So I’ve had some fixes to Multiclutch that I never really made a post about, and I figured I might as well post some instructions on exactly how to get this all working so people have less issues.

First of all, the latest download link:
here

Instructions on how to use this:
1) Install the original Multiclutch plugin using the original beta installer here

2) Install the latest version of SIMBL which includes 64 bit support from here

3) Install my fork of the plugin by copying the bundle file from my zip file above into ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins or /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins

4) *Important / new step* – remove the original multiclutch input manager from /Library/InputManagers. The latest build supports both 32 bit and 64 bit applications, it is a universal binary.

If you don’t do 4, it is likely that your Firefox / other applications will crash on some gestures.

If you do all of the above, and are still getting crashes, let me know here.

I think one of the biggest WordPress myths is that you need a bunch of plugins to control comment spam. Pretty much all of the posts out there on preventing WordPress comment spam are telling you to install some list of “must-have” anti-spam plugins. Some authors insist that you need only a few “choice” plugins, while others advise you to load up on everything you can get your hands on. Such advice is all well-intentioned, I’m sure, but it’s all based on the assumption that plugins are actually necessary to control comment spam. They’re not. WordPress is well-equipped to handle the job all by itself. Plugins may provide additional anti-spam functionality, but they are by no means essential to running a spam-free site.

Not even Akismet..

“Sure,” you are thinking, “you don’t need any plugins except for Akismet.” I mean, you definitely need that plugin, right? After all, it’s included with WordPress, so it’s got to be important. Umm, not so much. Yes, there are certain blogs that would probably be wise to take advantage of the additional spam-protection that Akismet might provide, but for 99% of the sites out there, it really isn’t necessary.

WordPress is strong enough..

I think one of the most underrated strengths of WordPress is its built-in anti-spam functionality. With an ounce of knowledge and a pound of forethought, you can configure your WordPress Discussion settings to act as a powerful and effective defense against the evil forces of spam. No plugins required! Let’s look at WordPress’ anti-spam tools and see why they’re all you need for a spam-free site..

Default article settings

First up, consider your default article settings. If comments aren’t enabled, of course you know that you don’t need Akismet or any other anti-spam plugin for that matter. If comments are enabled, you can cut out a significant portion of spam by simply disallowing pingbacks and trackbacks. By clicking a single checkbox, all of that crap that comes rolling in as trackback spam will stop. That’s a huge step right there, and it will eliminate every plugin that has anything to do with displaying or controlling ping/trackbacks.

Comment author must fill out name and e-mail

Another smart move, although I think most sites do this one already. By requiring your commentators to at least fill out these two fields (even if it is just dummy data most of the time), you brush off all of those lazy spammers who are picking up the easy ground fruit. Most legitimate commentators don’t mind filling in this info because they usually have something they want to say. Lazy spammers, not so much.

Users must be registered and logged in to comment

If possible given the specific goals of your site, requiring users to log in before commenting is an extremely effective way of preventing comment spam. Although requiring registration will stop a lot of legit comments as well, it is a powerful deterrent to lazy spammers and completely stops automated scripts. Sure, you may still get some trolls stinking up the place, but you would be getting those anyway. Plus, if they’re registered, it makes it easier to deal with them.

Automatically close comments on articles older than XX days

This is my favorite WordPress anti-spam feature. For a long time, we needed a plugin to get this done, but now that it is built into WordPress, everyone should be using it. Here at Digging into WordPress, we close comments on old posts after 90 days, which seems to be just about the right amount of time. Anything longer than that, and your posts begin to get targeted by spammers and automated spam scripts. Especially if your posts tend to do well and build up a lot of page rank, they will be prime targets for spam as time rolls on.

Break comments into pages with XX comments per page

This one’s not as obvious, but it is also a great way to reduce the incentive to spam your site. Spammers target strong pages for their junk, so by breaking your comments into pages of, say, 20 comments each, you get the best comments on the first page (the same page as the article), and then the typically declining-quality comments on subsequent non-ranking pages. Just make sure you are using meta canonical tags to keep the juice where it should be.

E-mail me whenever..

Unless your site is literally flooded with comments on every post, getting email alerts for new comments is an excellent way to kill any spam nonsense that gets through. I have done this at Perishable Press for four years now, and you would be hard-pressed to find even one spam comment anywhere on the site.

Before a comment appears an administrator must always approve the comment

This could get kind of labor-intensive, but it is a 100%-guaranteed way of completely eliminating spam without using any plugins whatsoever. Zero. Nada. Nil. If you are one of the many millions whose blog receives fairly few comments, this method will keep your comments squeaky clean.

Comment author must have a previously approved comment

A super-effective strategy that is not as labor-intensive as moderating all comments and not as restrictive as requiring registration. The idea here is that you get a chance to “meet” each one of your commentators and leave the door open only for the good guys. This technique drastically cuts back on human spam, and virtually eliminates automated spam (unless you don’t catch it the first time).

