I’m deep into preparations for my summer-long trip to Washington State and Page, AZ. And it seems that every other week, I’m traveling. And I have two video training courses to record for clients. And I caught a bit of a bug that had me out of action for about a day and a half.

And the W key on my MacBook Pro is not being very responsive.

I’ve also been reading, and when I read, I have less time to write.

Those are just some of the excuses I can offer as to why I’m blogging once or twice a week rather than once or twice a day.

But I’m working on a few blog posts now and hope to release them as they’re finished. Getting started is always the hardest part, so I thought I’d start a few of them at once and let them sit in ecto until I’m ready to finish and publish them.

Let’s see how I do.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I took my chick WebCam offline today. I moved the chicks to a different part of the garage and it just wasn’t worth it to move the computer and camera, too.

I’ll make a new chick movie next week, when I get back from Alaska, so everyone can see how they’ve grown. They’re 17 days old today and at least twice the size they were when they arrived two weeks ago.

This morning, I reviewed an interesting comment left in this blog’s Guest Book. It had been held for moderation, which means I have to review and approve it before it appears online.

Nasty for No Reason

The comment was one of the nastiest I’ve ever read. The person who decided to try to ruin my day told me that this site was like a garage that needed clearing out — or something like that; I didn’t preserve his words for posterity. He told me I should delete anything over six months old. He said he’d come to find information about my books but that he wasn’t willing to use the “convoluted” (his word) methods needed to find content here. He finished up by saying he was an editor — imagine that! — and that he now has no interest in any of my books.

Whew!

He evidently forgot to mention the problem with his eyesight that prevented him from seeing links clearly marked “Books” and “Articles” in the NavBar at the top of the page. He also appeared to miss the note in the description of this site — which appears “above the fold” on the Home page — that clearly said support for my books had been moved to Maria’s Guides. And that Search feature at the top of the site navigation column — I suppose the label “Search This Site” isn’t clear enough. And I guess I couldn’t expect him to scroll down on any page of the site to see the list of books supported with the links to content related to those books.

Convoluted? The only way I could make this site easier to navigate is to take control of his computer while he’s online here and guide his mouse to the link he needs.

He probably spent more time wording and editing his comment than he did looking around the site for the content he evidently wasn’t so interested in in the first place.

I deleted his comment, as I do with any other nasty comment that serves no purpose other than to rudely criticize me or someone else. I think that if he had presented his opinions more courteously, I would have given them some real consideration. But since his comment was obviously posted as a personal attack on me, I threw it away with the rest of the crap I encounter online.

On Bottom Dwellers

But it reminded me that there’s a lot of bottom-dwellers out there, looking to bring other people down to their level. The Internet is full of them and the worst thing you can give any of them is a keyboard and a form to fill in with their rude and destructive comments. I know bloggers who have turned off the commenting feature on their blogs because of the amount of crap like this that they get. Other bloggers let it run rampant in their comments, letting it feed the other bottom dwellers lurking out there until there’s nothing mature or civil about their blogs. As we’ve seen in the past, that can quickly get out of hand.

What these bottom-dwellers clearly do not understand is that my blog is mine. I decide on the design, I decide on the content, I decide on how long to keep blog posts, I even decide whether a comment is appropriate on a post. If he doesn’t like my site, he can go somewhere else — there’s enough content out there for everyone. As my mother would say, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”

More…

A quick look through my archives offers some other thoughts on related matters:

• Site Comment Policy (April 2, 2007)
• Blogging Courtesy (April 15, 2007)
• The Nerve of Some People (June 21, 2007)
• Quick Note to Commenters (February 1, 2008)

Because of the amount of spam and the number of inappropriate comments this site receives, all comments from new commenters are moderated.

Much of the moderation is done automatically with spam prevention software. This software will automatically delete comments coming from blacklisted IP addresses, comments containing too many links, comments containing certain “bad” words, multiple comments submitted from the same IP address or commenter within a short period of time, and comments meeting other proven criteria that I don’t know or really care about.

This two-layer automated spam prevention system catches over 5000 spam comments to my four blog-based sites each day. This gives you an idea of just how bad the problem is. It should also help you understand why I don’t manually review every single comment myself.

The few comments that get through the automated system are manually reviewed. A few of them are true spam that I delete.

