Featured, Useful Tools, Videos, WordPress »

I’m happy to announce the release of RSSless, a new WordPress plugin. RSSless is a WordPress plugin which allows you to hide specific content in your posts from RSS readers. This is helpful for bloggers who embed videos, images, or other content which doesn’t display or embed correctly in RSS readers. Rather then having RSS readers get blank content, you can simply replace it with customizable message, such as “Please view the original article to watch this video.”

RSSless uses WordPress’ built in short code API. Simply surround the content you want to hide from RSS readers with the [rssless] [/rssless] short code tags.

I created RSSless because of a specific need I had. Since it seemed to…

Useful Tools »

Mac only - I spent part of this week working on transferring some family videos to DVD. I have a pre-professional grade HD video camera that obviously shoots in widescreen. After working on it and sending it to iDVD for a quick menu and then burning it, I noticed that the widescreen video doesn’t get letterboxed on standard (4:3) TVs as I expected. Rather, the video gets cropped (much to my disappointment).

Luckily I came across myDVDEdit, a tool which lets you modify the contents of an unprotected DVD image on your computer. By following these directions I was able to get myDVDEdit to force my DVD player to letterbox my widescreen videos on standard TVs. It’s…

Useful Tools »

After a recent discussion about why I would never use Linux, I decided to take the advice of one of the commenters and “just switch to Leopard” (Crock). That’s right. I bought my very first Mac. After owning it for nearly a week I’ve come across some tips, tweaks, and plugins that have made my first Mac experience very pleasurable.

Note: all of the following were tested on an Intel Mackbook running Mac OS X 10.5.4 (Leopard)

Built-in Shortcuts and Time-Savers

One thing that makes Macs great are the built-in time-saving shortcuts. These shortcuts can save you a lot of mouse clicks and a lot of time. Here are a few of my favorite:

Keyboard and Mouse Shortcuts

Useful Tools »

So as you can tell I’m quite happy with my new domain emails hosted by Google Apps. I just purchased Sohail’s Gmail Notifier for Google Apps because the normal Gmail notifier doesn’t work with it (for a very cheap $6.99). I realize I could have used the Google Talk client but I don’t like having to keep it open all the time.

So because I’m in such a good mood I’m having a Google Apps Giveaway. Here’s what’s up for grabs:

• Four (4) copies of Sohail’s Gmail Notifier for Google Apps (one for four different people)
• and to one lucky person I’ll personally set up your domain on Google Apps, get your domain verified, switch your domain’s MX servers over to…

Tutorial/How-To, Useful Tools »

A few days ago I was sending an email from my Simply-Basic administrative email account and it got sent back with the following cryptic error message:

host mx4.hotmail.com [65.54.244.104]: 550 SC-001 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. Reasons for rejection may be related to content with spam-like characteristics or IP/domain reputation problems. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your E-mail/Internet Service Provider for help. Email/network admins, please visit http://postmaster.live.com for email delivery information and support.

Apparently Windows Live (aka Hotmail) blocked my entire mail server permanently as spam. I contacted by web hosting company and they said that since I’m on a shared server it only takes a few people sending…

Useful Tools »

There are thousands of PhotoShop tutorials available freely (and not-so-freely) on the internet. When their written clearly and documented nicely they can be quite useful. Today I came accross a tutorial that wasn’t only well written, it looked downright fun! It’s called Face Off and was written by Richard Isbell.

Here’s the original photo:

And here’s the final project:

The tutorial is easy to understand and seems fairly straight forward to follow. Check out the Face Off PhotoShop tutorial to see how to do it yourself.

Images shown originally published at http://xtro32.com/tutorials/face%20off/faceoff01.htm and used under “fair use” rights.