Maria’s Guides

Information from Microsoft AutoUpdate.

This update to Microsoft AutoUpdate for Mac is part of Microsoft’s ongoing effort to provide the latest product updates to customers. To receive future Microsoft product updates, you must install this update.

For additional assistance, or to obtain a downloadable version of this update, visit http://www.microsoft.com/mac.

Links worth following.

Here are the links of interest to readers of my books for the week ending January 12:

• Your GTD System Isn’t the Problem
  Excellent advice for people trying to implement GTD to be more productive — and not succeeding. On the Cranking Widgets blog.
  (tags: productivity Advice gtd)
• Making the Switch: Going From Partial to Full Feeds
  Good article about switching from partial to full RSS feeds. On PlagiarismToday.com.
  (tags: feed rss blogging)
• A long list of modifier key tricks
  For Mac OS X Tiger; should work in Leopard, too. On MacOSXHints.com.
  (tags: Apple Mac reference tips MacOS)
• Color Wheel Article
  Link to EXCELLENT article, in PDF format, that explains exactly how colors work together. From Before & After magazine.
  (tags: colors design tutorial reference)
• An Interface of One’s Own
  An anti-Word, pro Scrivener piece (of all things!) in the New York Times. By Virginia Heffernan. Thanks to @ev on Twitter for sharing the link.
  (tags: Word Microsoft software Times)
• Goodbye, cruel Word
  Steven Poole no longer uses Microsoft Word. Here’s why.
  (tags: Word microsoft writing journalism software productivity)
• E-book the letter
  Steven Poole lists the features an ebook reader SHOULD have. I think they sound rather familiar, don’t you?
  (tags: Amazon Kindle funny ebooks books reading)
• What to Expect at Macworld
  More rumors of what might be in store for us at Macworld Expo next week. On ReadWriteWeb.
  (tags: Apple MacworldExpo)
• 10 Ways Twitter Can Boost Your Social News Profile
  Some tips for getting more followers on Twitter, which can boost your profile on other Social Networking sites. On ReadWriteWeb.
  (tags: twitter Web2.0 socialnetworking tips)
• Author Uses Amazon Kindle to Beta Test New Book
  Interesting article about using Kindle to publish a book and entice readers to provide feedback to the author. On ReadWriteWeb.
  (tags: Kindle writing publishing ebooks Amazon)
• Twittering without access to Twitter.com
  A how-to piece with suggestions on how you can participate in Twitter when you don’t have access to the Twitter.com Web site. On Twitter Facts.
  (tags: twitter Web2.0 socialnetworking)
• Mac OS X 10.5, iChat: Unable to participate in video conference
  Workaround for problem using video chat feature of iChat with Mac OS X 10.5. On the Apple Support Web site.
  (tags: Apple MacOS Leopard iChat)
• My essential WordPress plugins
  Great post by Miraz Jordan that summarizes her must-have WordPress plugins. I’ll have to do a similar post soon. On the WordPress Visual QuickStart Guide support web site.
  (tags: WordPress plugin Webdesign)
• Why It Won’t Work
  John Scalzi’s take on why the Sony BMG plan to release non-DRM protected music won’t work. I tend to agree with him.
  (tags: DRM sony music download itunes ipod)
• Apples For The Army
  According to this story on Forbes.com, the U.S. Army is adopting Macs to help thwart hackers. Not exactly good news for Mac users — we don’t need to give hackers a reason to go after us — but good for Apple.
  (tags: Mac Macintosh military technology Apple security)
• DUM
  John Gruber’s take on the Kindle. On Daring Fireball.
  (tags: Amazon Kindle publishing ebooks books)
• Sony caves; DRM is dead, dead, dead
  Sony drops DRM. On MacUser.com. Thanks to @dmoren on Twitter for the link.
  (tags: drm music itunes sony)
• iBed
  Humorous photo of a recycled iMac. On I Can Has Cheezburger?
  (tags: funny humor photo imac)
• The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry
  Excellent article about the secret history of iPhone development. On Wired.com.
  (tags: wired Apple history iphone)
• A Savvy Approach to Copyright Messaging
  A great tip for helping to protect an image posted on a Web page from being stolen and used by others. By Derek Powazek.
  (tags: copyright Photography photos)

It’s a bit involved, but doable.

Yesterday, I explained how you can “unlearn” a word that you mistakenly added to Mac OS X’s user dictionary. Of course, applications other than those developed by Apple probably don’t use Apple’s dictionary.

Microsoft Word is a good example. It stores the words you add to it in a Custom dictionary file. To remove a word you added by mistake, you have to manually edit this dictionary. Here’s how you can do this in Word 2004 for Mac OS; the technique is similar in Word 2003 for Windows.

