For those on a network that have printers you can use, you have to take different steps to connect to the printers. While the steps to connect to a network printer are different than connecting to a local print, they aren’t complex and can be performed very easily.

Network Printers

Unlike local printers, network printers are usually connected to a server somewhere on the network. Connecting printers in this manner allows many people to use the printers very easily without having to disconnect and reconnect the printer.

Any printer can be connected to the network, even printers used at home. Describing how to do that is beyond the scope of this post, but I’ll look into writing one in the future. To connect to a network printer you would need the name of the server connected to the printer, and the name of the printer. Once you have those two pieces of information you can connect to the printer.

Connecting to a Network Printer

To connect to a network printer, simply do the following:

1. Click Start->Settings->Printers and Faxes. This will display a window listing all printers currently setup on your computer.
2. Click the Add a printer icon to start the Add Printer Wizard.
3. On the first screen, click the Next button.
4. On the Local or Network Printer screen, select the A network printer, or a printer attached to another computer) option, and then click Next.
5. Since you know the server and printer name (hopefully), select the Connect to this printer (or to browser for a printer, select his option and click Next option.
6. Enter the server and printer name in the format: \\[server name]\[printer name]. For example, if your server name is printserv and your printer name is laserprinter, then the path would be \\printserv\laserprinter.
7. Once you enter the name, click Next to continue.
8. When a connection to the printer is established, and you have other printers currently installed, you will be prompted to set the new printer as the default printer. This means that when you click the print button in an application, this printer will be the one automatically selected first.
9. Select Yes to make the new printer the default, or No to keep the current default printer. When done, click Next to continue.
10. A summary of the newly added printer appears. When you are finished reading the information, click Finish to continue.

You have successfully installed a new network printer to your computer.

In WordPress you have plugins that can control whether a link in the comments is nofollow or dofollow. In Blogger blogs, however, the default is to use nofollow links in the comments of the posts. In this post I will explain how to change the comment links in a Blogger blog to dofollow, if you would like to make the change.

Removing NoFollow

There are two links in the comments of a Blogger post that default to nofollow: the backlinks, and the comment author’s link. You can change one or both, it is up to you. Both are changed in the same manner, just in different locations.

To change the links, use the following steps:

1. Log in to Blogger, and then from the Dashboard click on the Layout link of the blog you want to change.
2. In the top menu, click on the Edit HTML link to display the HTML for your template.
3. We will need to view all the code in the template, so check the Expand Widget Templates checkbox.
4. Now you have two links that you can change:
   1. For backlinks, search for a expr:href=’data:backlink.url’.
   2. For the comment author’s web site, search for a expr:href=’data:comment.authorUrl’.

In both of the above cases, your cursor will move to the link tag that contains the nofollow value.

5. Delete the value rel=’nofollow’ from the link tag for the link you searched for. This will now make the link a dofollow link.
6. Click the Save Template button to save your changes. Now when visitors leave comments, they will receive a dofollow link back to their site.

I currently use the NoFollow Free plugin that allows me to change an author’s link after the author has made a specific number of comments on Technically Easy. The number of comments is 3, so after three comments you get a dofollow link back to your site.

While they may have several hundred visitors a day, or just over a thousand, it may not be enough to sell advertising at a decent price. This is where CMF Ads comes into play - by combining the visitors from several blogs to provide much more pageviews for an advertiser than a single blog could obtain. Its companion site, CMF Direct, will help those who have monetized their blog by providing an easy way for a protential advertiser to see what advertising is available on their blog.

CMF Ads - Changing Marketing Forever

CMF Ads is a collection of about 20 blogs, which are all hand picked by the creators of the network. Each individual blog may not provide the number of readers an advertiser is willing to buy an ad on, but together, the 20 blogs provide an advertiser with more than 150,000 readers each month.

The service allows for displaying an ad for a specific category, and geotargetting that allows advertisers to target specific readers with their ads. As for the placement of the ads themselves, they are usually located above the fold on each blog. This means that any advertisement purchased will not be hidden from view on any blog.

As for bloggers, I’m not sure when the two founders will be accepting more blogs into the network. Each blog is manually reviewed and added to avoid any junk or spam blogs. The huge benefit in this is that the advertisers are displaying their ads on quality blogs. If you have a blog, and would like to tell advertisers about what types of advertising you have available, then you may want to look at CMF Direct.

CMF Direct

One of the founders of CMF Ads started another site called CMF Direct that is geared towards those bloggers that are selling advertising on their blog. It is free and easy to join, but like CMF Ads, all submissions are manually reviewed before they are added to the system.

