Wrong!  It’s a pain in the behind, and seems to take forever or just doesn’t work.  The easy solution to the problem is blockposters.com

You just upload an image from your computer and choose how many sheets (by width) you would like your poster to span across.

Then you download a PDF file containing your newly created images.  Print, paste and voilà – you have a poster-sized print!

Thanks BlockPosters!

The most prominent company offering  free WordPress hosting right now is DreamHost.  They are a established, well known hosting company.  You can sign up for their free app hosting at: https://panel.dreamhostapps.com/signup/ .

Too keep it free (remember we’re just testing and learning here) pick a name to use with their free DreamHosters.com domain name.  FOr my example I picked  “mycooltestsite”:

I then made some changes to the default settings in step 3 – I clicked the “X” next to Drupal to deselect that program and changed the address in WordPress from “blog” to “www” – this is how I normally set up my websites.  You can certainly feel to leave the settings how they are or make any changes you want to.

Leave step 4 unchecked – we’ll talk more about hosting options in a future post. We’ll keep trying this for free for now.

Enter your information in step 5, and once you’re all done you should come to the payment page – which should show a grand total of $0 due.

DreamHost will email you instructions on how to get into the WebPanel of your new free hosting account, but for now click on the “Continue to our web panel” button.

The next step is to wait 15-20 minutes or so.  Go grab yourself a bowl of ice cream or a slice of pie to celebrate!

In a little while, you should find a gazillion emails from DreamHost in your email notifying you that your apps are installed and ready to use:

Open the one titled “Success installing wordpress…” and you’ll get the ID and password for your WordPress software:

There may be more information below this about making changes to DNS, but unless you used a custom domain name (not *.dreamhosters.com) you can ignore all of that.

Click on the management link in the email and you’re ready to make your first blog post or web page!

For help on getting up to speed on using WordPress, I recommend First Steps With WordPress for a quick tour of it’s features and functions.

You can perform such edits pretty easily with PDF Escape, an online PDF editor that’s free and also lets you edit password-protected PDF documents in the browser.

With PDF Escape, you can hide* parts of a PDF file using the whiteout tool or add annotations with the help of custom shapes, arrows, text boxes and sticky notes. You can add hyperlinks to other PDF pages / web documents.

I found an extremely easy way to do this via JavaScript with Feed2JS.  Just fill in a simple web form with info about your website, generate some JavaScript and paste it into your html.  I had the titles of my 4 most recent posts up in less than a minute.

If you’re interested in posting the content of a world-class blogger, you’ll have to look elsewhere, but if you want to see what the code for my site looks like, here it is:

<script language=”JavaScript” src=”http://feed2js.org//feed2js.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Ftjschmitz.com%2Fblog%2Ffeed%2F&amp;num=4″  type=”text/javascript”></script>

So here goes: if you want to keep Google off of your site – the easiest way is to add a file called robots.txt to the root directory of your website:

An example to disallow all robots would be:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

With those 2 lines, all robots (including Google) will leave your site entirely alone.

If you wanted to disallow Google, but allow all others (like Yahoo, etc)
User-agent: Google
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Everything you never wanted to know about the use of the robots.txt file is available at: http://www.robotstxt.org.

The best thing to keep in mind is that the “bad” bots will ignore robots.txt with wild abandon – doing their best to leave spammy comments for shoddy websites.  For those bad boys you’ll need to block them by IP address, something we’ll address another day.

Are we doomed to choose between memory leaks and features? Some may say yes, but I say “maybe not”. There are two different ways to trick your add-ons into thinking they are compatible with newer versions of Firefox. Be forewarned, though – doing so can seriously reduce the stability of Firefox. But, hey – you’re running beta software, right? You’re the kind of person who’s not afraid to take a little risk. So here goes:

Method 1 – editing the .xpi file:

Firefox add-ons are bundled up in .xpi files that are nothing more than zipped archives containing the necessary files. Add a “.zip” to the end of them and you can extract their contents for a little magic. Once you have the contents extracted, open the INSTALL.RDF file with a text editor. Look for the section that says
“<em:maxVersion>2.0.0</em:maxVersion>” change the 2.0.0 to 3.0.0, or even better 5.0.0. re-zip up the file and change the file extension to be just .xpi (no .zip). You can then open the file with Firefox and install it. Voila! Working plug-in. Now some new fancy plugins (like the Google Search Toolbar) are digitally signed, and making these changes somehow breaks the voodoo that holds them together. Firefox will refuse to install them, which is probably not a bad thing with all the crappy malware out there these days trying to get a piece of oyur computer. In a worst case, you can try…

Method 2 – using the Nightly Tester Tools add-on:

Install the add-on before updating to 3.x (or after, it just adds to the number of restarts needed). Once you’ve completed the upgrade, go to your add-ons manager (Tools | Add Ons). You can then right click on the add-on you want to test and pick “make compatible“. I’d recommend doing just a couple at a time, as about 1/3 of the add-ons I tried completely b0rked 3.0. If you run into this problem simply re-start in FF 2.x, and disable the offending add-on(s) from the add-ons manager. Later, rinse and repeat until you have a lustrous set of working add-ons.

