Links for February 2008.
- Time Wasting Blog Comments, Comments Policies, and Comment Etiquette – Good article about creating a comment policy on your blog to prevent marketing and time-wasting comments. On The Blog Herald.
- Increase Page Rank By Revitalizing Your Old Posts – Another great post for bloggers from the Blog Herald. This one explains why and how to update and revitalize older posts. A must-read for anyone with posts over 2 years old in their blog.
- What Is Sucking Your Blogging Confidence Away? – Yet another great post on the Blog Herald about blogging. This one tackles, among other things, handling mean-spirited comments by readers. Apparently, I’m not the only one who deletes them ruthlessly.
- Magnetic websites – A great post by Miraz Jordan with some easy-to-follow advice for bloggers and Webmasters. On Tikouka.
- Introducing Prologue – Automattic has introduced Prologue for WordPress, which enables WordPress.com users to create a Twitter-like microblogging environment on their blogs. On WordPress.com.
- A color toolbox – Article covers a number of tools you can use to work with colors. On The Unofficial Apple Weblog.
- Two New Anti-Scraping WordPress Plugins – Information about two WordPress Plugins that can help prevent or reduce the negative effects of feed scraping. On PlagiarismToday.
- 5 Steps: How Not to Look Like a Spam Blog – Great article of tips for legitimate bloggers to build blogs that don’t look like they’re splogs. On PlagiarismToday.
- How YOU Can Make the Web More Structured – Tips for using Meta tags to help build an Internet database. On ReadWriteWeb.
Time Machine and Airport Disks, redux – Andy Piper provides text and screencast about Mac OS X 10.5.2′s ability to see AirPort disks — but not allow them to work with Time Machine. On The Lost Outpost.
Now check your blog to see the results of your efforts. As shown here, I’ve got viddlerRSS set up to display thumbnails for my most recent three videos in my blog’s sidebar. Pointing to a video’s thumbnail displays the title of the video, which can help people decide whether they want to view it. Clicking a thumbnail image opens the video on the Viddler site.
The Record from WebCam screen appears with an Adobe Flash Player Settings dialog atop it. Click the Allow button so Flash can access your audio and video input devices.
In the Select Quality dialog, choose an option suited to your connection speed. I usually choose Medium because I have a relatively slow (512 Kbps) Internet connection. Then click Okay.The screen should show an image of whatever your connected camera is looking at. In my case, I’m using a built-in iSight Camera on my 24-inch iMac, so it’s looking at me:
The article indicates that Back to My Mac should work with all AirPort Express and AirPort Extreme base stations. It provides additional links to information for configuring a base station to work with Back to My Mac.
In Mac OS X 10.5.2, the recent Leopard update, Apple added a new setting in the Desktop panel of the Desktop & Screen Saver preferences pane: Translucent Menu Bar. Turning this check box off removes menu bar translucency, returning the menu bar to a plain gray, Tiger-like menu bar.
This feature makes it possible to use another computer’s optical drive to run installation software on DVD or CD on a MacBook Air, which lacks its own optical disk.
Seeing — and Setting — Options
New View Option
Of course, to use Viddler, you need an account. Go to 
In my situation, I needed to recover the ecto 2 application file and the folder containing the blog post database. I started with the application. I opened the Applications folder on my computer and clicked the Time Machine icon in the Dock. The cool (but rather silly) interface kicked in. I used the timeline on the right side of the screen to scroll back a few days. The ecto file did not appear. I scrolled back a few more days to the middle of last week. When the screen refreshed, the file was there. I selected it and clicked the Restore button. Time Machine closed and the file was copied to my current Applications folder.
In the Account panel, make sure you’re signed into .Mac. The panel should look something like what’s shown here, but with your info. If you see fields to enter a Member Name and Password, you’ll have to provide those and click the Sign In button to log in.
In the Sync panel, if necessary, turn on the Synchronize with .Mac check box and select an option from the pop-up menu. This registers your computer with .Mac.
If your computer has previously been registered and, for some reason, .Mac syncing has been turned off, you may see a dialog like the one here. Click Use Same Name only if you’re sure you’re enabling syncing for the same computer previously set up.
You can see a list of computers registered to your .Mac account by going the next step. Click the Advanced button in the Sync panel of the .Mac preferences pane. After a moment, a list of registered computers appears.