Let’s face it, Facebook, you have managed to make me look like a fool twice this week and while that’s not terribly difficult to do, I’m getting tired of it. This time around I find out that you fulfilled my wish for a way to view status updates only. No application updates, no notes, no videos, no links to helpful articles like this one, just plain old status updates. So where did you put this fantastic new Feed View? Why, down at the bottom of my list of Feed Views. While this is probably not a big deal for most of your users, it’s a really big deal for me because I subdivide all of my users into different categories to help me wade through them a bit better. So, let’s see what we have to in order to see the Status Updates view as our default page view. (Thanks to Amber Ward and her list of friends for this tip)

Step One
Look at the bottom of list of Feed Views for the word “more” and click it.

Step Two
Locate the Feed View titled “Status Updates”.

Step Three
Move your mouse to the right hand side of the “Status Updates” Feed View item, then click and drag it ALL the way up to the top of the list, letting go of it at the very top.

Step Four
Now that the item is at the top of your Feeds List, CLICK IT!!

Step Five
Celebrate! Now you can see all of your friends’ status updates without seeing all the additional blather that they or their apps may be posting.

Mind you, by following these instructions and never looking back you many never run across good information like THIS ARTICLE again in your lifetime, so be sure to use the News Feed and Live Feed views from time to time to get a taste of what your friends are yapping about this week…. you never know what those crazy friends might be up to!!

Happy Facebooking!

Related posts:

1. Fix Your Broken Facebook Feed
2. Facebook’s NEW News Feed
3. Facebook Videos Finally Play on iPhone without Flash?

Jeepers, people. Has Facebook gone wanky (again) or what? Don’t worry though, it’s okay, I have a fix so that your Live Feed works nearly like it did before the weekend of the Great Facebook Flop of Late 2009…… but before I get to the fix let me first mention that I found these instructions on Facebook… and of all people, it was sitting up on the wall of our friend Hollis Gillespie, a well known potty mouthed Atlanta author with movie deals and book deals coming out her ears. While I admire and respect Hollis’ creative skills it galled me that I, a graduate of Georgia Tech with a double-secret minor in computer technology, had to rely on a woman whose cellphone is held together by rubberbands (no offense Hollis).

So the fix.

If you’re not already there, go to your Live Feed. If you’re on your News Feed you’ll see the link above the box where you can type your status update.

Once there, scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen until you see a bar which states “Older Posts” on the left and “Edit Options” on the right. (This is just above the site’s footer)

Click on “Edit Options” until a dialog box pops up featuring the “fine controls” for how you view your friends’ feeds. Note the lower area entitled “Number of Friends”. There is a text entry field located here which allows you to tweak the number of users that will be screened for appearance on your Live Feed.

For reasons unexplained this number is set at 250. If you have over 250 friends this is a problem… so change that number to something higher. Once finished, click the “save” button in the lower right hand side of that pop-up box and it will disappear, hopefully taking your new higher limit back to headquarters and restoring some normalcy to your friend stalking addiction.

Happy Facebooking!

Related posts:

1. Facebook’s NEW News Feed
2. Make Facebook’s NEW Status Updates Group Your Default
3. Facebook Videos Finally Play on iPhone without Flash?

(note: be sure to read my newest post about Facebook’s undocumented transition)
I got tired of not understanding the NEW version of Facebook’s News Feed and went all the way over to their help section (tiring, this) looking for answers. Why they didn’t send the explanation out to its users baffles me (I’ve re-posted their answer below for you lazy people).

To quote Facebook’s Help Page:

What is the difference between News Feed and Live Feed?
News Feed aggregates the most interesting content that your friends are posting, while Live Feed shows you all the actions your friends are making in real-time.

How does News Feed determine which content is most interesting?
The News Feed algorithm bases this on a few factors: how many friends are commenting on a certain piece of content, who posted the content, and what type of content it is (e.g. photo, video, or status update).

So THERE!!
Annoying? Yes.
Weird? Yes.
But I still call this a win. The app spam is gone and now I can simply follow the most interesting of my friends without even needing to pick and choose.

Let’s see how well this actually works.

Related posts:

1. Fix Your Broken Facebook Feed
2. Make Facebook’s NEW Status Updates Group Your Default
3. Facebook Videos Finally Play on iPhone without Flash?

I understand that my pals The Cardboard Troopers had a wild time this past weekend. They arrived in Atlanta for the 2009 edition of Dragon*Con, but they couldn’t actually seem to find a trace of the convention and the hotel people kept looking at them funny. I sure hope that they come back for the 10:00am parade on Saturday, they always seem to enjoy that.

Which reminds me that last month the Fall issue of the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine hit the stands and I was simultaneously delighted (97%) and mortified (3%) to read the article about me that staff writer Van Jensen composed after we met prior to my surgery this summer. Entitled “How Did That NERD on the Left Become That PIRATE on the Right?“, the article does a really nice job of catching people up with the kid who won the Batman contest back in the 80s… and the second page features a certain cardboard trooper standing in front of a line of “real” troopers at Dragon*Con.

