Monthly Archives: November 2007

All Pingbacks Must Die

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I’ve had my last pingback spam.

Anyone who has a blog knows that the comment feature is what makes a blog stand out from a plain old Web site. The comment feature is what makes a blog interactive, it’s what gives readers a chance to share their point of view or additional information about a topic. It gives them a chance to ask questions and get answers.

The comment feature works with the pingback feature. Pingbacks (which are often referred to as trackbacks) are machine-generated “comments” that are added to a post when another blogger writes a post that links to it.

Huh?

Discussion AreaOkay, think of it this way. You’re blogger A writing post 1. Blogger B writes post 2 that includes a link to post 1. A comment appears on post 1 that links back to post 2. This is all done automatically in WordPress (my blogging platform of choice) if — and this is a big if — you left the Allow Pings option turned on for post 1. You can find the setting for this in the Discussion area of the Write Post administration panel.

Unfortunately, the pingback feature also makes it possible for sploggers to get free links to their sites. A splogger builds content on a blog by stealing it from RSS feeds. Their goal is usually to get hits on their Web sites, which are full of Google AdSense ads, but they sometimes are part of a “link farm” that boosts search engine ranking.

The problem lately is that my sites have been attracting more pingback spam from splogging sites than real pings from legitimate sites and bloggers. These must be manually deleted, since my spam prevention software doesn’t seem able to catch them all. And frankly, I’m a little sick of spending each morning deleting six to twenty of these comments.

So I’m going to stop writing posts with the pingback feature enabled.

And if you’re having this problem on your blog, I recommend that you do the same.

How to Create a Gravatar

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A few easy steps can get your custom image on gravatar-enabled blogs.

I originally wrote this article in April 2006 when I enabled my site for Gravatars. When I revised the site a few months ago, I temporarily removed Gravatar support. I’m now re-enabling it. In the meantime, Gravatar was bought out by Automattic, makers of WordPress. It seems to me that if you have a WordPress blog or comment on them, having a Gravatar and supporting the Gravatar feature would be a good idea.

That said, I reviewed this article and updated it as necessary to provide current information. Why not create your own Gravatar and see it appear on the Web sites you participate in?

If you read a lot of blogs, you’re probably already familiar with gravatars — custom images that represent certain commenters. These images are a kind of personal logo that identifies them and says something about their personality.

Here’s how gravatars work. A commenter creates an image suitable for a gravatar and uploads it to his account on gravatar.com. The gravatar is rated using pretty much the same ratings as the movie industry: G, PG, R, and X. These ratings are used by bloggers to set limits on the kinds of gravatars that appear on their sites — a gravatar with a G rating will appear everywhere while a gravatar with an X rating may not appear on many blogs at all.

Meanwhile, a blogger (like me) sets up her blog to enable it for gravatars. Then, when a commenter submits a comment, the blog’s gravatar plugin takes the commenter’s e-mail address (submitted in the comment form) and attempts to find a match at gravatar.com. If it finds a match, it displays the corresponding image. (The e-mail address is not used anywhere in the underlying page code.) If there’s no image on file, the plugin either displays nothing or displays a default image chosen by the blogger.

If you frequently participate in blogs by leaving comments for blog posts, you should consider creating a gravatar. Its easy and its free. Here’s how.