1. In Word, choose Microsoft Word > Preferences. (Note that a document window must be open to choose this command.)
2. In the Preferences dialog that appears, choose Spelling and Grammar.
   
3. Click the Dictionaries button.
4. In the Custom Dictionaries dialog that appears, select the name of the dictionary you want to edit.
   
5. Click the Edit button.
6. A dialog like the one shown next appears. Click OK.
   
7. A Word window named Custom Dictionary opens. It contains all the words in your dictionary, in alphabetical order. Make changes as desired in this file, adding or removing words as you see fit.
   
8. Choose File > Save to save the modified file.
9. If a dialog like the one shown next appears, click Yes.
   
10. Click the Custom Dictionary’s close button to dismiss it.
11. If you had Check spelling as you type turned on before you started this process, go back into the Spelling and Grammar preferences and turn it back on.

From that point forward, Word will recognize only the words in its main dictionary and the custom dictionary as you edited it.

Page References

Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide offers additional information related to this topic:

• Enabling Automatic Spelling Checking, page 143
• Checking Spelling as You Type, page 144
• Setting Spelling and Grammar Preferences, pages 380-382

It works but it’s not for everyone.

Tired of waiting for Word to optimize its font menu each time it launches? Tell it not to. This will speed up the launch process — especially if you have many fonts installed — but it will also stop Word from displaying font names in their typefaces.

Give it a try and see if it’s worthwhile for you:

1. With any Word document open, choose Microsoft Word > Preferences.
2. In the Preferences dialog that appears, click the General option in the list of categories on the left side of the window.
   
3. Turn off the WYSIWYG font and style menus option.
4. Click OK.

Try this for a while and see if missing out on the WYSIWYG menus bothers you. If it does, you can always turn this feature back on.

Get content delivered to your RSS reader or e-mail box.

There is no easier or more convenient way to follow a blog-based Web site’s content than to subscribe to its RSS feed. Today’s Web browsers and other applications make it easy. For example, RSS feed reading capabilities are built into Safari and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard’s Mail application. Firefox’s Live Bookmarks display new content from your favorite feeds. And there are numerous RSS feed reader applications — NetNewsWire and endo come to mind — that help you manage as many feeds as you have time to follow.

This site Includes both a full-site feed and category feeds. You can subscribe by clicking the RSS icon that appears in the header (for the entire site’s feed) or beside the name of a category under a blog post’s title (for a category feed). Or just use the links listed below.

Through the magic of FeedBurner, I can also offer e-mail subscriptions to site content. Subscriptions are guaranteed to be spam-free, and I don’t give or sell your e-mail address to anyone. Best of all, its easy to unsubscribe from any feed — each e-mail message includes an unsubscribe link that really does work. You’ll find forms for subscribing to topical feeds in the sidebar (when I get around to adding them; sorry!) or you can click the appropriate link below. Just remember to look for and respond to the confirmation e-mail you’ll get from FeedBurner. Your subscription won’t be turned on until you confirm that you want it. (This prevents unwanted subscriptions.)

All Content

Subscribing to this feed will get you all articles, downloads, and other material that appears on this site. I expect to average 5 to 10 posts per week, so it shouldn’t be too overwhelming to get it all. Keep in mind that if you subscribe to this feed, you probably won’t want to subscribe to any of the others listed below; doing so will get duplicate content.

Feed address:http://feeds.feedburner.com/MariasGuides

E-Mail Subscription Link:Subscribe to Maria’s Guides by Email

Mac OS Topics

This includes articles, downloads, and other content related to Mac OS and my Mac OS books.

Feed address:http://feeds.feedburner.com/macosquickstart

E-mail Subscription Link:Subscribe to Maria’s Guides | Mac OS Books by Email

WordPress Topics

This includes articles, downloads, and other content related to WordPress and the WordPress books I co-author with Miraz Jordan.

Feed address:http://feeds.feedburner.com/wordpressquickstart

E-mail Subscription Link:Subscribe to Maria’s Guides | WordPress Books by Email

And if you’re serious about blogging, you might also want to subscribe to blogging-related content on my personal site, An Eclectic Mind: http://feeds.feedburner.com/mariaonblogging

Excel Topics

This includes articles, downloads, and other content related to Excel and my Excel books for Mac OS and Windows.

Feed address:http://feeds.feedburner.com/MariasGuidesExcelBooks

E-Mail Subscription Link:Subscribe to Maria’s Guides | Excel Books by Email.

Word Topics

This includes articles, downloads, and other content related to Word and my Word books for Mac OS and Windows.

Feed address:http://feeds.feedburner.com/MariasGuidesWordBooks

E-Mail Subscription Link:Subscribe to Maria’s Guides | Word Books by Email.

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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?