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Today I got an message from a friend over on Facebook saying that they couldn’t figure out how to create a photo album. From the description they left me I realized that they were confused by Facebook’s confusing interface so I decided to post an illustrated lesson here on my site. It’s really not as hard as you think!

First, look in the lower left corner of your browser’s window. See the icons down there? Those are shortcuts to some of the applications available to you on Facebook. Callout #1 is pointing to an orange icon with a person’s silhouette in it. This represents the Photos application (and will in fact alert you to that fact if you hover your mouse over it). Go ahead and click that icon….

Don’t ask me why, but when you click the Photos application button it doesn’t take you to your own photo album(s), it takes you to a common area where you can see all of your friends’ photo albums. Handy if you’re just wanting to go looking around, unhandy if you’re headed to go manage your albums…. meaning that there’s one more click we need to make. Look at Callout #2 which is pointing to a link that reads “My Photos”. That’s where we need to go, so click it!

You’ve arrived at the area where your own photograph albums are kept. This is the area from where you can go and edit existing photo albums or create new ones. Making new ones is what we’re after, so look at Callout #3 which is pointing to a link which reads “Create a Photo Album”. That’s what we want, so click it!

Making a new album is easy! Just give your new album a name (”My 30th Birthday Party”, for example), give it a location if you so desire (”Airport Hilton”), and provide a brief description (people really do read captions, so make them interesting!). Next, decide who you want to be able to see these photos. If you don’t mind sharing them with the world, then pick “Everybody” from the pop-up list at the bottom of the images shown with Callout #4.

The only thing left to do is to click the button “Create Album” as indicated by Callout #5. Go ahead and click it. If you decide later that you don’t want to keep this album you can always delete it (though I’m not going to show you how to do that in this article, so you’re on your own if you post anything that might get you in trouble!! LOL)

Since you’re about to open your computer to another computer you need some guarantee that Facebook is actually the entity with whom you’ll be dealing with, which is why they issue a Security Certificate to your browser. This little bit of digital handshaking is intended to establish that secure connection… and the only way you’re going to be able to post your photos, so your only real option is to click the button that Callout #6 is pointing to marked “Trust”. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to do it right now!!

After a few moments (the connection process depends on your connection speed and your computer’s set up) you’ll be rewarded with a “window” into your hard drive. Callout #7 shows all the folders on your computer, so use it to navigate to the folder containing the photos you wish to upload to Facebook.

Once you get to the folder containing the pictures you want to upload, you’ll see small thumbnail images of each photo with an empty box on top of them. Those boxes are checkmark boxes (Callout #8 shows one example of this). All you need to do is scroll down through all the pictures in that folder and click the checkmark box for each photo you want to post to your new album on Facebook. Once you’ve put a check mark beside all the photos you wish to upload you can click the “Upload” button identified by Callout #9.

Note that you can only upload 20 photos at a time and that the Upload button will remain dimmed until you click at least one image to upload.

There are plenty more tips about uploading photos to Facebook, but I’ve run out of time for tonight! I hope that this lesson has been helpful to you. Feel free to share it with all your Facebook friends by posting a link on your Wall!

Related posts:

1. Fix Your Broken Facebook Feed
2. Facebook Love

Are you tired of seeing how all your “friends” are goofing off on Facebook? Do you really care if Sam Fiddlefark just took the “Which Piece of Cheese Do I Smell Like” quiz? Did you actually want to know that Finellopi Twankshaft just bought 137 people a Sexy Cocktail From Her Bellybutton or that Lorna McDufflebagg just scored 835 points playing KittenSmash?

Thought not.

I suppose then that you aren’t especially all that interested in attending the “Drive Your Pet To The Mall Day” except, perhaps, as a masked assassin atop a nearby bell tower with a high powered assault rifle and a 5-gallon bucket of armor-piercing bullets.

Thought not.

Don’t you love it when I post 20 minute long videos of myself listening to iTunes at work?

Thought not. (though I must say it hurts to actually hear you admit that you don’t enjoy them)

The good news is that you’re not alone in being tired of all of the extra noise on Facebook these days, and that your lack of interest in exercising your constitutional rights to “Vote NO to Blue Typefaces on Facebook!!” doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person.

A bit surly perhaps, but not bad (unless you actually wander off and do that whole bell tower thing).

Look, as cantankerous as you may be, you aren’t alone in your growing dissatisfaction with Facebook’s tendency to show you every burp, hiccup, and fart from the people on your Friends List.

If only there were some way to adjust the flow of information percolating from your friends’ fingertips…..

Oh, well, the good news is: YOU CAN!!!

The bad news is that the solution is HIDDEN.

Unless you click on Drewprops’ Secret Cool Facebook Control Panel Link Thingy {clicky here}.

Recent interface refinements to Facebook.com’s homepage are the first signs of hope that the massively popular site may eventually be moving to revamp the confusing and tangled nest of privacy, feed, and application controls that most users currently avoid. But until that day arrives, here is one solid action you can take to make your experience on Facebook a little nicer.