  1. Go to gravatar.com’s Signup Page.
    Sign Up at Gravatar.com
  2. Enter your e-mail address in the box and click Signup. A message appears, telling you that an e-mail message has been sent to your account.
  3. Check your e-mail. You should find a message from Gravatar with the subject “Welcome to Gravatar.”
  4. Click the URL link in the e-mail message. Your browser opens and displays a message confirming that you have successfully activated your account.
    Enter a Password
  5. Enter a password for your account in each of the boxes that appear and click Set Password.
  6. If you want to receive a Gravatar newsletter, click the button in the next screen. Otherwise, click No Thanks.
  7. Use your favorite graphics application to create an image suitable for use as a gravatar. For best results, it should be 80×80 pixels in size and not include a border. (Keep in mind that it might be displayed at smaller sizes.)
  8. Save the image as a JPG, GIF, or PNG image with an Internet-friendly name (no spaces or weird characters).
  9. Use your Web browser to open your My Gravatars page on gravatar.com. (You may need to log in to your account.)
    Your Gravatars
  10. Click the add a new one link.
  11. In the next screen, click My computer’s hard drive.
  12. In the next screen, click the Browse button. Then use the standard dialog that appears to locate, select and open the image file you created for your gravatar. The pathname appears in the File box.
    Upload gravatar
  13. Click the Next button. The file is uploaded and appears in the rating screen.
    Rate Your Gravatar
  14. Click the appropriate button to apply a rating to the Gravatar. Don’t lie; this is important. And remember that for maximum exposure, it’s good to create a gravatar rated G or PG.
  15. Your newly created Gravatar appears in the My Gravatars screen. Click it to select it for your e-mail address. When prompted, click the Confirm button. Here’s what it might look like when you’re finished:
    Selected Gravatar

You can repeat steps 10 through 14 to add additional images. You can then change your gravatar by simply selecting one of the new images. As you’ll see your gravatar changes globally wherever it’s used when you change it.

From that point on, your gravatar should appear whenever you post a comment to a gravatar-enabled blog — like this one.

Do you have a gravatar now? Show it off by entering a brief comment on this post.

RSSImport

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A WordPress plugin to add links to RSS feeds.

On pages 165-166 of WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide, Miraz and I discuss CG-Feedread, a plugin that enables you to list the titles (with links) of posts on another blog based on RSS feed content. We use the plugin on our >WPVQS.com Web site to list content from Miraz’s Mactips.info site and my An Eclectic Mind site.

I hate to admit it, but I never really liked that plugin. It came as part of a package and I was only interested in that one part. So today, while attempting to add the same feature to two of my WordPress-based sites, I looked for a different, simpler solution. And I found it: RSSImport by Frank Bueltge.

RSSIMport in ActionRSSImport is a one-trick pony. It enables you to add a list of posts from any RSS feed. There are four options: the number of posts to list, the URL of the feed, whether the list should include descriptions, and whether the post title should be truncated to 30 characters.

You install and activate the plugin like any other plugin. (You can refer to Chapter 7 of our book or consult the documentation that comes with the file if you need help.) Then place the following code in your template file — most likely sidebar.php — where you want the list to appear:

<?php RSSImport(10,"http://feeds.feedburner.com/mariasguides",false,false); ?>

The options go between the parentheses. In this example, I’ll pull 10 posts from the Maria’s Guides feed, exclude the description, and disable the 30-character limit on posts. The result looks like this on An Eclectic Mind. As you can see, I included a heading before the code so the list would blend in with the rest of my sidebar content.

And if you look on the Maria’s Guides site, you’ll see a similar list for an Eclectic Mind. (The two sites used to be one and they’re still somewhat “joined at the hip.”)

I recommend the plugin if you’re looking for a simple solution to list another blog’s posts. But if you want to list multiple blogs’ posts in the same list, CG-Feedread is probably a better solution.

Leopard Quick Tip: Click to Find Where a File Lives

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A Command key trick.

While working in a Finder window, you can use the Command key and mouse to learn where the window’s folder resides in the file hierarchy. Just hold down the Command key while clicking on the folder icon in the title bar:

Command-Click a folder Name

Okay, so maybe you already knew that. But did you know that you can do the same trick in a document window when that document is opened in an application? Command-click the document icon and see the path to its location on disk.

Command-Click a Document

Either way, choosing a folder in the hierarchy opens that folder in the Finder.

Shortcut Keys, Part I: Dialogs

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A list of shortcut keys you can use in most Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard dialogs.

This is the first in a series of quick articles that list shortcut keys available in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. In this piece, I’ll tell you about some of the shortcuts you can use in Mac OS X dialogs.

