news

Where did that post go?

I’ve had a few people ask about where some of the older posts from the original incarnation of MacMerc have gone. They’re all here… somewhere. Everything that was on the old site in the way of articles, reviews and news posts has been transferred over, but the links to where they once were may no longer work… in fact they probably won’t work.

I’m in the process of tracking down someone who knows the ways of htaccess and might be willing to help me set up a more efficient redirect but, in the meantime, if you can’t find a post from old MacMerc on new MacMerc, comment below and I will do my best to track it down.

Better yet, if you post a comment with the old link, I’ll track down where that post went and make sure the link redirects.

What can I help you find?

Free Blogware

Personal web logging is the Internet’s newest craze. To do it right you’ll want the best tools. Check out my picks for Mac blogging…

The Service

In order to blog, you’ll need to sign up for the service with one of several providers (unless you are on a server that supports scripting, then you can run your own). Blogger, arguably the best of the bunch, actually creates your blog and FTP’s it to your site. As an option, you can host your blog for free with them, but for an off-site blog I might look into Blog-City or tBLOG. They are both free, but won’t likely work with the software below.

The Software

While not required, client-side software can make posting content to your blog site quicker and easier. My favorite posting tool is BlogScript. This is a simple AppleScript that remembers your login information and quickly posts the contents of your clipboard to your blog.

For more features you may want to try BlogWorkz or iBlog. Both are more robust applications that allow easy posting to your blog, but I found them less consistent than the simple script.

Direct RSS

Blogging not your thing? How about creating your own RSS news feed? RSS feeds can be subscribed to by a slew of news readers. Direct RSS allows you to create and maintain your own RSS feed. It even takes care of the uploading (though that part didn’t work so well for me) and saves a local version of your .rss file to your hard drive.

Now that you’re all hooked up with the tools, you can express yourself with easy on the web. Now all you need is something to say. But I’ll leave that up to you.

Brian

Searching the Big Boys Right in Camino

By: Jon Gales

PowerUser Monday is a weekly column that focuses on a specific technique
that can speed up your computing. If you’ve got a tip that you’d like to
share (with attribution if you choose) please submit
it
to Jon.

This week’s column is brought to you by MacMall,
the premiere online store for Mac products. If you’re looking to snag
anything from a new FireWire cable to a new 17″ PowerBook, check
out MacMall first.

When Steve Jobs showed off Safari’s Google search at MacWorld you probably thought it
was pretty slick. I just snickered, because Camino (my browser of choice) has something way more powerful,
but a little less sexy. I was originally shown this technique a while back
by Gibbons Burke, but it has not yet become popular. I’ve tried explaining
it quickly to a lot of people, and only got met with stares. Here’s to a clear
explanation!

nic info Searching the Big Boys Right in CaminoFirst
off, let’s take a look at a little used feature of Camino book marks–keywords. When
viewing your bookmarks (in the window not the menu bar), you can hit
command-i or right click
and
hit get info. This will
bring up a window that you can see an example of at right.

You can make
a keyword (as I did in the screen capture) here. The next time you
want to visit
that
site,
which in this case is my newest site: News
Is Crappy
,
you can just type the keyword into the link bar.

I haven’t quite figured out what the description does for you (besides
help you out if you are forgetful). If you know, shoot me an email and
I’ll fill everyone else in.

Once you have using keywords down, it’s only a simple hop to getting
in built in searching. Let’s examine the default URL structure of
Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Jon%20Gales

That breaks down into a few parts:

    1. http://www.google.com
    2. search?q=
    3. Jon%20Gales

What we’re interested
in is #3 since it’s the only part that changes. Try changing Jon%20Gales to Mac%20news–Google
searches for “Mac
news”
. You probably already
knew that. Lazy nerds like me have been typing in search queries in that
format for years (seriously not kidding here folks–it’s almost a disorder).

Camino has a little known feature that does substitution… Try bookmarking
this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%s

Now make it have a keyword of something easy (I use g because it’s quick
but still has meaning to Google). Try typing in your keyword, followed by
a space, followed by a search term. If you used g as your keyword, and my
name as your search query, it will look like this:

g Jon Gales

If you set up everything correctly, the page you’ll be taken to this
page–or the search listings for my name.You didn’t have to visit the
home page of
Google. You didn’t have to go click on the tool bar. You can search Google
with a quick, “command-l, g search term, return”. It’s sick.
The moral of the story? %s substitutes whatever is after the keyword
into the URL.

The fun doesn’t stop there, since URL hacking isn’t too hard (just break
it down like I did and look for the search terms), you can make these bookmarks
for almost any site that has search. Remember that %20 simply means a space.
The only ones you can’t use with this method are sites that
use POST ,
which
is really
rare for search (POST is used when there is a lot of data being input,
or it’s of a sensitive nature).You’ll know it’s post if there is no ?
in the URL and your search terms aren’t in it anywhere.

One last quick tip, you can do this same method on a group of sites that
you bookmark together (when bookmarking when you have tabs open check the
bookmark all box). For instance, if you want to search Reuters, Google
News, and Yahoo! News all at the same time it is possible.

Below is a list
of keywords that I set up for a some sites. I’d love to hear what
you have set up.

List of sites that I often use keyword substition for:

Amazon.com -> amzn
eBay.com -> ebay
Google News -> gnews
MacUpdate -> mu

 Searching the Big Boys Right in Camino