Monthly Archives: February 2007

Mouse Wars: Microsoft vs. Logitech

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I try out two wireless mice and have a clear winner.

One of the things I don’t like about using a laptop is the trackpad. While I’ll take a trackpad over a trackball any day, neither of them come close to the pointing precision I can achieve with a regular mouse.

A lot of the work I do on my desktop Mac (which is fully recovered now; thanks for asking) is layout work where I commonly drag objects with pixel precision. If I had to do that with a trackpad, I’d go nuts. And while I don’t often do any kind of layout work on my laptops, I really prefer a mouse.

My Microsoft Wireless Mouse

Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse 3000 -SlateA while back, as a test, I bought a Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse 3000. That’s a big name for a little pointing device. I liked the mouse’s ergonomic design and the way it fit into my hand so nicely. It tracked well, pointed well, clicked well. And the roller ball between the two buttons was soon something I began using regularly. And that’s a lot to say from someone who has been using single-button Apple mice for the past 18 years with no complaints. Best of all, the darn thing retails for only $30.

The only thing I didn’t like about the Microsoft mouse was that it wasn’t Bluetooth. Yes, it was wireless, but to use it I had to stick a small receiver/transmitter do-dad into one of my USB ports. Not a big deal, since I don’t usually have anything connected to my laptop anyway. But the USB thing is also the on/off switch for the mouse. When you’re finished using it, you’re supposed to pull out the USB thing and fit it into a specially-designed slot on the bottom of the mouse. That triggers the off switch, thus cutting power to the device and stopping any drain on the battery. My problem — or perhaps I should say one of my problems — is that I have a mind like a sieve sometimes and simply can’t remember to go through this procedure when I’m finished working.

To be fair, there hasn’t been any penalty yet. I’ve been using the mouse on and off for over a year, forget to turn it off about half the time I use it, and it’s still on its original battery. It has some kind of standby mode that sense when you’ve stopped working and reduces battery drain. So it’s not like I’m going through batteries at an alarming rate. I’m not.

So, in summary, I liked everything about the Microsoft mouse except for this silly USB thing.

My Logitech Mouse

Logitech V270 Cordless Optical Bluetooth Mouse- CharcoalIn an effort to improve the situation, I bought a Logitech v270 Cordless Optical Bluetooth mouse. Now I don’t want you to think I was going to just throw away the Microsoft Mouse. I wasn’t. I happen to have more than one laptop and I also thought that I might start using a wireless mouse with my desktop machine. In fact, that’s what I originally bought it for. I have lots of USB devices and didn’t want to use up one of the ports on my hub. Besides, I’m trying hard to reduce the rat’s nest of wires behind my desk and figured a wireless mouse for everyday use would remove one wire.

Logitech is a company that has been around for a while. They’ve been making input devices perhaps as long as I’ve been using Macs. Their products are usually very good. But this particular mouse — which, at $50, cost almost twice as much as the Microsoft mouse — pretty much sucks.

Okay, so it doesn’t have the same perfect ergonomic shape that fits my hand so well. I wasn’t going to hold that against it. I figured that Microsoft got lucky with that design, or maybe that I got lucky that Microsoft’s design was so perfect for me. I couldn’t expect every mouse to fit so well. So that’s not what drove me to my decision.

It’s the tracking. The mouse is terrible. I can’t put my finger on it (no pun intended), but it just doesn’t seem as smooth. I can’t get the same precision. It’s frustrating and distracting and makes it difficult to get my work done without a lot of extra thought and effort.

To be fair, I tried both mice on several different computers, including my Dual G5 production machine, my 12″ PowerBook G4, my Dell Latitude 820D laptop, and my new 15″ MacBook Pro. The results were the same on every single machine. The only difference is that I had some difficulty pairing up the Logitech Bluetooth mouse on one or two of the machines. The Microsoft mouse worked perfectly on every machine — Mac and PC — as soon as I plugged in the silly USB do-dad. And it tracked perfectly, just like a wired mouse.