Others are comments by visitors who seem to have commented solely to advertise their business or service. Even if these comments are appropriate, if the commenter name field contains a company name or Web site name, that comment will be deleted. My blog-based sites do not exist for other people to advertise their products or services. If you don’t use your name or something that looks like your name in the Commenter Name field of the comment form, don’t expect your comment to appear here. Exceptions are possible but very rare.

Finally, a handful of other comments are nasty or inappropriately critical, abusive to me or other commenters. I don’t take that crap from anyone, especially on my blogs. If you have something critical to say, say it nicely. Don’t bash me or others by calling us names or insulting us.

The comments that make it through this entire moderation process are the ones that appear on the site.

Keep in mind that I go through the manual moderation process every 12 to 72 hours, so you might have to wait up to 3 days for a comment to appear. It all depends on how busy I am and whether I have a good Internet connection when on the road. Be patient.

I’d love it if more commenters would sign up for Gravatars so their custom icons would appear beside their comments.

I really appreciate reader comments, especially those that add to conversation here on this blog. I hope those of you who comment continue to do so. And I hope this message encourages those of you who have not yet commented to add your thoughts as comments to posts on this site.

A few weeks ago, I quietly added a few feature to this blog, mostly as a test. Provided by AudioFeed Creator, it automatically creates audio files from the text in my blog entries. Visitors can then subscribe to the audio content as podcasts or listen to individual entries from their Web browser or Web-enabled mobile phone.

All of this is done automatically for me, based on my full-text RSS feed. And no, there isn’t a group of people locked up in a room and forced to read all these blog entries aloud into a microphone. AudioFeed Creator uses voice synthesis. The result is actually pretty darn good.

Best of all, it’s free.

At this point, I’m considering the experiment a success. The entries are being created on a timely basis and they’re easy to listen to and understand. There’s absolutely no effort on my part. It seems like a complete no-brainer to add this feature to the site permanently.

Who might listen to it, other than people who like my words of wisdom read to them by a computer? I can see only two other groups:

• People who like to follow this blog and have more time to listen (usually while on long drives) than read.
• People with visual problems who can’t read the blog at all.

This second point makes is pretty clear that the audio feed adds accessibility to this site. While I realize that accessibility issues are important overseas, it’s something that most U.S. based blogs ignore. I’m not an accessibility expert, but I assume that making each blog post audible must increase accessibility somehow.

Anyway, I invite you to try it out for yourself. Let me know what you think by adding your comments to this post.

And if you have a blog with a full-text RSS feed, why not give AudioFeed Creator a try?

Now if only I could figure out how to change the voice to a female’s.

Regular readers here may recall that a few months ago, I split off all book/article support content to a new blog-based site called Maria’s Guides. It looks and works a lot like this site, but it contains just the content that readers of my books and articles might want to read — and none of the flying or travel or writing stuff I often blog about. I really didn’t want to have two blogs, but it really was the best decision to attract and keep two subsets of regular readers and subscribers.

Making the split was rather tricky. It required me to export all posts from this site, open the resulting text file in a text editor, and delete the posts and comments that were unrelated to my books and articles. I then imported the remaining posts and comments into the new site, which I’d already prepared.

Of course, the original version of all the Maria’s Guides posts were still on An Eclectic Mind. And since An Eclectic Mind had been around so long — four or five years as a blog after five or more years as a regular Web site — all the original posts were coming up in Google searches. So people were still reading this content on An Eclectic Mind, rather than on Maria’s Guides.

Still following me on this?

I faced a dilemma. If I simply deleted the duplicate posts on An Eclectic Mind, visitors would get an Error 404 message when they tried to view that content from sources like Google (which accounts for more than 35% of this site’s hits these days) or direct links from other sites. I don’t know about you, but when I get a 404 error, I don’t waste a lot of time looking for the content I was seeking. I’m outta there. I assume my blog’s visitors would be the same way.

The solution was to set up redirect permanent statements in this site’s .htaccess file. Each time I deleted a post on this site, I’d create an entry for the same post on the other site. When a visitor followed a link to content that no longer existed on this site, he’d automatically be taken to the same content on the other site. It would be completely transparent to him, unless he happened to glance in the address bar for the resulting page, which would show the MariasGuides.com URL.

Deleting content and creating these entries is a long and tedious process. Fortunately, I had enough foresight to use the same permalink structure on both sites. So it’s just a matter of copying and pasting URLs and deleting posts. It takes about one minute per entry. Today, I did another batch. I’m going backwards through time, doing the newer posts first. All of 2007 is now done.