First of all, let’s start with something we can all appreciate (especially the older ones in the audience): an analog interface. In other words, buttons and dials, levers and switches. Lots and lots of knobs. Mechanical interfaces are, arguably, the most logical means for the human brain to interface with a device since we are in fact analog devices ourselves.

If you haven’t done so already, click the “Drewprops Secret Cool Facebook Control Panel Link Thingy” (above) or consult the image at the beginning of this article.

Look familiar?
Yep, it’s an equalizer, just like on your old stereo system.

An equalizer is a series of slide switches which allow you to increase and reduce the volume of any number of channels and frequencies. In the case of Facebook, instead of tweaking bass and treble, it’s used to control the frequency of posts you see on a range of topics.

Those topics currently include:

• Events
• Groups
• Photos
• Notes
• Relationships
• Friends
• Wall Posts
• Profiles
• Status
• Links
• Videos

Want to see more photos from your friends? Slide the Photos button to the top. Perhaps you just got out of a relationship and you flinch every time you see your friends posting updates about their own love lives. To hide in your hole, just slide the Relationship slider down to the bottom, where your heart lies

Blacklists and Whitelists
Everyone has a friend or two that they “stalk” on Facebook, and everyone has a few friends they merely tolerate and would rather push to the back burner if possible. This is what the IT industry calls whitelists and blacklists and the lower portion of this control panel will afford you the opportunity to set up to 195 of your friends on either list (black or white), and like any name-centric text-entry field on Facebook, as soon as you begin typing in a friend’s name a list of ready-to-click names will pop up, based on your spelling. Get it right.

The powerful combination of controlling the volume of feed types and explicitly specifying certain friends’ importance-ranking will undoubtedly allow you black-hearted churls to begin to enjoy your Facebook experience once again. Trust me, I made 3,846 points in the “How To Write a Helpful Article About Facebook” game.

Didn’t you see that in your feed?

Related posts:

1. Fix Your Broken Facebook Feed
2. Make Facebook’s NEW Status Updates Group Your Default
3. Facebook’s NEW News Feed

The older we get, the more resistant to change we become, however the recent (March 2009) interface update to Facebook rattled a lot of my friends, old and young alike. Some love it, some hate it, all will have to get used to it until it changes again. So until the next change arrives, I’m posting some tips to help you guys understand how to better manage your Facebook experience. Let’s start by looking at the left hand column on the home page (item #1 in Figure 2).

Facebook identifies this column as its “Filters”, and you’re going to appreciate the power of Filters, especially as your list of friends on Facebook grows.

By default, the Filter “News Feed” will be selected (note that in Figure 2 the item “News Feed” is highlighted in blue) and will automatically show the most recent posts by ALL of your many varied friends in the “Stream” of posts by your friends. In reality, Facebook will only show a randomly selected few posts from your list of friends.

This means that as you add more friends on Facebook you’re less likely to be shown every update from every one of your friends, and since Facebook is just a computer program it isn’t necessarily smart enough to show you updates which might interest you.

This is where Filters come into play.

For example, let’s say that I’m in a mood to catch up on the behind-the-scenes antics of all my famous friends. All I need to do is click on the Filter named “Celebrity Pals” and Presto! I’m up to date on why Jenn’s not dating that singer anymore (dude, all she wanted you to do was brush your teeth more often… you passed up on THAT action because you’re too lazy??).

Pretty cool, huh?

However, to enjoy the benefits of Filters you’re going to have to do a little work first; you’re going to have to learn how to create some Friend Lists, so let’s go make one now!

Take a look at the drop-down menu (item #2 in Figure 2) available from anywhere inside of Facebook. Note that this menu item will only be visible to you when are logged into your account.

Click on the word “Friends” at the very top, or on “All Friends” which is second down in the drop down list. This takes you to your Friends page, which is the central location for managing your friends (Lord knows nobody else can seem to manage them), take a look….

Since we elected to go to the “main” section of our Friends page you’ll notice that “All Friends” is highlighted in blue at the top of the left hand column (item #3 in Figure 3).

You can see from my example that I’ve already organized most of my friends into several Friend Lists, including: Film Friends, Sugar Mommas, People Who Spit When They Talk, Silent Farters, Supermodels Who Are Stalking Me, Church Friends, School Chums, Celebrity Pals, and Funny Old People.

But since that awesome day at spring training last week when I ran into the flight crew for the next shuttle mission I now have a lot of friends who are astronauts, so let’s make ourselves a new group called “People Smarter Than Me” (an admittedly vast list).

Underneath my existing Friend Lists you’ll see a boxy button labeled “Make a New List” (item #4 in Figure 3). Click it!

Up pops a box which states “Step 1: Choose a Name” and displays a field with “< New List >” highlighted inside (item #5 in Figure 4). Change this to read “People Smarter Than Me” (without quote marks) and hit the Return key.

Up pops another box, toward the top of the page, which states “Step 2: Add friends to this list and use it all around Facebook” (item #6 in Figure 4). Now I can add all of my friends who fit this category by typing their names into the field which follows the words “Add to List:”.