Hold a comment in the queue if it contains XX or more links

Lots of comment spam is just crawling with links. A few mindless words and then BAM — they drop in a few hundred links. Some of the more subtle spammers are less obvious, but still have to unload their payload somehow, so they usually integrate a couple of links within some not-so-carefully crafted text. You know what I’m talking about. You definitely want to moderate anything with more than like two or three links. This trick is great for catching some of the craftier spam maggots.

Comment Moderation Blacklist and Spam Blacklist

A finely tuned WordPress Blacklist list eliminates the need for many types of plugins, scripts, and third-party blacklists. Any words, characters, or IP addresses included in either the Moderation or Spam Blacklist will be used to innoculate your site against any matching comments. Granted, it takes a bit of persistence to build up a good list, but once you do, it is very difficult for spammers to get around it. Note that, unless you are absolutely sure, you should probably stick with the Moderation Blacklist (regular expressions are powerful things!).

All of these great anti-spam features are like having fifty plugins already built-in to WordPress. With them, you can configure a powerful anti-spam strategy for just about any type of site without any plugins — not even Akismet.

Why not just use a bunch of plugins instead?

Because you don’t have to. Plugins require maintenance, frequent updating, etc. Every upgrade of WordPress and/or your plugins opens the door to possible issues and conflicts. Further, plugins consume valuable server resources, affecting the performance and consistency of your site. In general, the fewer plugins you have, the easier and more efficient things are going to be. I guess my feeling is, try to take the “zen” approach as much as possible — if something isn’t absolutely necessary, don’t bother with it. More and more, I am realizing that anti-spam plugins simply aren’t needed to run an effective and spam-free site.

After measurable success using Keynote as our primary platform for our most important presentations, the rest of the team here at the Luis Palau Association is starting to get Macs for their presentations to get all that buttery Keynote goodness for their presentations. I wrote this up to help the non-techies get their Macs set up for solid, reliable presentations every time. I’m sharing it with you here, in case you’d like to learn more about making Keynote sing.

In part one here, we’ll configure the Mac for presentations. You should only have to do this part once for a given machine or user on that machine. It must be done [again, only once] before the trip or presentation – not when it’s time for the show. Plan smartly!

Download the Presentation setup files (info below). Zip, 2mb.

Initial Mac setup

We need to do a little setup in general before doing presentations. A few quick setting adjustments will make future presentations go smoothly. Run through these steps at least once before doing anything. In fact, since we’re gettin’ all tweaky here, consider creating a “Presentation” user in Preferences > Accounts and just using that user for presentations. Putting the presentations (Keynote files, etc.) in the /Users/Shared directory makes sense for that use.

Display Prefs

First, open up the System Preferences Pane. It’s under Apple > System Preferences. Select “Display Preferences”.

Check “Show displays in Menu Bar”.

This makes it easy to switch resolutions:

Here you can see my two displays connected, which is like having the Mac and a projector

Trackpad Prefs

Go to System Prefs > Keyboard & Mouse > Trackpad. Select the two Trackpad Options at bottom:

Important: If you use a remote “clicker” like our presenter remote, you must plug in a USB mouse in order to use the Mac while the remote is plugged in. The remote acts like a 4-button keyboard, and with no trackpad you can’t do much without a mouse. Run with both during a presentation.

Energy Saver Settings

In the menu bar, where the power indicator is, select “Better Performance”. This will keep the lazy Mac from sleeping on the job during your fabulous presentation.

Okay – you’re ready to hook up that projector!

Plug in to the projector (or second display)

If you’re at a facility, they may just have the VGA cable to plug into, but it’s the same. You need your VGA adapter:

If it’s one of our projectors, you can use a DVI cable (no dongle needed), but it’s more common to use the VGA.

When you plug in, the screen will flash to blue and back. Go check your resolution with the Display Menu you set up earlier:

Check the arrangement

The Mac “knows” where the other screen is. In Displays > Arrangement you can select the second display and move it to the side you want. I like mine on the right; just be consistent. If you have to use the mouse on the second display, you’ll know where to head.

See that “mirror displays” item? Don’t do it, it’s evil. Don’t be evil. If your display is all “huge” and the same image appears on both, this is why.

Note: if you like the Dock on the sides (like me) you’ll need to set it to the opposite side, or else it will appear on the second screen, which you don’t want.

Set screen background

This is sort of a setup step, but you have to have a second display connected to do it. We need to set a black background (or logo) to the second desktop screen, so when switching programs, setting up, or if a crash happens (to the best of us!), it’s not disruptive to the show.

First, download a black swatch. These are a part of the Setup Files zip if you haven’t downloaded them yet.

I prefer setting the screen to black. It’s simplest, and least disruptive if there’s a problem. For some reason, it’s not default with the Mac. You’d think, with Apple’s Presenter-in-chief and all.

