Computer Tech Tips You Might Not Know

From the New York Times' writer David Pogue ...

“One of these days, I’m going to write a book called, The Basics. It’s going to be a compendium of the essential tech bits that you just assume everyone knows–but you’re wrong."

• Complete Article

PageFour - Outliner

I visited yesterday with the writer Cait London, a novelist with dozens of books in print, and she told me that one of the most valuable computer tools she'd found recently was PageFour -- "a good place to stash story ideas and develop them," she said.

"The sample is great to try," she told me. "I got it and a few other helper programs at bitsdujour.com and watch for the discount programs to be the special of the day. It saves in .rtf which is great, also Dragon works with it."

PageFour - Outliner and Tabbed Word Processor for Writers

PageFour is a tabbed word processor and outliner for creative writers. Where other word processors were designed with the business user in mind, PageFour aims to meet the needs of a different class of writer. It does not improve your prose or make you a better writer - only you can do that, but PageFour does make your job just that little bit easier.

How Are You Reading This?

Via a computer, of course? Or, well, maybe if you're really trendy, you're using a Blackberry or an iPhone, but the point is that we in the Internet Writing Workshop are computer-savvy (or at least, computer-capable) writers.

Here are two reports of interest today in the computer world, the first a comprehensive review of the latest edition of Internet Explorer, and the second discusses a major retailer's attitude toward bloatware:

IE8 Shows Microsoft is Serious about Playing Catch-up
IE8 has me surprised. Internet Explorer has fallen a long way behind Safari, Opera, and Firefox. IE7 brought the much-needed tabs, but was still a long way behind the competing browsers. And honestly, even IE8 hasn't caught up with the competition. But it's a great deal closer than I thought it would be.

Industry Rethinks Moneymaking Software Practice
SAN FRANCISCO — Before they ship PCs to retailers like Best Buy, computer makers load them up with lots of free software. For $30, Best Buy will get rid of it for you. Robert Stephens, head of Geek Squad, said of removing preinstalled software, “We’ll give consumers what they want.” That simple cleanup service is threatening the precarious economics of the personal computer industry.

If You See Reunion(dot)com

It's possible that Reunion(dot)com may use your computer to send a message to one of the Internet Writing Workshop's lists to which you belong.

Without your recognizing that you have given permission.

Here's the scoop, and possible remedies.

• Phishing
• The Anti-phishing Working Group
• Federal Trade Commission Onguard Online
• How Not to Get Hooked
• Microsoft's Recognizing Phishing
• Firefox Phishing and Malware Protection
• Quickstudy: Phishing
• Intuitive Systems
• Yahoo Answers
• More from Yahoo Answers
• A Word to the Wise blog
• Web Safety Ratings from McAfee SiteAdvisor
• Symantec Anti-phishing Protection
• Staysafeonline

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• This post in no way makes a judgment, good or bad, about Reunion(dot)com, its business, or its means of doing business. It is posted simply to provide information about avoiding the use of IWW members' private computers without acknowledged participation of those members.
• As always, no administrator of the Internet Writing Workshop or the IWW itself takes any responsibility for any information provided by any link posted. The information provided, the links posted, are possible tools useful to members who want to help keep the IWW lists free of spam and phishing and similar attempts to use the IWW's lists for intentions outside their purposes.

Private Information .

Grace Skibicki, one of the long-time administrators of The Internet Writing Workshop, recently discovered a useful bit of technical information. She says, "I read an interesting response to a technical question regarding Excel. In our recent Sunday paper this question was posed by a reader: He wanted to email an Excel file but wanted to make sure it could be read only, not edited."

The response was as follows. He was told that the "information rights management" in recent versions of Excel can enforce that kind of restriction but requires special Microsoft server software.

Google offers a cheaper and easier way to do this. Upload the file to Google's free Goggle Docs site (docs.google.com). You can limit some readers to read-only and also allow others to edit your work.

Grace continues, "I found this in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (June 1st). But the article was originally posted on May 25th in the Washington Post. It was written by Rob Pegoraro."

"I thought it might be helpful for those times when you want to send a piece of writing but do not want editing."

Use Outlook? You May Want Xobni.

From an article in the New York Times ...

"Xobni ... is ... a new tool ... that plugs into Outlook."

Xobni is meant to speed up and increase the effectiveness of searching Outlook. It's free for personal use. A commercial version is available for sale.

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• From the Xobni site ...

"Xobni offers a new way to organize and search your Outlook email. Xobni creates profiles for each person that emails you. These profiles contain relationship statistics, contact information, social connections, threaded conversations, and shared attachments. Our users tell us that Xobni makes your inbox work the way your mind does."