Once you sign up, you can then add your blog’s listing. The listing allows you to provide a description, keywords and a 125×125 banner image for your blog. You also have the ability to add several URLs. Each URL corresponds to a different method of advertising available on your blog: Entrecard, direct selling, Performancing Ads, OIO Publisher, Project Wonderful, and CMF Ads (provided your are a member).

You provide a separate URL for each type of advertisement that you offer on your blog. For example, if you offer Project Wonderful, you would enter the URL to your Project Wonderful ad units.

This site is in public beta, so there may still be work done in the future, but it is nice to have a place where you can provide information about all your ads in one place.

While there are many forms of advertising networks out there, these two are unique in what they offer and how they offer it. One of the best things I like about these two networks is that all blogs are manually reviewed before they are accepted. Most advertising networks have failed once spam blogs enter their system and dilute the quality of blogs offered.

What if you have more computers than the number of ports on your router? You could just connect a second router, but the easier method is to simply connect either a hub or switch to the router. In this post I’ll talk about hubs and switches and how they are used in a network.

Hubs

A hub is a piece of hardware that contains several ethernet ports that connects several computers. Connecting a hub to a network is very easy. You can simply connect a hub to your router, and then several computers to the hub. The IP addresses of the computers that are connected to the hub are assigned by the router it is connected to.

Hubs work by broadcasting data to all computers that are connected to it. When a computer or program makes a request for information from another computer, the originating computer sends (broadcasts) the request to the hub. The hub will then brodcast the request to all computers that are connect to it. When the destination computer receives the request, it sends the information back to the hub. Once again the hub broadcasts the information to all computers, with only the requesting computer acting on the information.

The downside to this type of connection is that the bandwidth is subdivided between the number of computers that are connected to the hub. If you have a 100Mbps connection, and 2 computers connected to the hub, then the bandwidth available to each computer is 50Mbps. With 4 computers, the bandwidth drops to 25Mbps.

An alternative to hubs are switches.

Switches

Switches are similar to hubs in that they allow you to connect multiple computers together on a network. You can also connect switches to routers in the same way you connect hubs.

There are several differences between hubs and switches, however, that can boost the performance of your network. The performance increase has to do with how data is transmitted between the computers on your network.

While hubs transmit data via broadcasting the data to all computers that are connected to it, switches establish a direct connection between the transmitting and receiving computers. The added benefit of this is that the bandwidth is not subdivided. If you have a 100Mbps bandwidth on your network with 2 computers connected to a switch, the total bandwidth available to both computers is 100Mbps. This means that each port on the switch has the full bandwidth dedicated to it.

Many switches also have the ability to either use half- or full-duplex (receive and transmit at the same time). Hubs are half-duplex, which means they can either receive or transmit, but not both at the same time.

As you can see you can replace existing hubs on your network with switches to increase the effective speed of your network.

Connecting a Hub of Switch to a Router

Many people currently connect their computer to a router, which in turn, is connected to their high-speed modem. If you have more computers than ports on your router, you can simply connect a hub or switch to the router as well. Both are connected to the router the exact same way.

I have both a Linksys hub and switch. I have used both in the past, and am currently using the switch. Each one has 5 ports, with the fifth port also used as the uplink port. On your switch or hub, find the uplink port. This is the port that your router will connect into. For my switch, because the fifth port is also the uplink port, I can’t connect a computer to it when I connect the router. This means I can have a maximum of 4 computers connected with the router.

To connect a hub or switch to your router, use the following steps:

1. Determine the uplink port of your hub or switch.
2. Connect the router (any port) to the uplink port of your hub or switch.
3. Connect a computer to any of the unused ports on your hub or switch.
4. When you turn on the computer, your router will then assign an IP address to each computer connected to the hub or switch.

One thing to keep in mind when connecting many computers to a router this way is the number of computers that can be managed by the router. Each router has a limit to the number of computers that can connect to it. I’m not sure of the numbers, but you can always inquire with the manufacturer.

Hubs and switches allow you to easily increase the number of computers on your network, without having to worry about setup. They are easy to setup and require very little effort to maintain. Switches will provide much better network performance over hubs, so it may be more beneficial to use switches instead of hubs.

This post is going to talk about creating header images for a web site or blog, and how to make them link back to a home page. If you are new to HTML, creating such an image is very easy to do.

Create the Image

Before you can create a clickable image that links to a home page, you first need to have an image. When creating the image, you will need to also know how big the image needs to be.

If you have downloaded a template with a placeholder-type image, you can just view the properties of the image to see how large you image needs to be. The HTML code may have the image size, or you may need to download the image and then view the properties in Windows.

