Maria’s Guides

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After over a year of soul-searching, I decide to spin off my book support topics to their own site.

I built my first Web site back in the mid 1990s. It was a simple site, created in HTML, that provided information about me and my books.

A [Very] Brief History of my Web Site(s)

The Internet was young back then — at least as far as the masses were concerned. Few people surfed. In fact, the whole idea of going online was so new and radical back then that my first book proposal, which was about telecommunications on a Mac, was turned down because publishers felt that there wouldn’t be enough people interested in it.

Anyway, as things heated up, I soon saw the benefits of putting more information on the Web. And then, in 2003, I discovered blogging. Surely my personal blog should be separate from what I write to support my books and articles, right? So I spun off a new site, LangerBooks.com, and published plain HTML Web pages with book promotional and support information.

Meanwhile, I fell in love with the whole blogging interface. There was no question in my mind: a blog was a perfect tool for presenting new content while automatically archiving old content. So I got LangerBooks.com into a blog format, with a separate blog for each title.

Back in those days (2003-2004), it wasn’t easy for me. I’d decided to blog with a program called iBlog that had a lot of promise. Unfortunately, its author wasn’t willing or able to keep up with technology. His software generated static HTML documents for each page of a blog. The more you wrote, the more cumbersome the whole blog updating process became. And, as those of you who read this blog regularly know, I can write an awful lot.

So in January 2005, I made the jump to WordPress. It was a big jump indeed, since I knew absolutely nothing about PHP or MySQL and very little about CSS. (What made it even bigger was that I was hosting my own blog on my own server.) I learned what I needed to know. One of the best things about WordPress is that you don’t need to know much to build a really professional looking site.

Around the same time, I decided that I didn’t want to maintain separate blogs for my books. So I brought all the books back under MariaLanger.com and came up with some creative ways to keep Book Support topics separate from the rest of the site. Creative, yes. Effective, perhaps.

One Blog to Rule them All?

Of course, the whole time I was doing this, I was reading from “pro bloggers” about how important it is to keep your blog on just one topic. These guys were blogging to make money, I argued to myself. They weren’t in it because of a need to blog or a desire to provide additional information to book readers. So I pretty much ignored them.

But their advice was eating away at my brain in the back of my mind. After much thought, I realized that having too many widespread topics in my blog was preventing the blog from being more popular. For example, people interested in my flying and lifestyle posts — which, according to a poll on my site, is about 30% of the site’s visitors — were probably bored silly with my Mac OS and Excel and WordPress posts. And people interested in getting book support (16% of visitors) weren’t interested in wading through the other content to get the bits of information that could help them. This was preventing me from getting more site subscribers and regular readers.

So about two weeks ago, I decided to make the split.

Drumroll, Please

The question of how I did it is something I can discuss as a WordPress-related post. Let’s just say that I’ve done the basic work and have enough content in the new blog to open it to the public.

So here’s the formal announcement:

Support for my books and articles can now be found at the Maria’s Guides Web site: http://www.mariasguides.com/.

If you’re reading this post there, you’ve already found it. Otherwise, if you’re interested in articles, tips, and downloads related to my books about Mac OS, Excel, Word, and WordPress, please go check it out.

And yes, occasionally there will be cross posts, like this one. But I’ll try to keep that to a minimum.

Why Maria’s Guides?

A few years back, I made a false start on a line of eBooks. I abandoned the project, primarily because I got busy with other things that were more interesting (and lucrative). I’m thinking of revisiting the idea with shorter eBooks covering a wider range of topics. Maria’s Guides was the working title of the series and I own the domain name, so why not?

Two Excerpts from Creating Spreadsheets and Charts in Microsoft Office Excel 2007: Visual QuickProject Guide.

Want to see some sample pages from my Excel Visual QuickProject? Here are a few links.

• Front Matter (including complete Table of Contents)
• Excerpt from Chapter 3

And offers 40% discounts on books purchased online.

Just a quick note to pass along some info I got in e-mail from Peachpit Press, one of my publishers.

Over the last several months, you’ve been talking and now it’s our chance to show you that we’ve been listening. You told us you wanted better and faster searches for our books and content. You said you wanted more videos, better access to our authors, and more ways to get involved. After listening to everything you had to say, we’re proud to introduce the newly redesigned Peachpit.com.

They’ve added features to the site, including online video tutorials, access to blogs, and online reference guides. But the news that might interest you most is that they’re also offering a 40% discount on all books purchased on the site:

To thank you for your feedback and to celebrate our new site we would like to offer you a 40% discount on your purchases. Just order before September 15 and enter coupon code PPT-NEWSITE-EM01 during checkout!

Sounds like a good deal to me. I hope you’ll take advantage of it, perhaps to buy one or more of my books?

Information from the Microsoft Web Site.

This update fixes a vulnerability that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code. For more information about this update, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article (KB940763).

System requirements

Before you install this update, make sure that the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.6 Update is installed on your computer. To verify that you have installed this update, select the Microsoft Component Plugin file in the Microsoft Office 2004/Office folder on your hard disk, and then on the File menu, click Get Info.

Additionally, your computer must meet the following minimum requirements:

• Operating system: Mac OS X 10.2.8 (Jaguar) or a later version of Mac OS

Note:To verify that your computer meets these minimum requirements, on the Apple menu, click About This Mac.

More information

If you have technical questions or problems downloading or using this update, visit the Microsoft Support page at www.microsoft.com/mac/support to learn about the support options that are available to you.

Another quick spreadsheet to show off the capabilities of Excel.

Site visitor Jamie left the following comment on my recent post, “Random Number Generator for Excel“:

maria dont spose u know how to split a four digit number like 2365 into 4 different numbers 2 3 6 5 in all different cells in excel without having to do it manually just wandering please tell me if you know a way thanks

I had an idea of how to do this with the MID function, which is a text function. I just didn’t know if I had to convert the starting number to text before extracting the digits.

So I whipped up the attached worksheet and popped in the formulas. The answer: no, you don’t need to convert the number to text first.

The MID function has 3 arguments:

• text is the text you want to extract characters from. For this example, it’s the four-digit number.
• start_num is the number of the first character in the string you want to extract. For this example, it’s the digit number (1 though 4).
• num_chars is the number of characters you want to extract. For this example, it’s 1.

You can examine the formulas in the spreadsheet for yourself to learn more. Download it here.

Hope this helps, Jamie!