I usually do a combination of the two – editing the .xpi file of all that I can, and using the Nightly Tester Tool to get the few that wouldn’t work that way. Either way, after you spend a day and a half getting everything working just right, the add-on coders will get off of their lazy duffs and eventually get a version out that works with the new beta. But you’ll have the satisfaction that you were able to run your favorite add-on before anyone else.

This amazing little gadget combines a 2GB flash memory SD card and a full-blown Wi-Fi adapter into one tiny bundle. With this bad boy in your camera, you can take pictures and wirelessly upload them to your computer or one of a bazillion web hosting sites (like Flickr, Facebook, Vox, Picasa, etc.

With them selling for under $100, I just may need to get two. Grandma and Grandpa may just get one for Christmas. The time saved in not having to be the camera jockey every time someone in my family fills up a memory card could be priceless.

1. Figure out who to send the DMCA letter(s) to. Ideally, you’ll send one to the site owner, one to their web hosting company, and one to Google (cause Google rules the world, right?). You can get the site’s owner and technical contact info by running a ‘whois’ search on the URL. Sam Spade is my favorite, but any of the thousands of sites out there will work. Your results will look something like this (fearaid.org runs a splog that scrapes my sister-in-law’s blog – this tutorial is dedicated to her):
   

   (Asked whois.pir.org:43 about fearaid.org)

   Domain ID: D134551157-LROR
   Domain Name: FEARAID.ORG
   Created On: 07-Dec-2006 21: 09: 48 UTC
   Last Updated On: 13-Sep-2007 22: 49: 07 UTC
   Expiration Date: 07-Dec-2007 21: 09: 48 UTC
   Sponsoring Registrar: Directi Internet Solutions d/b/a PublicDomainRegistry.Com (R27-LROR)
   Status: OK
   Registrant ID: DI_4999251
   Registrant Name: Catherine Martinez
   Registrant Organization: N/A
   Registrant Street1: Providencia 2113
   Registrant Street2:
   Registrant Street3:
   Registrant City: Santiago
   Registrant State/Province: Atacama
   Registrant Postal Code: 234213
   Registrant Country: CL Registrant Phone: 562.315631
   Registrant Phone Ext.:
   Registrant FAX:
   Registrant FAX Ext.:
   Registrant Email: catherinemartine@gmail.com
   
   

   Especially if the site owner is not in the US, you’ll want to send a DMCA letter to their hosting company as well, which has a better chance of being US based. You can do a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address of the site – in Sam Spade, just click on the ip address in the listing and it will take you to the information on the company that ‘owns’ the ip address their server is running. You’ll end up with something like this:

   (Asked whois.arin.net:43 about +209.163.229.240)

   OrgName:    Time Warner Telecom  Inc.
   OrgID:      TWTC
   Address:    10475 Park Meadows Drive
   City:       Littleton
   StateProv:  CO
   PostalCode: 80124
   Country:    US
   ReferralServer: rwhois: //rwhois.twtelecom.net: 4321
   NetRange:   209.163.128.0 - 209.163.255.255
   CIDR:       209.163.128.0/17
   NetName:    TWTC-NETBLK-12
   NetHandle:   NET-209-163-128-0-1
   Parent:     NET-209-0-0-0-0
   NetType:    Direct Allocation
   NameServer: NS1.IPLT.TWTELECOM.NET
   NameServer: NS1.MILW.TWTELECOM.NET
   NameServer: NS1.ORNG.TWTELECOM.NET
   Comment:    ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE
   RegDate:    1997-11-12
   Updated:    2004-02-18
   OrgAbuseHandle: TWTAD-ARIN
   OrgAbuseName:   Time Warner Telecom Abuse Desk
   OrgAbusePhone:  1-800-898-6473
   OrgAbuseEmail:  abuse@twtelecom.net OrgNOCHandle: TDN1-ARIN
   OrgNOCName:   TWTC Data NOC
   OrgNOCPhone:  1-800-898-6473
   OrgNOCEmail:  support@twtelecom.net
   OrgTechHandle: NST12-ARIN
   OrgTechName:   NOC SWIP Team
   OrgTechPhone:  1-800-898-6473
   OrgTechEmail:  swip@twtelecom.com
   OrgName:    Virtual Internet Systems
   OrgID:      VIS-66
   Address:    1307 Robincreek CV
   City:       Lewisville
   StateProv:  TX
   PostalCode: 75067
   Country:    US
   NetRange:   209.163.228.0 - 209.163.229.255
   CIDR:       209.163.228.0/23
   NetName:    TWTC-VISY-3
   NetHandle:   NET-209-163-228-0-1
   Parent:     NET-209-163-128-0-1
   NetType:    Reallocated
   Comment:
   RegDate:    2006-05-15
   Updated:    2006-05-15
   OrgTechHandle: VIS4-ARIN
   OrgTechName:   Virtual Internet Systems
   OrgTechPhone:  1-972-221-8416
   OrgTechEmail:  chris@visy.com
   