Tab

Open DialogThe Tab key advances you to the next area of a dialog. So, if a dialog contains multiple text boxes for entering information, tab moves you from one to the next. You can tell when an item in a dialog is active because a blue border appears around it or a blue (usually) selection bar appears within it (or both, depending on the item).

In this example of the Open dialog for Apple’s Pages application, the Search box is active; you can see the blue border around it. If any of the list items were active, they’d have a blue bar on the selected item.

Return or Enter

Delete PodcastPressing return or Enter “clicks” the default button in the dialog. The default button is blue and pulsating — it stands out from other buttons in the dialog.

Not all dialogs have a default button and, in many cases, the default button isn’t the one you’d expect it to be. For example, when I select a podcast and press the Delete key in iTunes, I’d expect the Move to Trash button to be the default. It isn’t, as shown here. The Keep Files button is the default. Pressing return removes the file from iTunes, but who knows where it is or goes on disk?

Keep in mind that although these shortcut keys should work in the Finder, they may not work in all Mac OS X applications. It really depends on the software developer’s implementation of Mac OS standards. Try them and see for yourself!

Letter or Command-letter

This one is kind of tricky and doesn’t work all of the time. But I’ve found that it works in many applications.

If you have a dialog with multiple buttons, you can “click” one of the buttons by pressing the letter key corresponding to the first character in the button name. So in the dialog shown above, you can choose Move to Trash by pressing M.

In some applications, you might have to hold down the Command key while pressing the letter key.

You can also use a letter key to quickly go to the first item starting with that letter in a selected scrolling list.

Escape or Command-. (period)

Pressing Escape or Command-. is the same as clicking the cancel or close button in a dialog. At least it should work that way.

Up Arrow and Down Arrow

Pressing one of these arrow keys highlights the previous or next item in a selected scrolling list.

Left and Right Arrow

Pressing one of these arrow keys enables you to move horizontally in a multiple-column list. For example, in the first screenshot here, if the first column was active, you could use the right arrow key to activate the second column.

Page Up and Page Down

Pressing one of the Page keys scrolls a selected list one windowful at a time.

Command-Shift-G

Go to Folder in a DialogYou like the Go To Folder dialog that you can use in the Finder? Well, you can also use it in an Open or Save As dialog. Just press Command-Shift-G while the dialog is open. You can then enter a path to the folder you want

I have a mental block when it comes to that dialog and never seem to enter the right path on the first try.

Page References

Product ImageMac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide includes more information about these topics:

  • Keyboard shortcuts, page 23.
  • Dialogs, pages 207-209
  • Go To Folder Command and Dialog, pages 52-53

Deleting Spam from Your WordPress Blog

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Marking it as spam isn’t enough to get rid of it.

One of the things I like about WordPress is that it’s impossible to know everything about it. And today I learned something new.

I learned that the spam comments that I marked as spam had not been deleted from my WordPress database. They were just marked as spam so they wouldn’t appear in posts.

How did I discover this? I had to export all blog posts from An Eclectic Mind to a special WordPress-compatible XML file that contained all blog posts and comments. I had to weed out all the posts and comments I didn’t want to import into my new Maria’s Guides site. And that’s when I found all the nasty spam I’d marked for the past 4 years.

Now don’t think this was all of the spam. It was only the spam that was marked as spam using WordPress’s comment moderation feature. When the comment spam situation got out of control, I enlisted the help of the Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2 plugins. Bad Behavior prevents potential spambots from posting comments at all. Spam Karma catches 95% of the spam that gets past Bad Behavior. I’m left with less than 10 spam comments a day. Not bad when you consider that Bad Behavior alone caught 17,067 spam attempts in the past seven days. The way I see it, anyone with a relatively well-Googled blog who doesn’t use at least one of these tools is doing a lot more comment moderation than they need to.

So there I was, halfway through the process of deleting non-book-related posts and their comments from an XML file, when I realized that much of the file’s contents was spam that wouldn’t appear when I imported it anyway. And that’s when I started thinking about how much database space was devoted to this spam.

