Have you seen these new Facebook Like buttons at the bottom of some blog posts? Here’s what they look like:

Initially, I glossed over them assuming they were the same thing as the “Become a Fan” buttons (which are now, confusingly, also “Like” buttons). However, these individual Like buttons are specifically for liking the blog post itself.

When you click on the Like button at the bottom of a blog post, an entry gets added to your Facebook timeline stating that you liked the post (assuming you’re logged into Facebook). For example, here you can see that I “Liked” one of my blog posts, The Pursuit of Knowledge:

6 Reasons why all bloggers need to add this button to their posts

If the potential of this Like button isn’t already obvious, let me give you 6 reasons why you should be adding it to your own blog posts right now:

1. Facebook has over 425 million users; chances are that many of your readers use the network. If you’re already using a Retweet button for Twitter, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be using the Facebook Like button.
2. The Like button is familiar to Facebook users. They already know what it does and they’ve probably used it several times on Facebook. This familiarity brings comfort and increases the chances they will use it.
3. Liking a post is a seamless operation for readers already logged into Facebook; one click and it’s done!
4. By liking a post, the reader tells all his or her Facebook friends about your blog post, greatly amplifying your blog’s exposure.
5. If other Facebook friends have already Liked the post, their names will be displayed next to the button. This creates a sense of trust and community and increases the chances your reader will also Like the post (creating even more exposure).
6. You can configure the Like button to show not only the names of the friends, but also their profile pictures! This further amplifies the comfort level of your reader and encourages them to share your blog post.

One other thing to note as a blogger is that the Like button isn’t tied to your Facebook account or Fan page. When a reader likes your blog post, the message that shows up on the readers Facebook timeline links directly back to your blog. This is great because the potential for exposure is huge — a reader doesn’t need to be your Fan or friend on Facebook to share your content!

How to integrate the Facebook Like button on a WordPress blog

For WordPress blogs, I prefer adding the Like button using a WordPress plugin like this one. However if you just want to add the Like button to your theme manually, you can drop this snippet of code in your theme’s single.php file, just after the line that includes the the_content(); function:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php echo urlencode(get_permalink($post->ID)); ?>&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=false&amp;width=450&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:60px;"></iframe>

For more information, including extra parameters for modifying the behavior of the button, check out the Facebook Developers Documentation page.

Thankfully, after much frustration and research, I have found a working solution using a plugin called Sensitive Tag Cloud. You can visit the plugin home page, or download the plugin from the official WordPress Plugin page.

Once you have installed and activated the plugin, access the configuration page (Appearance -> SensitiveTagCloud) and ensure that the “Restricted to current category” option is enabled.

Now to display the tags for a specific category when you’re browsing that category, edit the archives.php file for your theme and find the section related to browsing by category:

          <?php /* If this is a category archive */ if (is_category()) { ?>
                <h1 class="pagetitle">Category: <?php single_cat_title(); ?></h1>

Now, right below that second line, insert the following function to call SensitiveTagCloud:

<?php
  if( function_exists("stc_widget") )
    stc_widget();
?>

You can also wrap the function in a div if you want to style it. Here’s how my archive.php file looks now (minus the unrelated sections of code):

          <?php /* If this is a category archive */ if (is_category()) { ?>
                <h1 class="pagetitle">Browsing: <?php single_cat_title(); ?></h1>
<div style="background:#EAF3F3 none repeat scroll 0 0; border: 1px solid #D0D8D8; padding: 20px;">
<?php
  if( function_exists("stc_widget") )
    stc_widget();
?>
</div>

And with those changes, here’s how my Category pages now look:

This allows for browsing the tags associated with a specific category, while eliminating irrelevant tags. I write on a variety of topics, so there are a lot of tags that are unrelated or that would be out of context. For example, the “Blogging” tag in the Personal Development category would likely mean something different than the same tag in the Technology category (the latter having more to do with technical things like this article on WordPress).

The command line has so many advantages over the GUI. There are no annoying dialog boxes, no GUI quirks, and no frozen windows. If you want to automate something, you write a script. All POSIX-compliant systems have nearly identical tools and their options and configurations are likely to be the same. When you’re unsure about something, you simply pull up the man page or read the through the documentation to help you along.

The world of the command line is a world for tinkerers, for curious people, and for those with a desire to do more.

All of this started with the idea of making eye’s out of the two a’s in my name. I opened Photoshop, created a new document, added some text and began dabbling.

I thought it would be interesting to show the progression of the logo as I dabbled with the design. You’ll notice how I go full circle from minimalistic, to busy and crowded, and then back to minimalistic.

Here's the one that started it all. It started with the idea of making eye's out of the two a's in my name. At this point I wasn't even treating the logo idea seriously.

This is where I started to take the idea a little more seriously and began mixing in my tag line.

I played with the Photoshop custom shapes tool and found some grass.

I took the custom shapes a little too far; looks too busy.

Realizing that the green grass looks a lot like hair, I moved the face away from the letters.

Not liking how the tag line was spread all over the place, I brought it together at the bottom.

My perfectionist self couldn't be happy with the hand-drawn smile. So, using the same font as I used for my name, I created a parentheses and turned it on its side for the smile. I also changed the eyes using a hard-rounded brush instead of a soft-rounded brush.

For the final revision, I tweaked the tag line and replaced the commas with dot separators.