But if you pay attention to post counts — you can find the current post count for this site near the bottom of the right sidebar — you may notice that the number of posts on this site dropped by about 30 today. The site now has more comments than posts, which is kind of neat. (I learn a lot from reader participation here.) It’ll continue to drop as time goes on. I expect to delete another 200 or so posts by the time I’m done.

Some of you may have noticed that my Webcam disappeared right around the same time I upgraded to an iMac computer. The reason is going to sound pretty lame, but it’s true: The FireWire cable from the camera to my computer just wasn’t long enough to reach my window and I couldn’t get a FireWire hub to work properly. So I took the camera offline.

I sold the iSight on eBay and got a whopping $150 for it. That’s more than the darn thing’s list price when it was brand new. (Okay, so only by a dollar, but it is more.) So I have some ready cash to buy a replacement camera.

After some minimal research, I settled on an Ecamm Network iMage USB Webcam for Mac and Windows v 2.0. It’ll give me a reasonably-sized image and doesn’t require any special drivers. It even has screw holes in the mount so I can attach it to the window frame, nice and high for the best view.

I’m just hoping it doesn’t interfere with the iMac’s built-in iSight camera, which I still want to use for Skype, iChat, and other stuff.

Because the proceeds from the iSight sale were burning a hole in my pocket, I also sprung for the relatively inexpensive Macally Portable Goose Neck USB Video Web Cam - ICECAM. This is a toy I can use when I’m on the road to bring Webcam images from wherever I happen to be. Tune in next month; I’ll try to display images of my audience (if there’s more than just one person!) while I’m doing my presentation at the Peachpit booth.

I really like having Webcams and have had one, off and on, for at least six years. You can find one of my Webcams at the KBSZ-AM radio studios near downtown Wickenburg. Here’s the current image; maybe Pete Peterson, station owner, is in the shot. This image (as well as my personal Webcam, when it’s up and running) appears on wickenburg-az.com.

I’ve also written about setting up a Webcam on a Mac. The most recent piece is “Creating Timelapse WebCam Movies on a Mac” on the Peachpit Press Web site.

Both new cameras should arrive right after Christmas. I’ll write more when I’ve had a chance to play with them.

I need to create an online reservation form for Flying M Air. It should be secure and run on my server. It should be able to pull tour names and prices from a database I can maintain and do calculations based on what customers choose. It should be able to securely collect credit card and other personal information required to charge the card. It does not need to have credit card approval access; I am prepared to do all that manually. It would be nice if it could include a “special offer key” that discounted the flight for people who entered the correct code. Again, I’d want to maintain that myself. When the form is submitted, it should send a summary of the info to me and the customer. I should get it in a format I can use to import into an Excel or FileMaker Pro database for further processing.

The idea is for the form to collect reservation info from people who just don’t want to call and do it on the phone. I don’t have a toll-free number and I occasionally get tourists from overseas as customers. This would help people who don’t want to make that toll call or live in a very different time zone to handle their reservation securely.

My server runs at GoDaddy.com. It’s a Unix box with PHP and MySQL. The solution would have to integrate perfectly with my existing Web site design, which was developed with WordPress. (I can assist with the form creation part.) You can see it at www.FlyingMAir.com. I’d put the form on a WordPress page.

I have a budget for this, but if you or someone else you know can do the job and save me the bother of learning to do it myself, I’m certainly willing to pay. I will not, however, pay by the hour — I’ve seen too many people milked by Web developers on a hourly rate. I’m also not interested in hosting on a different server or setting up a system that will require me to retain someone to update database contents.

Interested? Leave a comment on this post. You don’t have to provide any info other than your e-mail address in the form field; I’ll contact you directly that way.

I was surfing aimlessly this morning, just finishing up my trip around the net, when I came across a widget like the one you see here on another blogger’s blog. His blog was worth $74K. I clicked the link, filled in the form and soon learned that my blog was worth $64,922.10.

(I should note that $64,922.10 is the number that came up today, when I wrote this post. It’ll be interesting to see how that number changes, especially as I continue to move book support related content off this domain name and only MariasGuides.com.)

While it would be nice to think that what I’ve been spouting here has a lot of value, I sincerely doubt that it has this much value. I’m certainly not one of the “A-list” bloggers out there. My content covers too many topics to have a consistent readership. I don’t get a lot of comments. And my subscriber numbers seem to hover between 100 and 200, no matter what I do. So $64Kk seems pretty outrageous to me.