• The Xobni blog ...

"Plain Text, and Plain Text Only, Please"

The list server computers work best when the list email is sent to them in Plain Text. That's a problem, since most of us write in Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, or OpenOffice.

If you cannot give up your favorite word processor, a man named Jonathan Hedley has put online a tool that allows a writer to plug in writing with Smart Quotes, em-dashes, and other rich text elements and create a Plain Text version.

Click here to find the site.

Of course, there are other resources for writers in word processors beside the big three listed above. Two administrators of the IWW offer two resources.

Eric Petersen,
Prose Administrator

I've been following the thread about converting Microsoft Word text into plain text for Workshop e-mails, and I thought I'd mention a great little program I've been using called DocPad. It's a freeware program that claims to be a replacement for Windows' notepad application. But it's much, much more than that.

DocPad is actually a full-featured plain-text word processor. You can use any font you like, (I use Arial) but the document in the editing window will always be in plain text and perfectly formatted for pasting into your e-mails, whether you use e-mail client software like Outlook Express or Thunderbird, or a web-based e-mail application like Hotmail or GMail.

There are no strange characters, no mangled paragraphs, nothing but perfectly formatted, easy-to-read plain text. Just write your works in DocPad and do a copy and paste into your e-mails. You can even associate plain text files to open in DocPad. You can paste Word text into Docpad and the only thing you'll have to clean up are paragraph indentations that may be indented too much.

When you load a DocPad plain text document into Word, the formatting is perfect, but in the Courier font, and of course, no bold or italics, but you can do that in Word.

DocPad is packed with bells and whistles including document statistics, (word count, character count, etc.) a spell checker, macros, a selection of skins, (I use the Soothing skin) a built in calculator, a calendar, print, print preview, search and replace, bookmarks, and much more. You can read all about DocPad's features and download it here.

I've been a member of the Workshop for over 10 years, and the administrator of Prose-P for about 8 of those years, and DocPad is the best plain text word processor I've ever used. Due to malicious code and virus concerns, many online markets (and print markets that accept electronic submissions), both paying and non-paying, now request that writers submit their works only as plain text e-mails. No HTML formatted e-mails or attached files will be accepted.

That's why I use DocPad as my plain text word processor. It's the best at plain text, and it's easy to load the plain text documents you create in DocPad into a regular word processor like Word or OpenOffice (which I use).

I hope you like it as much as I do.

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Carter Jefferson, one of the administrators of the PRACTICE list, recommends "Jarte \jär · 'tay\ noun (est. 2001) 1. A free word processor based on the Microsoft WordPad word processing engine built into Windows. 2. A fast starting, easy to use word processor that expands well beyond the WordPad feature set. 3. A small, portable word processor whose documents are fully compatible with Word and WordPad."

You can find it here.

OpenOffice

I write, and I've never found a better tool than OpenOffice, an open source office tools suite. It's almost a direct substitute for Microsoft Office, but it's free. "Free" ... in the sense that other open source software (think Firefox) is, in that those who can't code should support those who can code.

Here's the announcement about the release of OpenOffice version, 2.2, compatible with Windows Vista.

The OpenOffice.org Community announce the release of OpenOffice.org 2.2, the latest version of the leading open-source office suite. With upgrades to its word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, and database software, the free software package provides a real alternative to Microsoft's recently-released Office 2007 product - and an easier upgrade path for existing Microsoft Office users. OpenOffice.org 2.2 also protects users from newly discovered vulnerabilities, where users' PCs could be open to attack if they opened documents from, or accessed web
sites set up by, malicious individuals.

In version 2.2, users will immediately notice the improvement in the quality of text display in all parts of OpenOffice.org. The reason for this is that the previously optional support for kerning, a technique to improve the appearance of text written in proportional fonts, has now been enabled by default. OpenOffice.org's unique pdf export function has also been enhanced with the addition of the optional creation of bookmarks feature, and support for user-definable export of form fields.

While OpenOffice.org 2.1 functions well on Microsoft's Windows Vista, version 2.2 makes use of some of the new cosmetic changes available in Vista, the new file dialogues being an example. Apple Mac users will notice a smaller download and a smaller installed size. The Apple Mac Intel version has many stability improvements, and bug fixes ranging from .ppt export to improved UNO connections. Version 2.2 now requires Mac OS X 10.4.x running X11.