The DB-Manager Plugin

Database ContentsI use Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan’s DB-Manager plugin. This plugin puts MySQL database features into the WordPress administration panel. This is a must-use for anyone who needs to get into their database and learn more about it or make changes to it.

So I went into the plugin’s interface and learned that my blog had 1900+ comments. I knew that only 1400+ comments were actually appearing in the blog. That made 500+ spam entries sitting in my database, taking up disk space and making my backups much larger than they needed to be.

(Note: The screenshot here shows the database contents after removing the spam. If I’d known I was going to write about it here, I would have taken more screenshots.)

I wanted them out.

Help on the WordPress Forums

I found help on the WordPress forums. They really can be helpful if you enter the right search phrase.

The topic was Support › deleting over 10,000 spam comments without using moderation page. The story was, this poor soul had left his blog alone for a week and, when he returned, found 10,000 comments on it. He wanted to delete them.

A member named bindanaku came to his rescue with a MySQL query:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved='0'

This assumes that you want to delete all comments that haven’t been moderated. This was not the case for me. I wanted to delete all comments that had been moderated as spam. I assumed that the correct query for my situation would be:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved='spam'

I was right.

Back to DB-Manager

Enter a MySQL QueryI went to the DB-Manager administration panel and clicked the Run SQL Query button. That gave me a window where I could enter my query, as shown here. When I clicked Run, I got a message that the query was successful.

Sure enough, when I checked the Database info (see previous screenshot), I could see that 500+ comments had been removed from the database. But the table size was the same.

I used DB-Manager’s Optimize DB feature to optimize the database. That dropped about 400K from the table size.

I should note here that if you’re more familiar with editing a MySQL database, you can do the query with your normal editing tool. I don’t mess with my MySQL database much. I’m always afraid of screwing it up. (Call me a wimp — I don’t care.) That’s why I use DB-Manager.

Conclusion

While all this might seem like a lot of work to get rid of 400K of file size, the situation could be worse on your blog. My blog has about 1500 posts spanning about four years. I’ve been using Bad Behavior and Spam Karma for at least two of those years. So the majority of these old spams were from very old posts. If you don’t use any spam protection software and are manually moderating comments, you could have far more of these spam comments in your database. And since many of them were lengthy listings of porn and ringtone and other URLs, they were quite large in size. If you have a lot of these in your database, it could be taking up a lot of space — perhaps even more than your actual blog posts.

Do I recommend going through this process? It’s up to you.

A Computer without Word?

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I try an experiment to see if I can stay productive without Microsoft Word.

Last week, in an effort to get my old 12″ PowerBook to run more efficiently, I decided to wipe the hard disk clean and reinstall Tiger with a clean install. After installing it, I got a little crazy and decided to upgrade to Leopard. So far, the machine works fine.

The computer does have a problem, however. Its aged and well-used CD-R/DVD drive has decided to be a bit picky about which CDs and DVDs it recognizes. It liked the Tiger and Leopard install discs, which are both DVDs. But it didn’t seem to like the Office 2004 disc, which is a CD.

(A real Apple fangirl might point out here that the computer has taste. But I wouldn’t dream of making such a statement.)

It’s a Bother

I can get Microsoft Office on the computer by other means. I can insert the disc in another computer and have the PowerBook access the CD via my AirPort network. Or I can create a disk image of the CD, transfer that to the PowerBook over the network, and install from that. Or I can put a disk image of the CD on an 80GB Firewire drive I have sitting around and attach that drive to the PowerBook to install. Any of these methods should work.

Or, if I want to get really radical, I can install the beta of Office 2008 on the PowerBook and let it become my official testing machine.

But let’s face it: it’s a bother. And this morning I began asking myself if it was worth it.