But I’m sharing this with readers as a curiosity. Have any of you checked the value of your blog using this widget? If not, give it a try and see what comes up. Report your findings in the Comments for this post. Be honest! And tell us whether you think your number is as outrageous as mine.

And if you do visit the site where this widget can be found, tell me what you think: Is the blog a splog? I think it is.

In the meantime, if anyone wants to buy this blog, the current going price is…well, whatever is says in the box above.

Just thought I’d try another new plugin on the site: Share This. This adds a Share This icon and link at the bottom of each post. If you like the post a lot and want to share it with a friend, click the link to view a bunch of options for sharing it via e-mail or social networking.

This is in a trial stage right now. It’s there and it should work, but I’m not happy with the way it looks. I just don’t have time to tweak it right now.

Your feedback is welcome. Use the Comments link or form below to let me know what you think of this change.

Anyone who has a blog knows that the comment feature is what makes a blog stand out from a plain old Web site. The comment feature is what makes a blog interactive, it’s what gives readers a chance to share their point of view or additional information about a topic. It gives them a chance to ask questions and get answers.

The comment feature works with the pingback feature. Pingbacks (which are often referred to as trackbacks) are machine-generated “comments” that are added to a post when another blogger writes a post that links to it.

Huh?

Okay, think of it this way. You’re blogger A writing post 1. Blogger B writes post 2 that includes a link to post 1. A comment appears on post 1 that links back to post 2. This is all done automatically in WordPress (my blogging platform of choice) if — and this is a big if — you left the Allow Pings option turned on for post 1. You can find the setting for this in the Discussion area of the Write Post administration panel.

Unfortunately, the pingback feature also makes it possible for sploggers to get free links to their sites. A splogger builds content on a blog by stealing it from RSS feeds. Their goal is usually to get hits on their Web sites, which are full of Google AdSense ads, but they sometimes are part of a “link farm” that boosts search engine ranking.

The problem lately is that my sites have been attracting more pingback spam from splogging sites than real pings from legitimate sites and bloggers. These must be manually deleted, since my spam prevention software doesn’t seem able to catch them all. And frankly, I’m a little sick of spending each morning deleting six to twenty of these comments.

So I’m going to stop writing posts with the pingback feature enabled.

And if you’re having this problem on your blog, I recommend that you do the same.

Before I redesigned this blog, back in the days when it was still Maria Langer: The Official Web Site*, I added gravatars to the comments section of the blog. Gravatars are icons or avatars of individuals that are linked to their e-mail addresses. When someone with a gravatar posted a comment using his e-mail address in the appropriate field, the gravatar would automatically appear with the comment. If the gravatar changed in the future, it would also change on this site. Here’s what mine currently looks like.

This feature works with any site run by someone geeky enough to take the time and effort to set it up. With WordPress, it doesn’t take much time to do. Just the willingness to install and activate a simple plugin and modify some code in the comments.php file for the blog’s theme.

One of the reasons it took me so long to get this set back up was that I’m one of the few commenters who has a gravatar. I got a little tired of seeing [mostly] my face in the comments. It didn’t seem as if many other people were interested in this personalization feature.

Then Automattic (makers of WordPress) purchased Gravatar. I figured it would be more supported. And I was right. The Get Recent Comments plugin I use to list recent comments in the sidebar of An Eclectic Mind and Maria’s Guides support them. So I decided to enable that feature. From there, it took only moments to go the next step and put the gravatars back in the comments themselves.

So now it’s fully implemented on both of my main Web sites. And I’m encouraging people to go to Gravatar.com and get their own gravatars. And if you need help doing that, check out “How to Create a Gravatar” on Maria’s Guides.

I’ll be looking for your gravatars in the Comments of both sites.

* Read with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

Yesterday, I got a new book support site up and running: Maria’s Guides (which can be found at http://www.mariasguides.com/). Like this site, the new site provides individual category feeds.

Within the next 30 days, all Excel- and Word-related book support category feeds from An Eclectic Mind (MariaLanger.com) will be replaced by feeds on Marias’s Guides. If you don’t modify your feed reader or other subscription to point to the new address, you will stop getting the category content you currently subscribe to.

Here’s the information you need to make the change.