Mighty Mouse

Apple Bluetooth Wireless Mighty MouseApple sells a wireless mouse called Mighty Mouse. (It’s amazing to me how Apple comes up with these names.) It’s been discussed in comments elsewhere on this site. I got a chance to work a wired version of this mouse at the Chandler Apple Store a few weeks ago. It’s a two-button mouse without physical buttons. It seems to work well. I’ll be checking out the wireless version soon enough, since I need to write about it for my Leopard book.

The reviews on the Apple Store Web site are pretty much split. Some people absolutely love Mighty Mouse while others absolutely hate it. An Apple person I spoke to admitted in a whisper that he hated it. It’s certainly the most expensive of the bunch, retailing for $70.

I didn’t think there would be a reason to “hate” a wireless mouse until I bought the Logitech mouse. I assumed they all worked as well as the Microsoft Mouse when it came to tracking. But the Logitech mouse proved that they don’t. I don’t know how Mighty Mouse will perform yet for me, but I’ll be writing about it here sometime in the future.

My Ratings

The bottom line is this: I tried two wireless mice. I very much like one (love is too strong a word) and really don’t like the other (hate is also too strong a word). If I had to rate them on a scale of 1 to 5 stars, here’s how I would do it:

Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse 3000

[rate 4.5]

Logitech v270 Cordless Optical Bluetooth mouse

[rate 1.5]

Any thoughts? Use the Comments link to share them.

Excel Alignment Tips

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For perfectionists.

One of the things that always bothered me about Excel was the way it handled right alignment in cells with certain types of number formatting applied.

The Problem

For example, in the following illustration you’ll see that some cells containing values have currency formatting and other cells containing values have comma formatting applied. The line up nicely in a column. But when right-align the column headings as I’ve done here, the headings don’t line up with the numbers:

Excel Alignment Example

This is the case in all recent versions of Excel that I’ve worked with, including Excel 2004 for Macintosh and Excel 2007 and Excel 2003 for Windows. (The illustrations here are from Excel 2007 running on Windows Vista.)

Why It Happens

Before we can fix this problem, we should have a good understanding of why it occurs.

You may have noticed that when you apply currency or comma formatting (for example) the numbers shift to the left. Ever wonder why?

Excel Alignment ExampleWell, you can thank Excel for thinking ahead about something that you might not have in a column of numbers: negative values. As shown here, certain number formatting options place parentheses around negative numbers. To make sure all the numbers in a column line up, positive numbers are shifted by the width of a parentheses character to the left. So every number formatting with currency or comma formatting actually has a tiny bit of space after it.

The Solution

Since you don’t normally apply currency or comma formatting to text, cells containing text are truly aligned against the right side of the cell when you use the right alignment formatting option.

But guess what? You can apply currency or comma formatting to a cell containing text. And when you do, the contents of the cell will shift to the left by the width of one parentheses character. The result: everything is nicely aligned:

Excel Alignment Example

How to Advertise Special Offers with your WordPress Blog

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A surprisingly simple solution.

If you operate a blog-based Web site — or even a Web site that includes a separate blog — there’s a good chance that you can use the built-in category and RSS feed features to distribute special offers to site visitors by e-mail.

I set this up on my WordPress-based Flying M Air Web site the other day and it works like a charm. Let me explain how.

The Goal

Before I explain how to set this up, let me take a few moments to explain why you might want to do it. The best way to do that is to explain what my goal was.

Flying M Air offers helicopter tours, charters, and excursions throughout Arizona. Some of our flights begin and end in Phoenix, which is about 1/2 hour from our base in Wickenburg. The folks who buy Phoenix-based tours and charters cover the cost of our flight to the starting point, but with a penalty to our profit margin.

My idea was to “piggyback” other tours out of Phoenix on existing tours. So, for example, if I knew I had a flight at 1 PM, I could offer similar flights out of Phoenix in 12 noon and 2 pm time slots. These piggybacked tours would be offered at a discount to encourage customers to sign up. This would enable me to serve multiple Phoenix-based customers with one round-trip to the Phoenix area, thus maximizing my revenue for the trip.