As you’ve no doubt already experienced, Facebook uses “predictive type” to narrow down your choices as you type in a name, making it fast and easy to add people to your lists.

Go ahead and make yourself some Friend Lists and when you’re finished, let’s go back to the home page and wrap this thing up….

Are you back on the home page yet? Do it!!

Aha!!
Did you notice?

Those “Filters” in the left hand column are nothing more than a way to use our “Friend Lists” to filter what we see on the home page. That’s right, they’re simply a way to sift through updates from certain subsets of our friends. Pretty handy!

But wait!!

There’s one more thing.

You can tweak the way that your homepage displays your list of Filters. You can make them all visible so that they’re handy, or you can hide them all away to have a neat and tidy homepage.

Look at the word “More” between your Friend Filters and your Application Filters (item #7 in Figure 5). When you click this you’ll see any Filters which aren’t already visible. Note that there is a double-line dividing the “seen” from the “unseen” (item #8 in Figure 5). To rearrange your Friend Filters all you have to do is to drag and drop the lists across that double line (item #9 in Figure 5). When you’re finished just click the word “Hide” and any Friend Filters you’ve set to be “below the line” will disappear. And you can get back to them quickly whenever you want.

So there you have it!

Friend Filters, not so bad now that you understand them!

Thanks for stopping by and please feel free to share this tutorial with your friends on Facebook!!! Stick around and read some of my stories!

Related posts:

1. Make Facebook’s NEW Status Updates Group Your Default
2. Fix Your Broken Facebook Feed
3. Facebook Love

I’m posting this article to help a friend understand the organization of files on their Macintosh computer running OS X 10.4 (also known as “Tiger”). For many non-technical users there’s a big disconnect between the visual nature of the desktop environment and the nested folder navigation of a Finder window. This article presents a basic explanation, in terms these users might understand, and I realize that I may violate some naming conventions and terminology that more advanced users prefer.

Everything you see on your computer screen lives on your hard drive, the topmost item on the chart shown above. The hard drive is a hermetically sealed box with magnetically charged glass platters which rotate at mad speeds like a crazy jet-powered record player. All of the programs you use (email, web browser, iTunes, etc) live on the glass platters of your hard drive as infinitesimal strings of “frozen” magnetic charges. The thing that translates these magnetic charges into the programs that you enjoy using is called an operating system (abbreviated as “OS”).

The Mac OS creates several folders at its “root level”, which in computer terms simply means the “base” level… like the root level of a tree (as it turns out, the many-branching nature of a tree is a perfect analogy for how folder organization works and has been used in computer science for decades upon decades).

Since a computer operating system is a very complex and wonderful machine there are certain bits of that machinery that are best left alone unless you know exactly what you’re doing. Until you become a true computer nerd, I strongly urge you to stay away from the folders that I have marked with red titles in the diagram above (Developer, Library, and System). In fact, the only folders you need concern yourself with are the Applications folder and the user folder with your name.

In this case we’re going to pretend that your name is John Smith, which means that your user folder is named johnsmith. Let’s do a quick comparison of the organization chart from above with a typical Finder window for John Smith.

In this screenshot we’re looking “inside of” the User folder “johnsmith”, which lists 8 subfolders: desktop, documents, library, movies, music, pictures, public, and sites. Pay attention to how this matches the organization chart from the beginning of this article. Once you understand which folder is inside of which folder the Finder window begins to make a lot more sense. Note too that there is one additional “do not touch unless you know what you’re doing” folder inside of the User folder which is called “Library”.

To prevent this article from balooning into a book I’m going to end it here and will respond to questions from my friend in person, though I may provide follow-up articles here if necessary. I hope that this little run through helped some of you out there understand your Mac a little better.

No related posts.

Just click on over to the “Downloads” section of my website and scroll down until you find the PDF for “Six Degrees of Cooking”. Or if you’re really, really lazy you can download it by clicking here!!! Remember: don’t eat more than a handful of this at one sitting… it’s PACKED with calories, salt and fat. And if you do make it, be sure to check back and let me know how it turned out!!

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Just imagine after 5 hours of meticulous graphic design how distressing it might be to get a call from an Art Director screaming “YOU MADE IT THE WRONG SIZE!!!”.

“No, I didn’t,” is my reply, “Adobe Acrobat has simply printed it at the wrong size. Now let’s get you on track, so that you can hurry up and get your shot… and get me paid.”

I’ll give you the same solution that I give Art Directors, but first a rant.

Don’t ask me why, but Adobe Acrobat has a tendency to try to scale print jobs to make the artwork fit the page. Using fuzzy logic to guess what a user might want isn’t necessarily bad, but it smacks of Microsoft XP’s maddeningly invasive “helpfulness”. Maybe it’s okay for people who download the free reader, but really guys, DO NOT WANT. If I’ve purchased Adobe Acrobat Professional, it’s for a reason. Stop trying to guess what I want or need.