Turning to some of the enhancements made to the individual components of OpenOffice.org, the Calc spreadsheet has received additional enhancements to its support for Microsoft file formats, including improved support for Pivot Tables and some specialised trigonometric functions. Base, the database component, has improved SQL editing functionality as well as a new "Queries within Queries" feature. Compatibility options for some database drivers, such as Oracle ODBC, have been improved. Impress, the presentations component, offers improvements in the handling of hidden slides which has been made more intuitive.

It is important to remember that OpenOffice.org is not just a software package, but is also a development and user community. One demonstration of this is the ability of third party developers to create extensions in a simple manner. Third party xtensions can now be more closely integrated and features have been added to dramatically simplify the installation and updating of these. In addition, features have been added to assist those participating in the translation and localisation of OpenOffice.org.

In addition to being immediately available for download from the traditional download servers, OpenOffice.org is also available from a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network. Alternatively, OpenOffice.org Community Distributors supply the software on CD-ROM in many countries and native language translations will be available from their relevant communities.

The OpenOffice.org Community is an international team of volunteer and sponsored contributors who develop, support, and promote the leading open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org®. OpenOffice.org's leading edge software technology (UNO) is also available for developers, systems integrators, etc to use in OpenOffice.org extensions or in their own applications.

OpenOffice.org supports the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) OASIS Standard (ISO/IEC 26300) as well as legacy industry file formats and is available on major computing platforms in over 70 languages. OpenOffice.org software is provided under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) and may be used free of charge for any purpose, private or commercial.

The OpenOffice.org Community acknowledges generous sponsorship from a number of companies, including Sun Microsystems, the founding sponsor and primary contributor.

OpenOffice.org 2.2 may be downloaded free of charge.

Use TinyURLs!

Use TinyURLs!
by Carter Jefferson

If you're like me, you have this strong desire to let certain people know when you've published something, and sometimes just to cut them in on some particularly juicy website you've run across. So you send them an e-mail with the URL in it.

That's fine, as long as the URL is short. If it's not, most e-mail programs will break it in two, and your recipients will get something
like this:

http://www.mystericale.com/index.php?issue=current_issue&body=st
ory&file=con_game.html

That means nobody can just click on it; they have to copy both parts and paste them into their address bars. That's actually fairly difficult.

So a better way is to go to

http://tinyurl.com/

and there you paste the long URL into a box. You click on "Make tinyURL" and you get a new page, which will have this on it:

http://tinyurl.com/2h7kjn

Use that in your note, and when your correspondents click on it, they'll be there. The one above, incidentally, takes you to a story by my friend Bob Liter, a member of IWW.

A better way to do this is simply to put the link to TinyURL in your navigation bar. Then you go to the site you want to tell people about, click on the TinyURL link, and it automatically gives you the little-bitty URL you need. All the information here is spelled out in detail on the TinyURL homepage.

Send your friends the long URL, and they'll probably click on it and get nowhere. Send them the TinyURL, they'll click, and then they'll read your deathless prose, which they absolutely need to do.

Saving Your Precious Work

Saving Your Precious Work
Carter Jefferson

Back when writers used paper, that ancient means of putting thoughts into circulation and saving them, famous authors lost precious manuscripts to fire, flood, or simple mischance. Ralph Ellison saw 350 pages of his second novel go up in smoke at his summer house in 1966.

Now we use electronic means, but we face the same danger of loss.

For example, when I publish something in an e-zine, I usually want a copy to save with the fancy art work that surrounds it. I used to simply save a link, but then learned better. Beware! These outfits disappear, or sometimes they simply dump their archives. So now I go to the piece and click on "save page as . . . ," which produces a folder and an HTML file. Then it's on my hard drive permanently. Posterity will no doubt be grateful.

What about the draft of your novel? It's on your hard drive. But hard drives break down, and you could be out of luck. Here are some ways to avoid losing things precious to you.

First, get an external hard drive, plug it in, and copy all your important files. When your primary drive goes on the fritz, your works are safe.

Make CDs that contain those vital folders. Use a flash drive--those can cost as little as $15 for surprising amounts of space.

All those things are, however, still in your house, which could explode and take them with it. Consider storing things on the Web. Send your important files in e-mails to an account that gives you a large storage allowance--G-mail is one of those. You can buy Web storage, and at least two sites, 4-shared and X-Drive, offer generous amounts of free storage. (Check all these out--I don't guarantee anything,)

And, as a last resort, copy all those CDs, put them in a box, and ask your Aunt Minnie to let you store them in her attic. Nothing like belt and suspenders both!

(Internet Writing Workshop members John Meyer, Louisa Homerow, Terri Main, and Paul Stenquist helped me compile this information.)