The PowerBook is in semi-retirement these days. It spends much of its time in my kitchen, where I use it to create my morning blog entry. I sometimes use it to look up something on the Internet when I’m doing things around the house. And, of course, I take it traveling with me, primarily because it’s relatively small and lightweight and old enough that I don’t have to feel too bad if it breaks.

But the real question is: Do I need Microsoft Office on it?

An Alternative to Word

I definitely need a Word processor. I’m a writer and I use the computer to write. (I use most of my computers to write.)

But Mac OS X comes with a perfectly good word processor: TextEdit.

TextEdit ExampleDon’t laugh until you’ve tried it. The version of TextEdit that comes with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is a kick-butt little word processor. It supports all kinds of formatting, including basic text formatting, tabs, indentation, lists, and even named styles. It has built-in spelling check that can check spelling as you type and supports hyphenation. It can open and read all Word formats — including Word 2007 for Windows with its new file format (which Word 2004 for Mac can’t even do) — and can save to Word formats, Rich Text Format (RTF), and plain text format. That makes it possible to use TextEdit, even when the people you are sharing files with are using Word.

Clearly, this ain’t your father’s SimpleText.

Okay, so it doesn’t support cell tables and Word fields and its support for inserted graphics is rather limited. And there are some Word formatting options that TextEdit might simply choke on.

But do I really need all those Word features? Isn’t the ability to enter and edit text and apply simple text formatting what word processing is all about?

Do We Need All those Bells and Whistles?

And that brings up a point that’s been nagging at me for years — since Microsoft Office 6 for Macintosh came out, in fact.

My first Word book was the Macintosh Bible Guide to Word 6. The Macintosh Bible series of books was a short-lived seris of big fat books about specific software packages. I did one for Word, then did another for Excel.

I clearly remember installing and using the beta of Word 6. My first impression was: this sucks. Microsoft had decided to pack in a lot of new features. And, if I recall correctly, Microsoft had also decided not to use Apple’s built-in routines for drawing windows and dialogs. Instead, they decided to write their own routines to draw their own windows and dialogs. So not only did the computer have to deal with all the programming stuff for word processor operations, but it had to deal with all the extra Microsoft-brand programming for the interface — the same kind of programming that made early versions of Windows so sluggish to DOS fans.

The feature bloat and poor performance of Word 6 — at least in the beta stage; they managed to fix it up a bit for the release version — got me thinking about the features that should be in a word processor. Clearly, Microsoft had gone over the top. (And it continued to do so for most subsequent releases, although I do recall Office 2001 being a very good version.)

Today’s TextEdit is not too far off from Microsoft Word 4, which is the first version of Word I used (back in 1989). And frankly, it did everything I needed it to do to prepare my manuscripts.

And if you’re a Windows user reading this, you have WordPad (I think that’s what it’s called), don’t you? I’m pretty sure that these days that is Word 4.

Compatibility Issues

Today, things are different. Although I write all my Peachpit Press books in InDesign, Adobe’s page layout program, I still write each year’s edition of my Quicken for Windows book in Microsoft Word. My editors make extensive use of Word’s revisions feature, with each of them (and me) marking up the manuscript so it’s nearly impossible to read. I need to use Word to share files with these editors. There’s no way around it.

But that doesn’t mean that I need it on my little PowerBook. And it also doesn’t mean that you need it.

Other Alternatives for Mac Users

And then there’s the iWork suite of products. With the addition of Numbers, a good alternative to Excel, Mac users now have all the pieces they need to replace Office on their Macs. I have iWork around here somewhere, but I haven’t had time to experiment with it. I’d love to get feedback from users; use the Comments link or form below to share your thoughts.

Back to My Original Question

Do I need Microsoft Office on my semi-retired PowerBook?

At this point, I think the answer is no. Let’s see how long I can last without it.

Leopard Tip: Delete the All Documents Search

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Do you really need it?

I installed Leopard on my aging but otherwise faithful 12″ PowerBook G4 yesterday. I hadn’t planned on updating it because I didn’t think it had enough processing power to handle the new OS. But it met Mac OS X 10.5 requirements, so I figured, what the heck? I could always bring it back down to Tiger if I needed to.