Once you know the image dimensions, you can construct the new header image. You will need an image editor to create the image. In my last post titled Photo and Image Editors, I discussed several image editors that you can use to create or edit images.

Use the following steps to create an image:

1. Start your image editor.
2. Create a new image (usually click File->New) and then specify the size of the image. The size should match the dimensions of the image in your template if you are using one.
3. Once your image has been created, save it in either a GIF, JPEG, or PNG format. If your image doesn’t have many colours (<256), try using the GIF or PNG-8 format. For more colours, try the JPEG or PNG-24 format. Save it in a directory on your host, or if you are building your site on your local machine first, save it to a subdirectory within your web site directory.

When I store images for my web sites, I usually store them in an image or images subdirectory to keep my web site directories clean and organized. I then reference the full URL to that directory when using the images. For example, if my web site URL was somewebsite.com, and the image header.jpg was stored in the image subdirectory, the full URL would be: http://www.somewebsite.com/image/header.jpg.

Now that you have a header image let’s look at it adding to your pages and make it clickable so your visitors would return to your home page.

Making an Image Clickable on a Web Site

Creating a clickable image is easy to do and is very similar to creating a hyperlink. All you need to do is use the following HTML code:

Using the example from above, the HTML code will look like:

It is important to note that you should also include the height and width properties of the image in the HTML.

As you can see, creating a clickable image is simply a matter of creating a standard hyperlink, but instead of specifying text, you include an image.

The biggest problem with the sites that do use a lot of images on each page is the size of the images. Some who manage web sites don’t realize that images need to be resized outside of the browser to decrease the download size. Specifying the size of an image in the HTML code will only shrink the displaying of the image, not the actual size. To shrink the file sizes you will need an image editor. In this post I will list a few image editors that can be used to edit your images for your web site.

The Editors

There are many photo and images editors that are available. Some or expensive while others are free. While I haven’t used many editors, I will list those that I have come across. You may have your own preferred editor, but if you don’t you can start by looking at the ones listed below.

Adobe Photoshop (Site) This is the photo/image editor that all others are compared to. This is by far the most popular, but it is also one of the most expensive ($700 - $1000). For those serious about photo editing you can’t go wrong with Photoshop. It is so popular that the name has become a verb. How many times have you heard about a photo being “photoshopped”?

Corel Paint Shop Pro (Site) This is another popular editor and can pretty much do everything you need with images and photos. Compared to Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro is relatively cheap (less than $100). If you don’t have the money for Photoshop, and are looking for a great editor, then have a look at Paint Shop Pro.

GIMP (Site) If you prefer to look for free alternatives, then look no further than GIMP. The name is an acronym for the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Although it may be free, it is a very powerful photo and image editing software that can run on Unix, Windows, and Mac OSs.

IrfanView (Site) While it isn’t considered an editor, IrfanView does do some basic editing that may be all that you need. The biggest advantage of this tool is that it can view many of the common image formats, which is why it is considered a viewer more than an editor. Besides the viewer capability, the free pricetag is also a good reason to install this application.

While operating systems may come with a free photo/image editor, the ones listed above will provide you with more functionality and control than you could get with an operating system supplied tool. The prices of the tools above may vary, but each one is more than capable of editing your images to your liking.

Related Posts

Digital Photo Workflow
About Colour Management
When to Use GIF and JPEG Format
Converting Digital Photos for E-mail or the Web

Once you have transferred them, how do you organize the photos? There are many methods that people use to organize their photos, and I have my method, which I explain below.

My Organizing Digital Photo Organizing Workflow

I have explained my backup workflow in the past, but before I backup my data I first organize the files the way I like them. My workflow requires photo management software, which you can easily find for free with Google’s Picassa, but I prefer to use ACDSee, which is not free.

Directory Structure.

I always organize my digital photos into specific directories organized by year and then event. I don’t worry too much about the specific date, as I leave that to my photo management software.

My directory structure is organized as:

• [4-digit Year]
  • [Event Name or yyyymmdd]

I use the four digit year because it allows me to sort the directories in order when viewing the top-level directory. As for the subdirectories, I would provide an event name that is easy to read, or if there wasn’t anything going on, such as I just shot pictures at home, I would create a directory using the date. I prefer to use the format yyyymmdd since it allows me to easily sort my pictures within Windows Explorer by date.

If my directory structure look like:

• 2008
  • At the Beach
  • Children
    • 20081030

I could immediately find the pictures taken at the beach. The children subdirectory indicates that the pictures below it are of my children, and the 20081030 (October 30, 2008) directory indicates it was just a day I decided to take pictures for no particular reason.