What I wanted to do to get the word out was to publish the special offers on the Web site and automatically e-mail these offers to potential customers who were interested in receiving offers. I’m not talking about spam here. I’m talking about a mailing list that people voluntarily subscribe to and could unsubscribe from at any time. Something I wouldn’t have to manually manage. (God knows I have enough work to do.)

How I Did It

Flying M Air's siteI started by creating a “Be Spontaneous!” category on my Flying M Air site. The purpose of the category is to publicize “last-minute” special offers for specific dates and time slots. Because not everyone would know what “Be Spontaneous!” means, I also added a link to the category on the top navigation bar, with a more obvious label: “Special Offers.”

I then created post-dated entries with the special offers I wanted to advertise. Only one offer would appear at a time. I’d have to manually delete the offers after the date (or perhaps leave them there so visitors could see the kinds of offers they missed).

Next, I went to FeedBurner and set up a feed for the special offers. While there, I set up the E-mail Notification feature. You can learn how to do that in my Informit.com article, “Add Email Notification to Your Blog with FeedBurner.”

Finally, I added a subscription form to the sidebar of the site. I also got fancy and added an introduction to the Be Spontaneous! category that explained what it was all about and offered a subscription link.

Mission accomplished. (Really, though.)

Give It a Try

This is how I did this with WordPress, but you can just as easily do it with other blogging software. (Just don’t ask me which ones or how to do it. I’m a WordPress user.) The key ingredients are the separate special offers category and the FeedBurner e-mail subscription feature.

One word of advice: if you’re going to go through the bother of doing this, make sure your special offers really ARE special. Don’t turn this into spam. Not only will you annoy and alienate your subscribers, but you’ll give them the idea that subscribing to Web content always leads to spam.

And that’ll ruin it for the rest of us.

Web Site vs. Blog

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What’s the Difference?

Today I got a phone call from our local newspaper’s “business advocate” — the guy who writes stories about business. He was researching an article about blogging and figured that I was the most active blogger — if not the only blogger — in town, so I might be able to to provide some information about it. He wasn’t aware that I’d co-authored a book about WordPress blogging software (WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide) in 2006 and he probably wasn’t aware that I wrote Putting Your Small Business on the Web back in 2000. He probably also doesn’t know that I’ve written four books about Web authoring software (various versions of PageMill, now defunct) and that I’ve been building and managing Web sites since 1994 (although I’m not crazy enough to do it for a living).

We stumbled a bit in our conversation. He referred to my Web site, wickenburg-az.com, as a blog. (The site has been around since 1999, predating the blogging phenomena by at least 3 to 4 years.) I responded that it wasn’t a blog, that it was a Web site built with blogging software. And then he asked me what the difference was.

I had to think about it. What is the difference between a Web site and a blog?

They’re very much alike.

Let’s take a look at the similarities.

  • Web sites and blogs are both published on the Web and can be read with any Web browser. This gives them the same basic look and feel and similar user experiences. Web sites built with blogging software can look and feel just like a blog, even if that’s not what they are intended to be.
  • They depend on good, useful content. Web site visitors and blog readers come to read content. If the content is good and meets their needs, they’ll be back for more. If the content sucks, they won’t.

But they are different.

Of course, I needed to explain how they were different — not how they were the same. The response I came up with centered around the purpose of visitors coming to to the site, but there are more differences.