Put the black image in /Library/Desktop Pictures/Solid Colors (’/’ is the hard drive root).

Since the second display is now connected, the Desktop Picture pane appears on each screen. On the second screen, go Solid Colors > the black one.

Setting up Keynote

Before we get further, we need to set up Keynote properly. The default settings may work fine, but check against the following screens. Application preferences are in the Keynote menu > Preferences.

Slideshow:

Presenter Display (what shows on your screen when the show is running. Great for solo presentations):

The Mac is now ready for the next step: the actual presentation! Look for part two soon.

yeah ok
yeah beekay http://samples.beatport.com/items/volumes/volume3/items/0/800000/50000/3000/700/50/853758.LOFI.mp3

Thesis comes equipped with a wide array of styles that you can use to improve the presentational quality of your blog posts. Follow this style guide to enhance the readability of your content and to add a professional flair that will set you apart from the crowd!

Sub-Headlines

Producing highly scannable content is probably the greatest courtesy you can extend to your readers, and fortunately, it’s also one of the most effective ways to engage people’s attention when they visit your site. The question becomes, then, what can you do to make your content more scannable?

For starters, you can incorporate the use of sub-headlines to separate your posts into smaller sections that are more easily-digestible for readers. There are a couple of easy ways to insert sub-headlines into your posts, so let’s look at those now.

Figure 1. Select Heading 3 from the dropdown formatting menu

First, if you’re using the visual text editor, you can simply select Heading 3 from the formatting dropdown list, as shown in Figure 1. Please note that you must choose Heading 3 specifically; choosing any other heading will produce undesirable results. Furthermore, please be sure that you do not choose Heading 1 or Heading 2—those have been reserved only for post titles and should not be used within posts themselves.

Another way to insert a sub-headline is to switch to the HTML editor, and then simply encode your headline in <h3> tags, like so:

<h3>My Headline Text</h3>

Using either method will produce the desired result, so try whichever one you prefer!

Drop Caps

Want to add some scholarly flair to your blog posts? Try implementing drop caps, which look like the “W” you see at the beginning of this paragraph. Thesis comes equipped with a pre-defined drop cap style, so all you have to do is input the necessary code in your blog post to make it happen. Here’s how it works:

First, you’ll need to switch to the HTML editor by clicking on the “HTML” link in the upper right corner of your Posting area, as shown in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2. Click the HTML tab to access the WordPress HTML editor

Second, you’ll need to wrap the letter you want to turn into a drop cap with the appropriate HTML. In the following example, the code you would actually add inside the HTML editor is highlighted for clarity:

<span class="drop_cap">T</span>his is my paragraph. The "T" is my drop cap.

Notes and Alerts

Every now and again, you may find it necessary to draw special attention to a paragraph (or even just a few words) of text. As you might have guessed, Thesis contains a couple of pre-defined styles that can help you out in this department, and all you have to do is implement them by way of the HTML editor.

The first special paragraph style is a Note, which looks like this:

This is a note—check out the default styling!

To create a note, simply access your HTML editor (as in Figure 2), and insert the following highlighted code:

<p class="note">Your note text goes here!</p>

The second special paragraph style is an Alert, which you may wish to use for text that you really want your readers to notice. It looks like this:

Hey! Don’t miss out on this handy paragraph style!

Creating an alert is identical to creating a note, except that you’ll use the alert class instead of the note class, like so:

<p class="alert">Your alert text goes here!</p>

In-post Ad Placements

At some point, you may wish to incorporate an ad within the body of a post, and if you want it to perform as effectively as possible, you’re going to need an easy, clean way to integrate it into the layout. Naturally, Thesis comes equipped with ad handling styles that will make this a simple task—ya just gotta know how to use ’em!

For the sake of this example, let’s assume that you’re using the AdSense Deluxe Plugin to insert your JavaScript ad code (I use it at Pearsonified).

To begin, dive into the HTML editor (see Figure 2), and select the position within your post where you’d like your ad to appear.

Now, if you’d like your ad to appear on the right with text wrapped around it, you would insert this code:

<div class="ad"><!‐‐adsense‐‐></div>

If you’d like your ad on the left with text wrapped around it, you would use this code instead:

<div class="ad_left"><!‐‐adsense‐‐></div>

Pay careful attention to the size of the ad units that you attempt to place within the content area of your site. The two ad handling styles introduced above work best with ads that are 250px wide or less. If you really want to stretch things, you can probably get away with up to 300px wide (Google’s Medium Rectangle, for example), but I would never recommend going any wider than that if you’re trying to wrap the text around the ad unit.

Oh, and if you don’t want to wrap text around an ad unit, simply place the ad code between paragraph (<p>) tags. By default, Thesis’ content column is 480px wide, so you’ll be able to accommodate ad units up to that width.