Digital Photo Tags

I have seen many organizing workflows that rename the digital photo files based on who is in the photo, the date, or the event. I prefer to keep the names generated by my camera, and let my photo management software do the rest of the work for me.

In the software I create three main categories:

1. Event
2. Family
3. Friends
4. Location

Within each category I create subcategories that I use to tag my digital photos. A tag is simply a label I assign to the photo, and that information can then be stored in a database or file. My photos are never modified by the photo management software when I tag the photos.

Using the example above, I would create a Beach subcategory under the main Event category. If going to the beach is an annual event, I would create a 2008 subcategory under the Beach category. Then I can just add another year subcategory under Beach for each subsequent year I go to the beach.

I would create each family member under the Family category using the [last name], [first name] format. This allows me to keep members of the same immediate family together in the list. I do the same for the Friends category.

Finally I organize the Location category by country, followed by province/state, and then city/town.

An example of the organization structure would look like:

• Event
  • Beach
    • 2008

• Family
  • Smith, Bob
  • Smith, Mary

• Friends
  • Jones, John
  • Jones, Will

• Location
  • Canada
    • Ontario
      • Toronto

The above structure allows me to find all photos of a single person, taken at a specific location, a single event, or photos for all years of a specific event.

Now that I have defined my directory structure, and setup my tagging in my photo management software, I can begin to organize my photos.

Organzing the Digital Photos

When I organize my photos I use the following steps:

1. I insert the memory card into my card reader, and then open Windows Explorer. I create a subdirectory on my external hard drive similar to what was described above.
2. I copy the photos from the card reader to the new subdirectory.
3. Once the copy has completed, I open ACDSee (my photo management software).
4. Using the category organization described above, I begin to create any new categories I need to tag my photos.
5. I navigate to the directory I copied the photos into and begin to tag each photo with the correct categories.
6. I then start my online backup to protect my new photos.

The above method works very well for me, and doesn’t take long to organize my photos. I now have the ability to find all photos of a specific person, event or place in a matter of seconds. I can also view all photos taken on a specific date by simply clicking on a day in a calendar, or view all photos taken on a specific month or in a specific year.

Gone are the days of unorganized pictures thrown together in unlabelled boxes, leaving no clues as to who is in the picture, when it was taken, or where.

Related Posts

Is Your Data Safe?
What is Your Archiving Workflow?

It is important for those setting up a blog to ensure they have modified the permalinks of their posts from their default value. It isn’t hard to change the structure, and can be done even after you have published several posts.

What are Permalinks?

When you publish a post it is immediately displayed on the home page of your blog. Once you publish another post, the first post is either moved down the page, or it is removed entirely, depending on how many posts you display. The problem is how someone would read the first post if it no longer appears on the home page. This is done using permalinks.

Permalinks, short for permanent links, is a URL that points to a specific blog post. This means that each post has a static URL that a visitor can enter into their browser to read that particular post. If you would like to link to a post, you can just use the permalink of that post.

Blogging platforms, such as WordPress and Blogger, create permalinks for each post you create. You can easily get the permalink for each post through the blog’s respective post management system, or by simply copying the URL from the blog post title when it is displayed in a browser. Usually the permalink is comprised of at least the title of the post.

For example, if you created a blog post titled “Why I Blog?” on March 23, 2008, your blog platform may create a permalink such as: http://[your domain]/2008/03/why-i-blog.htm. You may notice that in this example the permalink also uses the year and month of the publish date.

For WordPress, however, the default value does not use an easy to read permalink structure, which some new blogger’s don’t realize. The good news is that it is very easy to change the permalink structure, and the change can be made even after you have published several posts.

Changing Permalinks Within WordPress

To change the WordPress permalink structure, use the following steps:

1. Log in to your WordPress administrative panels.
2. On the far right, click the Settings option.
3. In the second set of links at the top, click the Permalinks link.
4. Under Common Settings, you will see various formats of permalinks. Select one of the options or create your own custom structure. For Technically Easy I chose the Month and name setting.
5. Once you are done, click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page to save your permalink structure.
6. View your blog and click a post on the home page. You should now see your post displayed with the new permalink structure.

For Blogger users, you should automatically have a permalink structure defined that is similar to the one I described above, so no changes are needed.

One thing to note about Blogger’s permalinks: they can be truncated if the post titles are too long. You may need to keep this in mind if you move from the Blogger platform to the WordPress platform, but there is a plugin that can help you out. I have outline this information my post titled Blogger to WordPress - Part 4.