Okay!
The thing you folks need to look for is a control Adobe calls “Page Scaling”. This is a pop-up menu item on the front of the print dialog box and featues the following options:

• None
• Fit to Printer Margins
• Reduce to Printer Margins
• Tile Large Pages
• Tile All Pages
• Multiple pages per sheet

You, my dear befuddled friend, should select “None” from this list, as you know that you Intentionally and with Great Purpose designed your document for output at a specific size. For you Mac users here’s what the pop-up looks like:

Hope this helps you!!

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Okay, in the first part of that video you saw a chair’s upholstery being sucked up into a vacuum cleaner, right? Well here’s how it worked….

The engineering for this setup involved finding an existing chair and stripping the upholstery from its frame. The next step required us to fabricate an upholstered “breakaway skin” that wrapped around the chair’s frame, however, we couldn’t use velcro to secure the skin in place because we needed to be able to YANK the skin down through a hole in the floor as the set for both of these chair commercials were built on an elevated stage so that the chair wranglers could be poised underneath to yank the upholstered skin through a small hole cut in the deck of the stage (for the first commercial) and to spin & flip the “bucking” chair (in the second commercial).

To make the “breakaway skin” fit the chair properly required endless adjustments to the way the flaps were sewn, adjustments to where bits of padding were added, consideration given to the resistance of the fabric on the texture of the padding… just a jillion little never ending adjustments. Even though I felt like the only person working on this gizmo there were actually a number of guys who had a hand in it and I just realized after watching this video that Michael Benedict (now with the Atlanta Opera) had worked on this gag as well!!

On the day of the shoot there were three of us below the deck for the vacuum commercial.
There was a hole cut into the floor directly in front of the chair and a vacuum cleaner was pushed up to the hole. A balloon was fitted inside the vacuum’s fabric bag and an air hose snaked out of the vacuum’s beater bar area down into the hole and up to an air compressor. A thick rope of cords and strings went from underneath the chair down that same hole.

Now, remember when I said that we couldn’t use velcro?
Well we couldn’t. However, we could (and did) use T-pins to hold certain bits of the skin in place.

Everything else depended on timing.

When the cameras rolled and the director called “action” it was my job to pull strings connected to the pins, releasing the skin from its hold on the wooden frame. The man operating the air tank (Paul Huggins, co-owner of Scenario Custom Scenery) would begin inflating the vacuum cleaner’s bag while the “Yank Guy” (Jesse) frenetically pulled the cords connected to the bulk of the breakaway upholstered skin.

We must’ve done the gag a dozen times or more and the final product looked great on camera.

Have you seen the commercial?

No related posts.

With the WordPress theme I’m currently running my Single Page posts are nested four levels deep within other DIVs. Each paragraph block in a post is wrapped with its own HTML paragraph tags. Depending on the post, I may have one or more images interspersed between paragraphs.

Viewing this in IE7, revealed large “holes” in my paragraphs (see image at top of post).

My first reaction was that these were “phantom” images that were not displaying. But, checking the post in another browser confirmed that no images were missing. A more accurate description might be that they were “cast shadows” from existing images. Regardless of why they were occuring, the problem had to be with my stylesheet and the way that IE7 was rendering it (a tradition of poor rendering we’ve grown accustomed to from Microsoft).

After much trial and error I determined that the solution was to specify a width to the paragraphs (see photo below). Even though this works on Firefox and other browsers, IE7 doesn’t seem to “pass along” the established width of the outermost DIV which ultimately contains the paragraphs for the post, so it’s up to you as the designer to do so.

In this particular theme, the area containing the blog post is around 565 pixels wide, a measurement established 2 or 3 DIVs earlier in the code. I simply made the stylesheet define the paragraphs in the single-post DIV as being 560 pixels wide, which made everything work, all over.

No related posts.

In Wordpress, these things we call “categories” serve several functions.

Categories quickly inform first-time visitors what the topics are that you, as an author, write about. This is immensely helpful, both for your visitors and for you. Categories, accurately titled and accurately applied to posts (which I occasionally refer to as “articles”), certainly won’t be overlooked by search engines.

The grand convenience of categories is that, thanks to the way that WordPress stores your posts in a database, visitors may elect to view posts which only belong to one category. For instance, you may only want to read the articles that I have published under the “How To” category here on my own website. This rich and powerful means of navigating your data ensures that you’re providing the ultimate convenience to your visitors, and thus to yourself as a content provider.

Find Your Category Listing
Before you press the “Publish” button on that article you’ve been composing, look around for something called “Categories”. In the newest WordPress.com interface they’re listed underneath the area where you compose your article. Just scroll down past the box where you’ve typed the body of your post and look for a listing of your categories (as shown in the image at the beginning of this post).

See All Your Choices
When you first scroll down to look at the list of categories WordPress may only display the “Most Used” categories. To see ALL of the categories you should click the word link that say “All Categories”. (In the screenshot above you’ll see that I’ve already clicked the “All Categories” link)

Make a Selection
Remember, you must PICK a category to associate with your article before you click the “Publish” button to publish your article. All you need to do is to click the box to the left of the category (which will put a little check mark in the box).