  • Web site visitors come to a site to look for specific information. That information does not need to be new. It just needs to be what the visitor is looking for. For example, I visit the HP Web site when I need a new driver for one of my printers. I know it’ll be there and I don’t care if it’s been there for five years. People visit wickenburg-az.com to get basic information about Wickenburg: what it’s like, what to do there, etc. But blog readers visit or subscribe to blogs to get fresh information or insight on topics that are important to them. I read ProBlogger, for example, because it has timely articles that can help me understand how to be a better blogger. People visit aneclecticmind.com to read articles like this one about blogging, or other articles about flying, or even other articles about what it’s like to live in a place like Wickenburg — all from my point of view.
  • Blogs tend to be more opinion-based than Web sites. Sure, HP is going to tell you on their Web site that their printers are the best, but what would you expect? On my blog, I’ll tell you what I think about my HP printer and compare it to other printers I might own or have experience with. I’ll also tell you what I think of Apple Geniuses or local restaurants or life revolving around the Internet. (Although some locals might find this hard to believe, I keep most of my negative opinions of Wickenburg out of wickenburg-az.com. Most.) The opinion aspect makes blogs more personal than a Web site.
  • Blogs rely on fresh content. It’s commonly accepted that a blogger should post at least 3 to 5 new entries a week. Web sites, on the other hand, are more static and don’t require as much updating. Their visitors don’t expect it, either.

Does it matter?

Who knows? But it’s made me think about blogging a bit more than usual lately. And I’m sure it will lead to a few more articles here about what makes a blog a blog in the near future.

iPod Microphones: A Review

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On the Future Tense Podcast.

One of the other podcasts I really enjoy is American Public Media’s Future Tense. This public radio show has 3 to 5 minute segments on topics related to computing and technology. I highly recommend it for a quick dose of what’s new presented in plain English.

XtremeMac IPV-MIC-00 MicroMemo Digital Voice Recorder for iPod Video (Black)For those of you interested in recording with your iPod, the February 12 episode, iPod Microphones: a Review, should make good listening. It certainly pleased me. It confirmed that the iPod microphone I recently purchased — the XtremeMac MicroMemo — was the best of the three reviewed. The podcast also includes sample recordings with various mics under various conditions to give you an idea of what to expect if you invest in one of these gadgets for your iPod.

More Feed Stuff

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Now you can see the extremes I can take this stuff to.

Okay, so I get my category feeds set up and I get them redirected to FeedBurner. But I decide that I don’t like the name of the site feed (Maria Langer, The Official Web Site*) appearing as the name for all of the category feeds. Too much confusion for folks who subscribe to two or more categories here. (Silly me, imagining loyal readers who want to track multiple book support sites via feed.)

So I dig around in the WordPress Codex for code that’ll help me. I see some template tags there that might do the trick but don’t feel like wasting a day figuring out how to make this work.

So then I try searching the WordPress documentation and forums. I usually have terrible luck with the forums. I never seem to come up with the right combination of search words. But today, I did.

I searched for category feed title and I came up with this thread. In it, Diplo provides some relatively complex yet simple to insert code. Once I realized that the non-English words were variable names (duh) and could be used as Diplo wrote them, I inserted the code as instructed and got the desired result: if a feed is for a specific category, only the category name appears in the <title> tag. As an added bonus, the category’s description (not the blog’s description) also appears in the feed header.

Now maybe I can get back to my real work.

–
*Read with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

FeedBurner E-Mail Notification Article Now Online

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Informit gets around to publishing one of the articles I wrote in December.

Back in December, I added individual RSS feeds on FeedBurner for the book support categories on this site. The main reason I did this was to take advantage of FeedBurner’s e-mail notification feature.

E-mail notification is like RSS feeds for novices. Instead of requiring users to know how to set up a live bookmark or configure a feed reader to get new content, it simply delivers new content to subscribers automatically once a day via e-mail. Whether I write one entry or ten in a day, the contents of those entries are compiled nightly into a single e-mail message and sent out to subscribers. That’s all they get. No junk mail, no spam, no annoying reminders. Best of all, the e-mail message includes links that subscribers can use to check out the article on my site or leave comments. And a link to unsubscribe that actually works.

When I set this feature up for my book support categories, I wrote an article about it that explained, with screenshots, how to get the job done. I submitted it to my overworked editor at Informit.com, she gave me the thumbs up, and it ended up in Informit’s publication pipeline. I approved the edits in mid January and began waiting to see it appear online.