With many sites containing many additional files that are downloaded, such as Javascript, CSS, images, and flash, web sites can take quite a bit of time to finish downloading. In this post I will show how you can change your .htaccess file to increase the speed of your web site very easily.

A Reason for Web Site Speed Increase

When a visitor views your web site for the first time, their browser will begin to download the necessary files it needs to display the web page correctly. The file names and locations are usually referenced in the web page itself, a CSS file or additional supporting files.

The more the browser needs to download, the slower a web site becomes. For many small images, the download speed could be quite quick. Once you add several larger files (40KB+), the time it takes to display your site could be too much for your visitor.

For many web sites, images such as logos and backgrounds won’t change very often, so a visitor shouldn’t need to download such files each time they visit your site. Reusing the images that are stored in their browser cache would improve the loading time of your site, as well as reduce the bandwidth usage on your host.

For those using Apache, you can easily modify your .htaccess file to manage the caching of various files from your web site. I’ll explain how to do this below.

Caching Files With .htaccess

As previously mentioned you may want a visitor to use their local cache for certain files, such as images, CSS and Javascript, that don’t change very often. Apache allows you to do this through the .htaccess file.

The .htaccess will use the mod_expires module to set the expiration date/time of certain file types to prevent these files from being download each time a web page is accessed.

There are two directives that you can use in the .htaccess file to accomplish this task: ExpiresDefault and ExpiresByType.

The ExpiresDefault sets a default expiration time for all files on your domain. For example, is you add the following to your .htaccess file:

All files on your domain will automatically have an expiration time of 60 seconds after the file was accessed. The A in the example means accessed, while an M would mean modified. The time specified on the line is in seconds.

You can also use this format, which means the same thing as above:

The ExpiresByType directive allows you to specify an expiration time based on file type. As an example, this is useful if you use CSS files that aren’t modified frequently. To set the expiration time for CSS files, you can using the following:

What the above lines mean is that when a visitor accesses your web page the first time, the CSS files are downloaded to their local browser’s cache. If they return to your web page within the next month, the browser will use the local cached CSS files instead of re-downloading them. You can do the same for any file types that aren’t updated on a frequent basis.

A cache solution may look like the following:

The default expiration time is set at 1 day, while each individual file type has its own expiration. The smallest expiration time are used by the HTML files, which may be updated on a frequent basis. Icon files have an expiration of 1 month, while all the other file types listed expire in 1 week. Keep in mind that the expiration times are determine by when the file is accessed.

By using the above definitions, visitors will be using the local cached files instead of having to re-download them all each time they visit a web page. If you use the same files on all your pages, such as files that belong to your template, then the files won’t need to be downloaded again, regardless of which page your visitor views.

To help me with this task I used a batch file that was easily able to handle everything I needed. If you haven’t used batch files before, then this post will explain what they are and how they can be used.

Batch File Overview

Batch files are nothing more than a text file that executes one or more commands from a command prompt. Unlike other executables that use the “.exe” extension, batch files use the “.bat” extension.

The one reason batch files are used is to execute many commands at one time, like in a batch. This means you don’t have to sit in front of your computer to execute each command separately.

In the early days of the PC, the most common batch file was autoexec.bat, which loaded when you started your computer. This file contained many driver and application settings that were needed to run your computer. This file was at times a source of frustration, especially to get the settings correct.

I still like to use batch files today, as they are quick and easy to create, and can be used to automate such things as a virus scan or defrag at specific times.

Creating a Batch File

As I mentioned, a batch file is easy to create. All you need is a text editor, such as Notepad. When you save a file in your text editor be sure to change the extension from “.txt” to “.bat”.

To execute a batch file, you can just double-click the file in Windows or type its name from a command prompt to execute the batch file.

For example, lets say you wanted to execute a file called “ProgramA.exe” from the “C:\ApplicationA” directory. You would open up your text editor and type:

Once you save your batch file (remember to change the extension to “.bat”), you can then just double-click your batch file and “ProgramA.exe” would run.

If you wanted to also execute “ProgramB.exe” from “C:\ApplicationB”, you would change your batch file like so:

This would execute both “ProgramA.exe” and “ProgramB.exe”.

If you wanted to print out a message to the screen while it ran, you can use the echo command like this:

While the above commands are simple, it shows how easy it is to execute more than once command at a time.

I currently use batch files to automate my virus scanner, anti-spyware, and defrag applications, as each of these applications can be executed from the command line. You can read how I do it in the post titled Automating Computer Maintenance.