Add a Category
Every new WordPress blog starts off with only one category name: “Uncategorized”. It’s up to you as an Author to create more categories as they’re needed. I’d STRONGLY urge you to use single words as categories, to provide clarity for your visitors. Who can figure out a sentence-long category name? Be concise! (However, as you can see in the provided example above, it is possible to use more than one word in your descriptions.)

Warning: Don’t Forget to Choose a Category!
Please note in this same example that I (as administrator of the blog) have deleted the default category name “Uncategorized”. If you elect to do this, be sure that you (and any other authors on your blog) know that they must select a category from the list of categories before they publish an article, otherwise WordPress will create a new category named “1″ and assign it to that uncategorized post, which is obviously not going to be very helpful to your visitors (now is it?).

Multiple Categories
There are times when you might want to list a post under more that one category, and you are able to check more than one category from that list if needed.

I hope that this article helps some of you who don’t understand what categories are, or how they work. Those of us who work with this stuff all the time can lose sight of the fact that some people need a primer on the basics!

Related posts:

1. Make Facebook’s NEW Status Updates Group Your Default

But you came here for a way to fix your problem didn’t you?!

I’m going to give you a way to create a properly imposed PDF version of your InDesign document, without using anyone else’s plug-ins or scripts. It’s an entirely Adobe-based solution and while it doesn’t provide an editable InDesign imposition, it’s a very good solution that should benefit a good number of users. Are you ready?

Users of InDesign CS2 had an item in the File menu called “InBooklet SE…” located under the File menu. In the CS3 version of InDesign you’ll find an item named “Print Booklet…” in the same location. (see image below)

Now take a look at the dialog box from CS2 InBooklet SE:

and compare it to the dialog box from CS3’s new “Make Booklet” wizard:

Did you notice something missing?

That’s right, there’s no option to create a new document from the imposition.

Besides offering the designer the ability to print a properly imposed version of their document, InBooklet SE’s “killer feature” was that it provided the user with the ability to create a brand new InDesign document with the page order permanently rearranged for imposition. In my situation, I would use the new document to export a correctly imposed PDF for my admin staff so that they could print company documents on demand. This workflow eliminated the need for the company to purchase a second license for InDesign, protecting original documents from untrained users.

It was a shock to discover that InDesign CS3 had lost its ability to create new documents based on the new imposed page order and I spent some time searching the internet for a solution to this problem. The only solution I could find online to combat this missing feature is a script written by Stephen Carlsen (available for download from his website), which examines your document, determines the correct imposition order for the pages, “cooks” a PDF of each of the pages in the InDesign document, and reassembles those solitary PDF page snaps in sorted order into a new InDesign document.

It’s a nice little script and I give kudos to Stephen for tackling a way to work around Adobe’s infuriating gaffe, but it’s an extremely inelegant solution to the problem and it fails to generate correct output if you use section breaks… and honestly, who doesn’t use section breaks?

But there is a more elegant way to achieve the result you’re seeking and it’s easy to do, as long as you also own a licensed version of Adobe Acrobat Professional!!

While you have the “Make Booklet…” wizard open click the button which reads “Print Settings…”, located along the lower edge of the dialog box.

This will call up the traditional InDesign Print dialog box (see next image).

Click on the pop-up list of available printers, at the top of this dialog box.

Next, click the button labeled “Printer…” along the bottom edge and yet another dialog box will pop up, but this one should look familiar to regular users of InDesign as it’s the regular old printer dialog box you normally see when printing less complex documents.

Select either “Adobe PDF 8.0″ or “Adobe PDF 7.0″ from that list to use as a virtual printer (whether you have either of these options available to you depends entirely upon your installation of Acrobat).

Next, click “Print” and you’ll be asked to select a location on your computer where the Acrobat virtual printer can save the file you’re about to create…

after you select a location click the “Save” button in the lower right of that dialog box.

Now you’re back down to the InDesign Print dialog box and almost done…just click the “OK” button.

Finally, you’re returned to the original “Print Booklet” menu, and it’s time to actually CREATE your PDF document!

Just click the “Print” button in the “Print Booklet” menu and InDesign will spool the print file off to the Acrobat Distiller engine and in no time at all you’ll be awash in a sea of properly imposed PDFs!!

Ta Da!!! A properly imposed PDF file!!!
Now all you need to do is to print your document in “duplex” mode on your printer/copier, a process that varies between manufacturers and is far beyond my ability to lend assistance. However, I can do one thing for you, and that’s to remind you to tell your output device not to scale the artwork to fit your page in Adobe Acrobat. Need some help with doing that? Read my article on “How To Make Adobe Acrobat Stop Printing the Wrong Size“.

So…..
I hope all of this helps you!??

I wish that I’d been smart enough to figure this out long before now, back when I was using CS2, because there was really no need (in my particular situation) to create a new InDesign document with the pages rearranged for imposition. From now on I’ll only need to use one InDesign document.

Sure would be nice if Adobe would create a shortcut for this… hmmm, I wonder if you can make an action to do all of this for you?