Informit apparently publishes new content weekly on Fridays. At least, that’s how it seems to me. My articles always seem to come out on Fridays. “Add Email Notification to Your Blog with FeedBurner” appeared this morning.

Enjoy.

Oh, and by the way, there are three more articles in the Informit pipeline. I’ll let you know when they appear. You can always find a complete list of my articles, with links to the ones that can be read online, on my Articles page.

.htaccess Modifications Boost My FeedBurner Numbers

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The fruits of my labor.

Yesterday, I spent a good part of the day updating my site’s .htaccess file to redirect requests for my WordPress-generated feeds to my corresponding FeedBurner feeds. This included the main feed for my site as well as individual category feeds for my Book Support categories.

I discussed why I wanted to do this in a previous article, “The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite,” which includes a quick book review of the book I found extremely helpful to complete this daunting (for me, at least) task.

The resulting .htaccess file included a few RewriteCond and RewriteRule statements to point most feed requests to my FeedBurner feeds. I say “most” because, for some reason, I couldn’t get one of the RewriteRule statements to work.

Having trouble understanding what the heck I’m talking about? Here’s a way to look at the situation:

Think of all of the incoming feed requests as a flow of water coming into my site. I don’t want that water in my site — I want it at FeedBurner’s site so I can measure it and ensure consistent outflow. My RewriteRule and Redirect statements are like pipelines, each of which gathers a specific flow of water and delivers it to FeedBurner. I need one more pipe to capture the last trickle of water coming into my site. I think I have the right pipe, but the water’s not flowing into it.

(Sometimes I really do get carried away with analogies.)

Anyway, this morning I checked my Feedburner subscriber numbers. After all, if I started sending FeedBurner more of my requests, there should be more subscribers, right? The result had me pleasantly surprised: I had about twice as many subscribers today as yesterday for my main feed. It’ll be interesting to see what tomorrow’s number looks like.

I also made some changes to the category feed links (those tiny orange icons in a post’s header) so they’re redirected to the corresponding Feedburner feeds. Of course, this was only for my Book Support category topics. I don’t have a FeedBurner feed for every category on my site, so I couldn’t redirect them all.

What’s the benefit of a FeedBurner feed? Two obvious things that I can see:

  • Feedburner can track the number of subscribers to a feed, so you can instantly and easily see how popular a feed is. It also provides a bunch of other stats to help you understand what subscribers are interested in.
  • Feedburner’s BrowserFriendly feature takes ugly feed code and turns it into a Web page. So if someone clicks a feed link, they get something they can actually read in their browser. Best of all, there are buttons near the top of the page that make it easy to subscribe with a bunch of different popular feed readers. This is a great feature to convert newbies into subscribers.

I’m not completely done messing around with .htaccess on my site, but I’m taking a break from it. Sometimes when I hit a block, the best thing to do is walk away for a while and come back to it. I’ll get that last pipe working — but not today.

Anyone interested in seeing the .htaccess commands I used? Use the Comments link to let me know and I’ll put them online in another post.

WordPress Category Feeds

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Did you read the article?

If you’re a subscriber or frequent visitor here, you may have caught my how-to article about including category feed links for each post’s category. You can see how this looks on every post on my site — at the top of the post is the category name with a tiny feed icon before it. Clicking the feed icon opens the RSS feed page for that category. You can copy the link and paste it into your feed reader to subscribe to the category.

I wrote the article right after I made this modification to my site. It seemed like a good WordPress trick to share with readers, so I put it online. At least 130 people read it on my site. But then I got to thinking about it and realized that I might have a good paying market for the article. I submitted it to my editor at Informit and they bought it. So I had to take it offline.

Fear not! Informit.com is a free source of articles on the Web. So when it gets through editing and into production, it’ll be back online there and I’ll have a link to it on this site. Unfortunately, that’ll take at least a month. I’m not their only writer and there’s plenty of other content for them to get online. I’m still waiting for four articles I’ve written for them in the past month to appear online — three of them are of special interest to WordPress users.