Excel Book Readers

The old feeds named:
Maria Langer | Excel QuickStart
Maria Langer | Excel QuickProject

will be combined into one feed called:
Maria’s Guides | Excel Books

with a new feed address of:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/MariasGuidesExcelBooks

Or you can click this link to subscribe by e-mail. (Don’t forget to complete the subscription process by verifying your e-mail address when the confirmation message comes from FeedBurner.)

Word Book Readers

The old feeds named:
Maria Langer | Word QuickStart
Maria Langer | Word QuickProject

will be combined into one feed called:
Maria’s Guides | Word Books

with a new feed address of:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/MariasGuidesWordBooks

Or you can click this link to subscribe by e-mail. (Don’t forget to complete the subscription process by verifying your e-mail address when the confirmation message comes from FeedBurner.)

Mac OS and WordPress Book Readers

The feed addresses for these feeds have not changed. If you’re not currently a subscriber and want to become one, use these links:

Mac OS Books:

Feed address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/macosquickstart

or

E-mail Subscription Link: Subscribe to Maria’s Guides | Mac OS Books by Email

WordPress Books:

Feed address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/wordpressquickstart

or

E-mail Subscription Link: Subscribe to Maria’s Guides | WordPress Books by Email

All Book Support Content

With book support content gathered together on a dedicated Web site, there’s now “one-stop shopping” for content by subscribing to the new site’s feed. Subscribing to this feed will get you all articles, downloads, and other material related to all of my books about Mac OS, Excel, Word, WordPress, etc.

Feed address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MariasGuides

E-Mail Subscription Link: Subscribe to Maria’s Guides by Email

Guaranteed Spam-Free!

If you’re worried about e-mail subscriptions, don’t. These feeds are guaranteed to be spam-free, no matter how they’re delivered. And we don’t give or sell your e-mail address to anyone. Best of all, its easy to unsubscribe from any feed — each e-mail message includes an unsubscribe link that really does work.

Got Questions?

If you have any questions about these changes, please use the Comments link or form below to ask them.

And I do apologize for the inconvenience this may cause. I think that in the long run, these changes will make it much easier to get new content about specific book topics.

I built my first Web site back in the mid 1990s. It was a simple site, created in HTML, that provided information about me and my books.

A [Very] Brief History of my Web Site(s)

The Internet was young back then — at least as far as the masses were concerned. Few people surfed. In fact, the whole idea of going online was so new and radical back then that my first book proposal, which was about telecommunications on a Mac, was turned down because publishers felt that there wouldn’t be enough people interested in it.

Anyway, as things heated up, I soon saw the benefits of putting more information on the Web. And then, in 2003, I discovered blogging. Surely my personal blog should be separate from what I write to support my books and articles, right? So I spun off a new site, LangerBooks.com, and published plain HTML Web pages with book promotional and support information.

Meanwhile, I fell in love with the whole blogging interface. There was no question in my mind: a blog was a perfect tool for presenting new content while automatically archiving old content. So I got LangerBooks.com into a blog format, with a separate blog for each title.

Back in those days (2003-2004), it wasn’t easy for me. I’d decided to blog with a program called iBlog that had a lot of promise. Unfortunately, its author wasn’t willing or able to keep up with technology. His software generated static HTML documents for each page of a blog. The more you wrote, the more cumbersome the whole blog updating process became. And, as those of you who read this blog regularly know, I can write an awful lot.

So in January 2005, I made the jump to WordPress. It was a big jump indeed, since I knew absolutely nothing about PHP or MySQL and very little about CSS. (What made it even bigger was that I was hosting my own blog on my own server.) I learned what I needed to know. One of the best things about WordPress is that you don’t need to know much to build a really professional looking site.

Around the same time, I decided that I didn’t want to maintain separate blogs for my books. So I brought all the books back under MariaLanger.com and came up with some creative ways to keep Book Support topics separate from the rest of the site. Creative, yes. Effective, perhaps.

One Blog to Rule them All?

Of course, the whole time I was doing this, I was reading from “pro bloggers” about how important it is to keep your blog on just one topic. These guys were blogging to make money, I argued to myself. They weren’t in it because of a need to blog or a desire to provide additional information to book readers. So I pretty much ignored them.

But their advice was eating away at my brain in the back of my mind. After much thought, I realized that having too many widespread topics in my blog was preventing the blog from being more popular. For example, people interested in my flying and lifestyle posts — which, according to a poll on my site, is about 30% of the site’s visitors — were probably bored silly with my Mac OS and Excel and WordPress posts. And people interested in getting book support (16% of visitors) weren’t interested in wading through the other content to get the bits of information that could help them. This was preventing me from getting more site subscribers and regular readers.