Thanks for all the comments folks!

[tags]Adobe, InDesign, CS2, CS3, InBooklet, SE, Quark, imposition, rearrange, pages, create, new, document, plug-in, plugin, script, print, printing, solution, workaround[/tags]

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This has caused me on several occasions to load Tray 3 with good paper, run back to my desk to print the document, run back to monitor the print job then yank the tray open and remove the “good” paper as soon as the print job is finished in case someone else has a print job in the queue behind me. No use in printing normal stuff on the good paper.

It’s made me feel especially silly considering the fact that I know that I’ve had a way to make it work in the past.

I suppose you could call it one of my personal “lost secrets”, like how to make hydraulic cement or watered steel or Greek fire.

I had it, then I lost it.

A personal defeat to be sure.

Then, this past Friday, I rediscovered the secret.

The problem? Click over to the “setup” portion of the Print dialogue box and look for the drop-down menu for “paper size”. Make sure that it is set for “Defined by Driver” and not for any one paper size in particular. That one move should do the trick by instructing InDesign to obey any paper tray assignations you’ve made. It’s a satisfying sensation to have fine control over your equipment.

I hope that this helps others, though it’s really posted here as a helper for me since I have little doubt that I’ll be dialing this page up at some point in the future, having forgotten the setup process all over again.

[tags]InDesign, how to, how-to, print, printer, problem, wrong, tray, dialogue, box, Xerox, DocuColor, 2240, driver[/tags]

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STEP ONE
Let’s go ahead and remove the crank handle for the window. If you’re lucky enough to have power windows there are a few steps that are different from my situation and unfortunately I don’t know what they are. (If you have one of those and know the steps please post the instructions in a comment to this article.)

Here’s a photo of the removed handle and the crank post on which it fits.

The handle is held on with a keystone shaped retainer clip that I’ve seen referred to elsewhere as a kotter pin, though it doesn’t seem to be a true kotter pin. To remove this retainer clip you’ll need a hook tool which can be easily made from a wire coat hanger. Look at the photograph below for the shape into which you should bend your wire. The retainer clip you need to remove is slipped around a circular sheath built into the plastic handle, a sheath with cutouts along two sides that allow the clip to ‘pop’ into place, riding in a channel encircling the metal crank post. It’s very simple engineering and very simple to remove once you find the ‘fat’ end of the retainer clip. Note that there are two plastic ‘nibs’ on either side of the circular sheath built into the plastic handle, so the ‘fat’ end of the retainer clip could be slipped on from either of two sides. Once you find the ‘fat’ end of the retaining clip just slip your hook tool around the ‘fat’ end of the retaining clip and gently pull. Note that the retaining clip will want to ’spring’ off the sheath on which it fits so you might want to cup your free hand around the area so that you don’t lose the clip (something I almost did).

With the retaining clip removed the plastic handle will easily slip off the metal crank post. Set it and the retaining clip in a safe area.

STEP TWO
Now it’s time to finish loosening the door panel. With the door open, look beneath the mirror control stalk and you’ll see a plastic screw. Remove it and place it in your ’safe’ parts holding area. Note that the black plastic triangle is already removed in my pictures, in your process it will still be in place.

With that screw removed the door panel should be a little floppier, but you probably need to pop one more retaining clip which is hidden from view farther down the door panel. Just slip your fingers in place behind the door panel where you removed that plastic screw and start working your way down, gently tugging at the door panel until you feel it ‘pop’ out at you a bit.

Move back to the top of the door panel now and see if you can lift it up and away from the structure of the door. It doesn’t need to move away a lot. Just a bit.

STEP THREE
Time to replace the mirror!
Turn your attention back to the black plastic triangle where the mirror control stalk (mirror adjusting rod) is located, prying at it gently until the one and only retaining clip pops loose. Work it gently, ever so gently, away and out of place. You’ll need to manipulate the plastic element, the control stalk of the old mirror and the loosened door panel in unison to remove the black plastic triangle. A reader (Bart) suggests making this part of the repair easier by removing the plastic handle/knob of the control stalk. To do this, simply pop off the plastic end cap of that plastic handle/knob (make every attempt to catch the end cap so that it doesn’t go zinging off into oblivion) and loosen the concealed screw revealed beneath. Once done, move the plastic triangle to your safe parts storage area (also do this with the control stalk knob if you have removed it).

Ta Da! You can now see the three retaining bolts for the mirror. No, I have no idea what size socket I used because I didn’t think about writing an article until after I was nearly finished (thanks to reader Bart for letting us know that it’s an 8mm socket!!). Suffice to say that it’s small. I don’t expect you’ll be doing this unless you have some tools anyway, so I trust that you’ll figure it out. Feel free to post the bolt size in a comment if you’d like.

As you remove each bolt be careful to keep one finger on it to prevent it from falling down into the door panel. Carefully set each bolt aside in your safe parts storage area and be sure to keep the mirror from falling to the ground as you remove the last and final bolt. It might help if you tape the mirror to the car as a ‘helping hand’ in case you think you might not be able to keep from dropping the mirror.

