I have to admit, I’ve recognized I am becoming more overloaded, and I’m using Evernote to help out with that some (the article mentions TheBrain).  It is a tough hill to climb.

The GIMP (The GNU Image Image Manipulation Program) is an open source image editor.  It’s almost a free version of Adobe’s Photoshop.  While it may look different, The GIMP is just as powerful as the expensive Photoshop.

GIMP Guru has a lot of excellent tutorials for The GIMP, but the one I have found the most helpful is Removing Red Eye with The GIMP.

But now, problem solved!

The Facebook application is fbCal, and it is magnificent.  You install it like any other application with Facebook, and it creates 4 different feeds you can use in any application you like (iCal and RSS feeds for both birthdays and events).  Snazzy!

BTW, Firefox 3 is absolutely amazing.  The speed is incredible, especially with the javascript heavy web applications I always use, like Gmail, Google Reader, and Remember the Milk.

And second BTW, PortableApps is amazing also.  It keeps me from having to install the plethora of open source applications I use periodically, leaving me with a slender hard drive with fewer applications installed.

I regard author comment highlighting as a major feature or lack thereof for any theme. It should be mandatory, as it makes it easy to scan and find the original author’s comments. It also keeps a rude commenter from posting under your name and having readers believe it is actually your comment. You could also use colored comment highlighting on a multi-author blog to note comments by writers from the site who didn’t actually write said post.

Anyways, on to the details.

Note that my theme (MNML), uses Sandbox as a backend. This makes fixing this issue really easy.

If your theme is not based on Sandbox, use Matt Cutts’ howto to add author highlighting.

If your theme is based on Sandbox, follow along a couple of easy steps.

Sandbox uses lots of semantic markup, to make it easier for theme designers to style using only a stylesheet. This makes it easy for us to identify comments by the post author.

Each comment includes several css classes, including bypostauthor if the comment author is also the author of the post.

So, go to your theme’s style.css file and add the following at the bottom:


.bypostauthor {
background-color: #COLORCODE !important;
}


Change the COLORCODE to a six digit html color code and you are set.

Currently, I am using this code to set my own comments to have a red background:


.bypostauthor {
background-color: #FF0000 !important;
}


If editing CSS makes you queasy (hey, I understand, I was once a newbie, but editing CSS files makes for easy learning), try one of these many plugins.

Many paper formatting guidelines call for no header on the first page, with a header that includes the page number (and possibly other information, including name and professor) on subsequent pages. While it may seem difficult to do this in OpenOffice Writer, it is rather easy.

Create a header as your normally would; usually this is by clicking Insert -> Header -> Default and then Insert -> Fields -> Page Number. You should see your header on all pages of your document, including the first page.

Now, place the cursor within the first page of your document (ie- click within the first page of the document and then make sure you see a blinking cursor on the first page), and then select from the menu Format -> Styles and Formatting. Select the fourth icon at the top of the dialog box (if you hover over it, it says “Page Styles”). Now, double-click on “First Page”.

Once you double-click on “First Page”, the header on the first page will magically disappear, while keeping the header on each subsequent page intact.

For even more customizability, you can create an entirely different header for the first page instead of leaving it completely off.

To do this, again make sure your cursor is inside the first page of the document. Then click Insert -> Header -> First Page. Now, a header will appear on the first page of your document and you can place any text or fields (page number, etc.) within this first page-only header.

If you have any problems with this quick fix for headers in OpenOffice Writer, please leave a question in the comments section below and I will try my best to answer your query.

Also, look forward to more of these How To’s (for Open Office and other applications) in the near future.

Lastly, if you would like to try out OpenOffice, you can download it for free from the OpenOffice website or your can download a portable version here which you can unzip locally and delete after trying out this amazing piece of community-produced software.

A search I do use often is searching Wikipedia. Want to change Wikipedia to be the default search in the location bar? Vanilla.

In Firefox, type about:config in the location bar and press enter. Now, in the ‘Filter’ search, type “keyword.URL” without the quotation marks. Right-click on the “keyword.URL” preference and select ‘Modify’. In the box enter the following link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=

And press enter or click ‘OK’. Now open another tab, and in the location bar (where you usually enter http://chrismlindsey.com) enter “Firefox” (again, no quotes) and press enter. This will take you to the Wikipedia page on Mozilla Firefox.

Now, say you want to keep Google as the default search in your location bar, but still want to search Wikipedia quickly. Easy solution, we’ll create a keyword search.

To do this, we’ll create a new bookmark. Click ‘Bookmarks’ in the file menu at the top of your Firefox window, click ‘Organize Bookmarks,’ and then click ‘New Bookmark…’. In the ‘Name’ field enter “Wikipedia Keyword Search”, in the location field enter this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s

In the ‘Keyword’ field enter something like “w” or “wp”. Now click ‘OK’ and close the Bookmark Manager. In the location bar, enter:

wp Firefox

or

w Firefox

And watch as the Mozilla Firefox article appears.

This is a relatively easy problem to fix, but you have to get your hands a bit dirty and change some code. I’ll try to make this as simple as possible, after the jump!

Go to your WordPress Administration panel and select ‘Presentation’, and then select ‘Theme Editor’ from the submenu. On the right side of the editor, select ‘Header’, so we can easily edit the code in your theme’s header.php file.

Familiarize yourself with this little interface, it is rather nifty for quick code changes.

Now see if you can find some code that looks like this:

<h2><a href=”<?php echo get_settings(‘home’); ?>/”><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></a></h2>
<h3><?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?></h3>

This code adds the text for your WordPress blog’s name and description (or tagline), along with a link to your homepage. Remove this code (you might want to copy and paste this to a txt file on your computer, just in case something goes haywire).

Now add in the following code, putting the url to your image and the name of your site in the code:

<div align=”center”><a href=”<?php echo get_settings(‘home’); ?>/”><img src=”http://YOURIMAGE” border=”0″ alt=”Your Site Name” /></a></div>

A recommendation: if your logo will be on a colored background (like the example above), you might want to make the background on your image transparent, so the image will match the background color. Just remember, save the file in a format that keeps the transparency. I usually save as .png, but change the mode to indexed, otherwise the transparency will not display correctly in Internet Explorer (lack of full PNG support, yet another reason to use Firefox).

I hope this helps out those of you who find a great theme, but what to implement an image in the header. If you need any assistance, post in the comments and I will try to help out.

I use Gmail as my primary email. I have for over a year now. And I send all my emails from Gmail.

But, whenever I click on a mailto link in a webpage, it always opens up in Outlook Express. Yeah, it takes like 2 minutes to open up, and I don’t even use Outlook Express. It is just the default mail client on Windows XP. I try to look at links before I click on them, but a lot of the time it just happens. Call me click-happy.

So how do you make it work so when you click on a mailto email link that it opens up in Gmail?

The Gmail notifier does this, but I hate leaving stuff running in my taskbar all the time, especially when I always have Gmail open in a tab in Firefox.

So what other solutions are there?

I installed Google Talk sometime ago to take advantage of some feature. I don’t have it running all the time, and I think I might have used it twice before now (I just chat in Gmail or Pidgin). But it has a nifty little feature that alters the system setting to allow all mailto links to open in Gmail.

And Voila! Click on a mailto link like this one, and watch it open in Gmail!