The problem with older Macs running new software — including operating system software — is that they often don’t perform as well as a newer Mac will. You’ll notice this when attempting to complete processor-intensive tasks, such as opening large documents, applying filters in Photoshop, and — dare I say it? — searching for items on your hard disk.

Sidebar Searches

Leopard SidebarAnd that brings us to Leopard’s built-in Sidebar searches.

A Leopard installation reconfigures the Mac OS X Sidebar to make it better organized and a bit more usable. But what it also does is set up a Searches section that is preconfigured with six searches: three time-related searches and three file type related searches. Clicking a search in the Sidebar performs that search.

ImageI want to point out here that the Smart Folders feature, which is used to create these Sidebar search items, was available in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, too. It just wasn’t an in-your-face feature set up in the Sidebar by Apple. As discussed on pages 98 through 99 in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger: Visual QuickStart Guide, Tiger made it possible to save a search as a smart folder, which could be added to the Sidebar by clicking a check box in the Save As dialog. Leopard works the same way (see pages 93 through 94 in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide, but Apple evidently wanted to prove how useful this feature was by putting a few examples in the Sidebar for all to see and use.

But just how useful are these examples? I’m not sure they’re useful at all. While you might find it helpful to click a Sidebar item and quickly find all files that have changed today, that list contains all files — not just documents. As I type this, the Today search brings up 108 items on my little PowerBook, most of which are RTF files that may have been installed with the update I did twenty minutes ago. How useful is that? And I’ve only been using the computer for an hour so far today.

What Do You Think?

Give those preconfigured searches a quick try and see for yourself what the results are. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Back? Okay. Now tell me: are they useful? Did you get the results you expected? Where they results you could use?

And did you try the All Documents search? That’s the one on the bottom of the list.

Search for All DocumentsI tried it this morning on this PowerBook, which has a 867MHz G4 processor (the minimum for Leopard), and started the computer on a mission it took quite a while to complete. Why? Because it came up with several hundred search results, most of which were configuration files buried within the depths of Mac OS’s file hierarchy. And this is on a computer that, so far, contains only a clean installation of Leopard (without all the extra fonts and printer drivers the installer offers to add), ecto (which I’m using to compose this blog entry), and Firefox. That’s it. I don’t even have my own documents installed yet!

Because the Leopard installation was new and the hard disk had not yet been indexed, the computer had to churn through all the files to find them. That slowed down the entire system, making me regret that I had installed Leopard at all. But now that the hard disk has been indexed, clicking that search displays results more quickly.

The question remains: how useful is the All Documents search?

Out with the Old, In with the New

What you might not realize is that the Sidebar is configurable. That means you can add or remove things from it.

As I explain in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide (on page 158, in case you’re wondering), you can remove an item from the sidebar by simply dragging it off. Try it for yourself right now. Get rid of the preconfigured searches you don’t think you’ll use.

That’ll not only clean up your Sidebar, but it’ll prevent your computer from having to churn through files in the event that you accidently click one of the searches.

With the searches you don’t need out of the way, you can feel good about adding the searches you do need. Use the Spotlight menu or search box or the Find command to creating a meaningful search that you think you’ll use again and again. Then save it as a Smart Folder and use the check box in the Save As dialog to add the search to the Sidebar. (Remember, you can always remove it.)

Curious about how this feature works? It’s simple. A smart folder is a saved search query file that, when clicked, performs the search. The default location for a smart folder is the Saved Searches folder inside the Library folder in your Home folder. (So this means you can have different saved searches than another user on your computer.) When you add a smart folder to the Sidebar, it’s the same as adding any other file to the sidebar — your Mac creates an alias of it. When you remove it from the Sidebar, the original item you created remains in the Saved Searches folder, so you can add it back. (This is not true with the predefined searches, which are saved elsewhere and cannot be easily added back when you remove them.)