But I thought I’d take a few moments to explain why I went through the bother of creating category feed links here. Read on to see if this technique works for you.

Why Category Feeds?

Without repeating too much of what’s in my Informit article, here’s the deal.

Everything I’ve read about successful blogging says that a blog must have a specific topic to succeed. If you visit my Web site or subscribe to my primary RSS feed, you know that I’m just not following that rule. My site/blog covers all kinds of topics: computing for Mac users, computing for Windows users, flying, writing, photography, stuff going on in my life, travel, blogging, productivity, and so on. It’s a hodgepodge of information and opinion and I seriously doubt whether everything I write about is of interest to anyone.

While I could start multiple blogs, each of which covers a specific topic, I’ve been there and done that and I didn’t like it one darn bit. Too much work to do, especially when it’s time to upgrade!

Fortunately certain topics are of interest to a lot of different people. One person might like what I write about WordPress while another might like what I write about flying. Neither of them care a bit about the other topic. They don’t want to subscribe to my main feed to get the tidbits that interest them. They might not even want to visit the site regularly to see what’s new and interesting for them. They stop by once or twice, read things they like, see things they don’t care about, and forget to come back.

I want to capture those visitors and keep them coming back for more. I figure that the best way to do that is to offer RSS feeds (also viewable as “Live Bookmarks” in Firefox — my browser of choice — and possibly other browsers) for every topic on the site. This way, people who want to follow certain topics I write about can do it without having to wade through the stuff they couldn’t care less about.

How WordPress Makes this Easy

WordPress makes it easy to publish category feeds — it does it automatically. All a reader has to do is know the URL for the automatically generated category feed. And all I’ve done is give it to them on a platter, by creating a link with the feed URL beside the category name in a post header.

My article goes into the how-to aspect of this in some detail, with the code I used to make it happen. Copyright agreements prevent me from repeating that code, which is the main content of the article, here. (Sorry, but I do write for a living, which means I need to get paid for my work sometimes.)

I did write an article some time ago that explained how to create an RSS feed page like the one on my site: “How to Create a WordPress RSS Feed Page.” As that article explains, you can use the wp_list_cats tag to include your RSS feed link for a category in parentheses after the category name. That’s handy on an RSS feed page like the one I wrote about, as well as in sidebar listings of categories. For most folks, that’ll be enough.

I used a more “in your face” approach. I just hope it works.

Thoughts on the topic of category feeds? Use the Comment link to share them with other readers.

Backup at the Touch of a Button?

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We’ll see.

The first thing I did when my hard disk failed on Friday (for the fourth time in less than 10 years) was to go online and find an external hard disk that had enough capacity to back up my computer’s entire hard disk. And while I was at it, I’d get one that was bigger than my current hard disk so I could use it for my next computer (which will probably be purchased sometime before the end of this year).

Seagate ST3300601CB-RK 300 GB External Hard Drive with FireWire and USB 2.0 InterfaceI started at the Apple store, figuring that the products sold there would work effortlessly with my Mac. I found a Seagate 300 GB model (the Seagate ST3300601CB-RK) that boasted “pushbutton backup.” Now that sounded like the right thing for me. I did a little Web searching and found the same hard disk on Amazon.com for $40 less. I ordered it. It should arrive sometime next week — hopefully right around the same time TechTool Pro finishes doing whatever it can to recover my data.

SmartDisk FWFL80 80GB Firelite 2.5In the meantime, I still have two 80GB Smart Disk FireLite portable Firewire hard disks to capture whatever can be scavenged from the disk.

I’d like to hear from readers about backup strategies and solutions, as well as any experiences with Seagate’s “award-winning Bounceback Express software.” (I’m extemely skeptical about this solution.) Use the Comments link. And if you want to share a hard disk crash story with us, please do. I can’t be the only one out there losing hard disks.