So about two weeks ago, I decided to make the split.

Drumroll, Please

The question of how I did it is something I can discuss as a WordPress-related post. Let’s just say that I’ve done the basic work and have enough content in the new blog to open it to the public.

So here’s the formal announcement:

Support for my books and articles can now be found at the Maria’s Guides Web site: http://www.mariasguides.com/.

If you’re reading this post there, you’ve already found it. Otherwise, if you’re interested in articles, tips, and downloads related to my books about Mac OS, Excel, Word, and WordPress, please go check it out.

And yes, occasionally there will be cross posts, like this one. But I’ll try to keep that to a minimum.

Why Maria’s Guides?

A few years back, I made a false start on a line of eBooks. I abandoned the project, primarily because I got busy with other things that were more interesting (and lucrative). I’m thinking of revisiting the idea with shorter eBooks covering a wider range of topics. Maria’s Guides was the working title of the series and I own the domain name, so why not?

I’ve noticed in the past that many “pro” bloggers often summarize their best posts for the week or month in a sort of “This week/month in review” post. It’s not a bad idea because it can help new or irregular readers find interesting content that they may have missed.

So this month, I’ll be starting a monthly Top 10 post. The posts you find here are the ones that were the most popular with readers or, in some instances, ones that I thought were unusually content-rich.

1. Can YOUR Mouse Last 18 Years? This will probably go down in this blog’s history as the most popular post of all time. With 46,000+ hits (last time I looked) since it was posted on August 1, it got so many Diggs that it nearly got me kicked off my ISP’s server. If you haven’t read it yet, you may enjoy it. It’s the true and short story of my friend Jo’s 18-year-old computer. And over a month later, this remains the most popular post on my site, getting the most hits — mostly from StumbleUpon references, ever day.
2. I Don’t Like Being Seriously Dugg. Do you want to know how getting over 1,000 Diggs in a short period of time can send traffic to your site in outrageous numbers? And what the consequences could be? Here’s my take on the fallout from the mouse article.
3. Copyright for Writers and Bloggers — Part I: Why Copyright is Important. This was the first article in a three part series I wrote in August about copyright. The whole series approaches copyright from the point of view of the content creator — folks like me who create fresh new content. Although I’ve only linked here to the first article in the series, I urge you to read all three; the links for each are in a box in the first piece. I’m thinking that I need a follow-up piece about content users (and abusers) but that’ll have to wait until October, when things settle down a bit.
4. Leopard Features Poll. This quick poll is my attempt to get Mac OS X users to tell us what they’re looking forward to most in the upcoming release of Mac OS X. If you’re a Mac user, please take a moment to share your opinion. I’m actually pretty surprised by the results so far.
5. Ten Dashboard Widgets I can’t Live Without. In this post, I share a list of my favorite Dashboard widgets. Be sure to read the comments, where other readers have mentioned the widgets they use most — and one of them offered up a tip for getting word definitions that I have been using daily since reading it.
6. Choosing Your Mac OS Startup Disk on the Fly.Although this quick post didn’t get many views, I think it’s a good trick for anyone using Mac OS X with Boot Camp to know.
7. Declaring RSS Feed Bankruptcy. In this article, I explain why I deleted over 1,000 unread posts from my feedreader application. And why I still don’t miss them.
8. Networking — Part I: Doing it the Old Fashioned Way. This is the first part of a two-part article about networking. No, not the kind with wires or data floating wirelessly through the ether. It’s networking as a tool to make professional contacts, generate business, and better serve your existing customers. If you read this, don’t miss Part II, which discusses LinkedIn.
9. The High Cost of Writing Tech Books. This piece explains some of the hidden costs of writing computer how-to books. It also guides you down memory lane with me as I list some of the hardware I’ve purchased over the past 18 years.
10. Goofing Off on a Summer Sunday. This post is mainly of interest to the folks who come here to read about flying helicopters. It’s an account of a heli outing I took with some friends one Sunday in August.

Are these the only good posts for this month. I don’t think so. But I limited myself to ten and these were the ten I came up with. I’d love to get your comments on the ones you read. Use the Comments link or form for the post to share your opinions and any additional information you think is relevant.

[composed on top of a mesa in the middle of nowhere with ecto]