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How to Automatically Confirm or Deny All Invites on Facebook

October 6, 2010 By 12 Comments

I’ve got a lot of friends on Facebook. And those friends are very busy inviting me to events, pages, Farmville, Mafia Wars, and every other little thing anyone ever invented for Facebook. The problem is, I don’t have time to go through literally hundreds of invitations to confirm or deny them. (And I mainly just want to deny them…)

So I was looking for a way to automatically deny all invitations on Facebook when I came across this nice little Firefox extension that lets you do just that! Well, it will also let you accept all invites on Facebook, if you’ve got a lot of extra time in your life to spend looking at all that stuff.

But if you have a whole boatload of page invites, friend invites, calendar invites, game invites, or any other invites that you want to either automatically deny or confirm – here is how to do it!
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Filed Under: Social Media, Tutorials Tagged With: , , ,

5 Amazing Examples of Watermelon Carving

August 16, 2010 By 17 Comments

Here in Texas it is HOT outside! I mean it’s still nearly 100 degrees at midnight during the summer. So, it’s no surprise that Watermelon is a favorite around these parts. If you keep it in an ice chest for a while before you carve it up it makes for a cool refreshing treat!

But there are chefs out there who are using watermelons (and other fruits) for much more artistic purposes! And I was amazed to see some of the things these people can do in a very short time.

Here is Vid Nikolic going to work on a watermelon.


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Filed Under: Art, Food, Tutorials, Videos Tagged With: , , , ,

Tutorial: Manually Take WordPress Out of Maintenance Mode

August 4, 2010 By 23 Comments

Today while performing a WordPress upgrade on another blog the update failed! Grrr. If that wasn’t enough of a problem, when I checked the site it was stuck in “Maintenance” mode – meaning that no matter what you tried to do the only thing that showed up was a page telling you the site was in “Maintenance Mode”.

I Googled like a madman, and searched the WordPress site too, but there is no documentation as to what to do to get it out of this mode! So, I fired up my FTP browser and manually performed a complete upgrade of WordPress. Still no luck!
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Filed Under: Tutorials, Wordpress Tagged With: , , ,

Video Tutorial: Getting Started with WordPress

August 3, 2010 By 3 Comments

Seems like I’ve been talking to more and more people lately who are just getting started with WordPress, so in order to put a few materials together for you so you don’t have to search all over the bloody internet I’ve compiled the following WordPress Video Tutorials. I consider all of these good enough that I wouldn’t even bother remaking them because they really can’t be improved upon.

So let’s get started learning how to use WordPress, shall we?

Tutorial: How to Use the WordPress Dashboard

The first thing that happens when you log into any WordPress installation is that you are taken to the Dashboard. So we might as well start out by learning what’s here and how to customize the Dashboard.
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Filed Under: Tutorials, Wordpress Tagged With: , ,

Tutorial: Fix iPhone and Google Calendar Time Zone Sync

June 15, 2010 By 7 Comments

Folks, I travel a lot. And I use my iPhone, and I use Google Calendar. On my recent trip to the Indy 500 my phone apparently did all sorts of automatic stuff based on my time zones and kept me in good shape. However, when I returned to Dallas I had something strange happen!

Although my Google Calendar was reflecting the proper time zone on my computer, and ALL of my time zone settings were correct, my Google Calendar as viewed through Safari on the iPhone was off by exactly one hour – which happens to be the same as the difference on the trip I took.

I searched EVERYWHERE for settings on how to fix this, and finally figured out the incredibly complex way to do it!

Turn your iPhone off and then on again.

Yeah. That’s it. Power cycling the phone corrected the time zone immediately. So if it happens to you, now you know.

Filed Under: Tips and Tricks, Tutorials Tagged With: , , , ,

Tutorial: Speed Up Your Web Surfing with Google DNS or OpenDNS

April 10, 2010 By 13 Comments

Folks, listen up. If you are still using your ISPs slow DNS servers you are probably suffering needlessly and not taking advantage of the full speed of whichever connection you may have – even high speed ones like cable, DSL or Fiber Optics. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about – this means you!

I’m going to show you how to speed up everything you do online by switching to a better, faster Domain Name Server (DNS) system run by either Google or OpenDNS. Best of all, it will only take you like 5 minutes to make a change that will benefit you every day from now on! But before we get started, let me explain what DNS does for you in non-technical terms.
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Filed Under: Computing, Google Tools, Tutorials Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Video RANT: Taking the (Sharp) Edge off the MacBook Pro

March 11, 2010 By 71 Comments

Filing the Edge off a MacBook ProGod only knows how many times I’ve whined on Twitter about the sharp edge on my MacBook Pro right where your wrists rest while working on it. I swear to Buddha that after 15 minutes of working on this thing I have lines deep enough imprinted in my forearms to make people think I’m trying to slash my wrists! Furthermore, this laptop nearly makes me want to!!!

But tonight I’d had enough. After a marathon session of pain, I finally got off my lazy butt and did something about it. So, here is a video of me taking a file to my MacBook Pro and doing what Apple should have done long, long ago!
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Filed Under: Computing, The Man's Videos, Tutorials Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Simply Enable PHP’s GZip Compression to Speed Up Your Blog

February 22, 2010 By 33 Comments

As you may know, I use WP SuperCache on all of my blogs to enable them to handle the rather high loads the server runs at occasionally. One of the things that WP SuperCache does is enable compression for all of the cached pages. It’s an option in the control panel, which I ALWAYS enable. This saves a lot of bandwidth and makes pages download much faster for readers.

Well, what I didn’t realize was that the compression is only being performed on the cached files apparently. Because I did some testing and on the non-cached files there was no compression. So, I’ve got a really, really easy trick that anyone can do on their PHP blog to enable GZip compression.

Of course I’m going to show you how to do it in WordPress because that is what I know – but a simple one line addition to your theme file will enable it on any PHP based system (Drupal, Joomla, or whatever). If you have instructions for another CMS please let me know and I’ll add them here too.
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Filed Under: Tutorials, Wordpress Tagged With: , ,

How To Automatically Convert Videos To Images

February 20, 2010 By
Guest Post by: Charles McKeever of OpenSourceMarketer.com.

Creative ideas are everywhere, if you know how to listen.

In this article I’m going to show you how you can automatically split videos into images and then use those images to generate traffic for your website. When John Pozadzides (aka the man behind One Man’s Blog) did this, he got 10,000 pageviews on a single blog post in just 7 days.
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Filed Under: Tutorials, Videos, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
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