   

   If you end up with multiple companies, it’s best to contact all of them. In this category, most of the email and fax listings will be accurate, so it’s not a major expense.

   You’ll also want to keep Google in the loop, as they can carry a lot of clout. Their DMCA information page has their address and fax number as well. They do requite notification in writing, so you’ll need to warm up the fax machine or scrape up a stamp. You can also contact the Adsense Team, cutting off the revenue stream of the splog.

2. Compose your letter(s) – the simplest could be something like this:
   

   Subject: DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringement

   To whom it may concern,

   I am writing to inform you that the site spamblog.com contains copyrighted content from my site(s). Specifically, the text and images appearing at www.mysite.com/index.html and www.mysite.com/content.html

   The offending copyrighted material is located at www.spamblog.com/index.html and www.spamblog.com/clicktheads.com

   If you need more information, I can be reached at myemail@mysite.com or via phone 216-555-5555 and my mailing address is John Doe, 123 Main St., Schenectady, NY 12345.

   I have sent email requests to the owner of the offending site at spammer@spamblog.com requesting the offending material be removed, but have not received any reply.

   I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

   I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

   My signature below serves as my legal electronic signature.

   John Doe
   October 16, 2007

   If you would like more formal letters to be sent via fax or snail-mail, some excellent templates are available at www.mcanerin.com:
   Google DMCA – MS Word Document (32k)
   ISP DMCA – MS Word Document (38k)

3. Follow up. You should give the recipients an appropriate delivery time plus 5-7 days to respond. If you don’t hear back from them re-send your letters. If you are mailing them, you might want to send them certified mail – it costs $2.65, but will definitely get the attention of the recipient. Those little green tags can put the fear of legislation into companies who assume that you are starting to gather official documentation for a case against them. Also move up the food chain as much as you can. Often cheap, inexpensive, spammy blogs are run on the cheapest possible hosting available. Cheap hosting is often provided through a reseller, who buys bulk hosting from a big hosting company and re-sells it. Many resellers are shoestring operations who don’t respond to any email from anyone for months. As you move up the digital food chain you’ll eventually reach a company with enough lawyers hanging around that they are appropriately respectful of a DMCA notice. They’ll let their reseller know that unless they want their entire operation frozen that they need to take care of the problem in a timely manner.

I’ve seen this process work in as short as a few minutes (email sent, and content removed by the webmaster almost immediately). I have also heard of cases where both the registrant and hosting company were internationally located and thumbed their noses at the DMCA takedown requests. Of course, if someone is stealing your english-language content, they are probably targeting US readers, with US based advertisers. Keep hitting the advertisers and they’ll have no reason to run the blog.

If this helps, leave me a comment and let me know how it works for you.

WordPressMU reaching 1.0 is a biggie – I tried an older version about a year ago, and it just didn’t fly. The new version has been used to power WordPress.com for a while now and seems to have all of the bugs shaken out of it.

bbPress is described as: “forum software with the WordPress touch, and developed by the same folks.” It has also had an extensive shakedown powering the WordPress Support Forums.

Thanks to everyone who contributes to such a fine product!

The only problem is, for webmasters who use adsense (like me) you have to keep toggling Adblock on and off to see what kind of ads Google is serving to your site. That got kind of old for me, and I decided I wouldn’t mind seeing adsense on everyone’s pages.

The problem is, the regexp strings that Filterset.G uses are torturous, and even once you delete the parts that unblock adsense, they just get overwritten on the next update! The solution is Adblock Plus – it has the bonus capability of being able to whitlist URLs.

Simply enter @@URL into the ‘new filter’ form in the Adblock (Plus) preferences and that site is whitelisted. So to un-block Adsense you’ll want to use something like:

@@*.googlesyndication.com

and you’ll be seeing sweet Adsense shills once again.