel book, writing articles for Informit.com, taking care of accounting matters, etc).

Evidently, I’m not the only person with this problem. It was covered on MacBreak Weekly, one of the podcasts I’ve been listening to these days. A summary of some of the tools discussed on the program is covered on 43 Folders: “MacBreak: Minimize distractions on your Mac.”

My favorite: Spirited Away to hide inactive windows.

If you’ve got the distraction problem as bad as I do, good luck getting over it.

Must-have data — at least for me.

It may sound strange to folks who live in the world of alarm clocks and wrist watches, but my life’s calendar is managed by the sun. I wake early — before sunrise this time of year — and I sometimes can’t do things until after the sun has come up. As a pilot, I also need to know when the sun will rise and set so I can schedule sunrise and sunset flights, night flights, and photo flights, all of which depend on the sun for timing.

Each year, I export the daily sunrise and sunset information from TimePalette, a shareware application that provides various almanac information, into a FileMaker Pro database I created, which turns the exported data into real dates and times. I then export the Sunrise and Sunset info as separate FileMaker Pro files. I import those into iCal Filter, which enables me to export them back out as iCal .ics files. I open those file to import the information into iCal, thus displaying sunrise and sunset times on my iCal calendar.

Although it seems like a lot of work, I only do it once a year and then I’m set for the entire year.

I just ran through this exercise for 2007. You can download the resulting Sunrise.ics and Sunset.ics files and import them into your iCal calendar. Of course the sunrise and sunset times are customized for Wickenburg, AZ (not far from Phoenix), so if you live more than 100 miles away, the times will be off by more than a few minutes.

If you’re interested in the .ics files for your location, I could probably be charmed into whipping up the files for you in exchange for one of the items on my Amazon.com wish list. (I really like surprises.) I might even throw in the moonrise/moonset times; I’m working on adding them, too.