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart GuideWant to learn more about searching in Leopard? Check out my Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide. You can find it in Apple stores and on Amazon.com.

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Time Machine & AirPort Disk

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Clarification for my Leopard book readers.

Time MachineEarly in Leopard development, Apple clearly indicated on its Web site that Time Machine would work with the AirPort Extreme’s AirPort Disk feature. To test this out, I obtained an AirPort Extreme and used it to set up an AirPort disk. And yes, with one of the pre-release versions of Leopard, this feature did work.

But somewhere along the line, the feature broke. Apple removed reference to the compatibility from its Web site. Leopard was released and Time Machine would not work with an AirPort Disk.

You can read confirmation of this in “Apple doubles back on Time Machine and AirPort Disk” and “Time Machine and AirPort Disk: Together again. Sort of” on Ars Technica. You can also find a workaround in “10.5: Make Time Machine work with AirPort and AFP disks.”

I tend to agree with the folks at AppleInsider, who claim in “Briefly: Apple still working on Time Machine’s AirPort Disk support” that:

The findings suggest that the AirPort Disk support under Time Machine could resurface in an upcoming maintenance update to Leopard, the first of which is well underway. However, it should also be noted that Apple has pulled features from its major operating system in the past and never looked back.

So, to that end, I’d advise readers not to depend on using Time Machine with an AirPort Disk, at least not on the near future.

This is unfortunate, because Time Machine compatibility was one of the main reasons the owner of an older AirPort Extreme base station (like me) would consider purchasing a new AirPort Extreme that supported the AirPort Disk feature. I said as much in an article I wrote for Peachpit’s Web site before Leopard was released. Without this compatibility, I’m just not motivated to upgrade my base station. And I suspect there are others in the same situation.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

Canon LiDE 30 Scanner with Photoshop CS3 on Intel Mac

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Not a good combination.

I finally got around to installing my Canon LiDE 30 scanner — I know it’s cheap junk, but that’s all I need — on my iMac. Much to my surprise the driver installer didn’t see Photoshop as a place to install a plugin. So I manually installed it And then it wouldn’t work.

So there goes another hour of my time to troubleshooting the problem.

It appears that Canon doesn’t have an Intel-native plugin for the scanner. The plugin was written for Power PC Macs. And Photoshop CS3 won’t run Power PC plugins on an Intel Mac.

This explains why the setup worked perfectly well on my Dual G5 (did I mention it’s for sale on eBay?) but won’t work on my new iMac.

I found information for a workaround on the Adobe forum. (Can you believe actually found helpful troubleshooting information on Adobe’s site?) The topic title is Scanner not recognised in Photoshop CS3. Someone named Buko suggests running Photoshop in Rosetta and explains how to do it:

do a get info on the CS3 application and check the start in Rosetta button

Photoshop InfoI followed these brief instructions (see screenshot) and restarted Photoshop. And guess what? It worked.

Rosetta is an Apple technology that makes it possible to run non-Intel native or non-Universal Mac OS applications on an Intel Mac. As this Info window illustrations, Photoshop gives you the option of running Photoshop in Rosetta when necessary to ensure support for older plugins. You can turn this option on before you start Photoshop to access otherwise incompatible software-driven features. You can turn the option off and restart Photoshop when you don’t need those features.

I’m no under-the-hood programming expert, so I was wondering what the pitfalls of running Photoshop in Rosetta were. I Googled and found an article on tuaw.com titled, “Photoshop seems to run fine in Rosetta.” Although the article is nearly 2 years old, I agree that Photoshop seems to work okay.

The suggestion on the Adobe support forum was to run Photoshop in Rosetta only when you expect to scan something. This is probably a good idea, especially if you do a lot of intensive graphics processing. But there are other ways to scan that don’t require Photoshop at all. The CanoScan Toolbox software, which comes with the scanner, works fine and can send the image to Photoshop to be opened. That seems to be a good workaround, especially if, like me, you don’t scan often.