With the third and final screw removed you can gently pull the old mirror free from the door frame and set it aside, preferably on the ground instead of the hood of your car since it can easily slip off.

Note that the OEM mirror has a gasket surrounding the three bolts to keep water from penetrating your door through the mirror. My new mirror did not have this gasket so I applied a bead of RTV silicon rubber around the same area on the new mirror. We’ll see how well that works.

Reassembly is simply the reverse of what we’ve already done. It took me less than an hour to make the swap and I’ll bet that it takes you half the time now that you know what you have to do!

IMPORTANT UPDATE
I made the mistake of buying an aftermarket replacement for my broken mirror and didn’t take the car out for a drive until six weeks later, whereupon I discovered that it was an inferior product. Once on the road I was dismayed to observe that there was a maddening vibration to the mirror element even though the mirror housing itself was rock steady. Worse than that, the mirror would not remain in position after adjustment.

I had no other choice than to buy a genuine Honda replacement part, at approximately four times the cost of the third-party replacement. It was worth the added expense.

Placed side by side you can see the difference in the quality of the manufacture of both parts. Also, the Honda part comes with a pre-attached gasket to seal the openings in the door frame that allow the mirror to be attached. I used RTV in the openings where the bolts run through for good measure but that was probably unnecessary.

I will say that it went a lot faster the second time around!

If you are reading this article in anticipation of performing this repair, I strongly urge you to spend the extra money on OEM parts because you will undoubtedly be very disappointed if you do not. I also recommend that you use a good search engine to look for “genuine Honda parts”. I found a dealer in Indiana or Illinois who would have sold me the exact same Honda part for $50 less than I paid at my local dealer, Willett Honda of Morrow, Georgia. If I had arrived earlier in the day when a manager was on duty I might have been given some sort of discount, but I was pressed for time.

More than anything, I hope that this information helps other Civic owners out there! (Which it apparently has already done since the article was first published)

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Having said all that, I’d like to tell you about my latest purchase of a Whatchamakinsky, aka Atlanta artist Leann Zafuto, whose work is currently being shown at boswellGallery in Decatur. I think that Leann’s work stands a very good chance of breaking the Art Barrier and I’d recommend that you consider picking up one of her paintings while she’s still affordable.

The Art Barrier is the dividing line between consumer art and serious art and it can be just as damned subjective as art itself with one big difference: value. When an artist breaks the Art Barrier they begin being recognized by art critics, which generally leads towards interest by “serious” collectors who rely on the tastes of the aforementioned critics to help them invest their buckets of money.

But what if you don’t have buckets of money to invest?

It’s easier than any point in history for the average person to own a piece of artwork, heck, you can find it for sale practically anywhere in a large city. Coffee shops, restaurants, hair salons, clothing boutiques, department stores and even some of your finer gas stations offer a nice selection of artwork (though the ones at the gas station tend to be black velvet portraits of Elvis and/or large-breasted warrior women). Any of those places might supply you with a piece of artwork that you will cherish for the rest of your life but the chances are slim that you’re going to land on a piece of department store artwork that will one day find your grandchildren doing jigs of joy when an art appraiser on the Antiques Roadshow 2030 tells them how much the painting is worth.

So just buying cheap art isn’t necessarily the answer.

Of course you could go to an art gallery but that’s certainly no guarantee that you’re going to find artwork that’s going to break the Art Barrier. There’s always the possibility that the only thing that’s going to get broken is your wallet. I’ve been in plenty of art galleries that left me wondering who the fools are keeping them in business. But I know who those fools are. An art purchase is to most buyers as personal a statement as the creation of the art was for the artist. Buyers are emotionally invested in their purchases and will sing the praises of the artist to anyone unlucky enough to wander near their personal collection (tip: never ask about artwork in people’s homes). Consumer enthusiasm is good, but is that going to make an artist’s work more valuable down the road? Probably not. My Mom and one of her sisters love Thomas Kinkade but the stuff they buy is only worth the materials they’re made from.

So how do you find artists who might really become collectible in the future? Crap, I don’t know. Get one of those fancy flying Deloreans from the movies. Or follow my simple, unproven steps to artistic collecting success:

1. Stop shopping for art in department stores and art depots. Now.
2. Pick artists who concentrate on their art. Stay away from dabblers.
3. Look for artists who work in recurring themes.
4. Research. Tour your local galleries for a couple of months to learn the artistic “lay of the land” in your region.
5. Find out who the artists are talking about. Maybe you’ll even become friends with a few. That’s never bad… unless they cut off an ear and you have to drive them to the hospital.
6. Stay away from crazy artists. Actually, you might want to collect them. The wildest stories will last the longest so if you find an artist whose work seems to be appreciated by the arts community AND they’re a character, all signs point toward “buy”.
7. STOP listening to what I have to say and go buy your own dang art. Dang.

That’s all I’ve got for art collecting today. I’ve given you a very big tip on Leann Zafuto’s paintings, the rest is up to you.

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