Friday, December 16, 2011
Cure for Outlook 2007 running slow
I don’t use Outlook myself, for all it’s quirks I still much prefer to use Opera’s built-in mail client rather than have to run a separate program to check and send mail, but I know someone who does use it and they constantly complained about how slow it was: sending and receiving messages was taking far too long, and the occasional message would get stuck* in the Outbox with no apparent way to delete it, etc.
The two problems mentioned above are probably unrelated issues but the nub of his whinging was that Outlook 2007 was so problematic that he was considering removing the whole of Windows 7 from his computer and going back to XP as he was spending too much time sat looking at his screen waiting for it to do something. He was not alone.
A quick search on the web revealed that his grievance was shared by many other people around the planet, and it seemed that there was a quick fix for this widely shared problem, and it is this…
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Flatpress for Dummies
This article shows you how you can start your own blog in a matter of minutes using FlatPress.
Basic guide to getting started
What is FlatPress?
FlatPress is a great piece of software and I use it a lot to rapidly develop websites, just like this blog. Basically FlatPress is a content management system (you can either create and edit pages using the built-in web interface, or by using other methods) which doesn’t need a database so you can install it on most web servers which have PHP installed which covers the vast majority of web servers out there in internetland and some of them are completely free to use (as is FlatPress) so getting your own “home” on the web has never been easier.
How does it work
The name “FlatPress” is derived from the fact that it uses “flat files” (i.e. ordinary text files) in order to operate, in contrast to WordPress (one of the most popular blogging platforms in use today) which is powered by a database. Nothing wrong in either case - but flat files are easier for the layman to comprehend so it’s little wonder that a regular flow of new users… [Read more...]
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Using Windows Live Writer can screw up your blog’s news feed validation - here’s how to avoid it happening
Really, it can.
I posted this on the FlatPress forum, as that is the blogging software I use - but it most likely applies if you use Windows Live Writer to post to other blogging platforms too (e.g. Wordpress).
If you use Live Writer and the Remote Posting plugin to maintain your blog then (in Live Writer) you need to go into “Tools… Options… Editing” and UN-check all those boxes which say “Replace hyphens…”, “Replace straight quotes…” & “Replace other special characters” otherwise if you use any special characters in your post titles (e.g. three dots “…”) that will get converted to a special character and trip up your feed.
It just happened to me.
Can’t connect to facebook, YouTube etc? Try flushing your DNS first…
I was having a problem connecting to facebook and YouTube from my laptop, but only when I was connected to the internet via our company network in the office – I had no problem at all accessing these sites when using the same machine at home. I knew that there must be some way around this problem because the company DOES NOT have a block on those sites, it’s just that for some reason or other most of the computers on the company network can’t access those same sites, except for one desktop machine.
After much googling and tracing and comparing the settings on this desktop with my own laptop I figured that it might be something simple and, in my case, it was as simple as flushing the DNS to make sure that the laptop wasn’t “remembering” to try and find facebook in the wrong place. That over simplifies it a bit, but the short of my problem was that every time I typed facebook into my address bar while connected to the company network the route which that request was taking was leading to a server over in the Far East somewhere, and it seems that facebook is blocked on that particular server.
Here’s how I fixed it – this may work for you, it may not, but it takes a… [Read more...]