Design is definitely not one of my strong points, but I’m happy with the way the final logo came out. In fact, it’s probably the best and most creative logo I’ve ever come up with.

Step 1: Disable plugins

It’s a good idea to disable your plugins before making these changes. At the very least, if you have a caching plugin installed (such as WP Super Cache), delete the cache and then disable that plugin.

Step 2: Change the blog URL

First, I had to change the WordPress blog URL from blog.raamdev.com to raamdev.com/blog/. This is simply a matter of updating the “WordPress address” and “Blog address” options from within the WordPress Administration panel (Settings -> General).

Second, I wanted the final URL to be raamdev.com/, instead of raamdev.com/blog/. To do this, I first changed the “Blog address” to raamdev.com/. Now to get WordPress working on the webroot (raamdev.com/), I had to move /blog/index.php to the webroot (/index.php) and then edit index.php and change this line,

require('./wp-blog-header.php');

to this,

require('./blog/wp-blog-header.php');

Now, when index.php is loaded, it knows to look for all the WordPress files in /blog/ and since WordPress has been configured to use raamdev.com/ as the “Blog address”, it will automatically handle everything else.

Step 3: Redirect old URLs to the new URL

The blog. sub-domain maps to a directory in the webroot called /blog/. If someone visits a link to a page that includes the sub-domain, the web server needs to tell the browser the new location. To do this, I needed to recreate the /blog/ directory and add the following to an .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog\.raamdev\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://raamdev.com/blog/$1 [R=301,L]

Now, if someone tries to visit http://blog.raamdev.com/2010/01/28/some-blog-post, the web server will do a 301 redirect to http://raamdev.com/blog/2010/01/28/some-blog-post.

What’s a 301 redirect? Well, when you move a web page from one location to another, you can specify the type of redirection. A 301 redirect means the web page has been moved permanently. This is useful for keeping indexes updated. For example, if someone searches Google and finds an old link, Google will detect the 301 redirect and update its index with the new URL, thereby keeping your URL’s pagerank.

Step 4: Change Permalink structure

To change the permalink structure, I used the awesome Permalink Migration plugin by Dean Lee. With this plugin, I just specify the old permalink structure (in my case, this was /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/) and then change the permalink structure in WordPress (Settings -> Permalinks) to the new format (I’m using /%postname%/).

Now whenever someone visits a URL using the old permalink structure, Dean’s plugin sends a 301 redirect to the new URL.

Summary

With the .htaccess rewrite rule and Dean’s Permalink Migration plugin, we now have a double 301 redirect to make sure the old URLs redirect to the new ones:

1. Someone searches Google and finds this link to my site: http://blog.raamdev.com/2010/01/28/some-blog-post
2. The .htaccess rule rewrites the URL and redirects: http://raamdev.com/blog/2010/01/28/some-blog-post
3. Dean’s Permalink Migration plugin redirects to the new permalink structure: http://raamdev.com/blog/some-blog-post

Here’s what the standard md5sum output looks like:

$ md5sum test.txt
d0ea20794ab78114230ba1ab167a22c2 test.txt

Now here’s what the output of md5 on Mac OS X looks like:

$ md5 test.txt
MD5 (test.txt) = d0ea20794ab78114230ba1ab167a22c2

While this normally wouldn’t be a big deal, it can cause major issues if you’re trying to run scripts that were written for a Unix-like environment which expect the default md5sum format.

Thankfully, md5 has a switch that reverses the output:

$ md5 -r test.txt
d0ea20794ab78114230ba1ab167a22c2 test.txt

If you’d like to permanently change md5’s behavior to mimic that of md5sum, you have two options:

The first is to simply add the following alias to ~/.profile:

alias md5sum='md5 -r'

Now when you type ‘md5sum test.txt‘, the command will be replaced with ‘md5 -r test.txt‘. However, this may not work with your scripts.

The second solution, and my preferred method, is to create a small script called md5sum that contains the following:

#!/bin/bash
/sbin/md5 -r "$@"

I then make this script executable (chmod +x md5sum) and put it in /sbin/. Now, whenever a script calls md5sum, the small bash script above is used and it produces output identical to that of md5sum on other Unix systems.

After some investigation, it appears this is a problem with the way IE7 and IE8 request session data from Apache, or possibly because IE7 and IE8 have a non-standard way of announcing the domain they’re requesting session data for.

Here’s my scenario:

I’m running Apache 1.3 with two domains, each has their own account with their own users:

    Domain: mycompany.com
    Session path: /tmp/
    Webserver user: mycompanycom

    Domain: support.mycompany.com
    Session path: /tmp/
    Webserver user: nobody

Here is what happens during a normal visit with Firefox/Safari/Chrome:

1. I visit mycompany.com and session file is created in /tmp/ owned by the user mycompanycom
2. I then visit support.mycompany.com, and second session file is created in /tmp/ owned by user nobody
3. Apache doesn’t get confused and the correct session files are returned

However, here’s what happens during a visit with IE7 and IE8:

1. I visit mycompany.com and a session file is created in /tmp/ owned by the user mycompanycom
2. I then visit support.mycompany.com and, instead of creating second session file in /tmp/ owned by the user nobody as you would expect (and as happens when using Firefox/Safari/Chrome), Apache tries to return the session file for mycompany.com.
3. The session file for mycompany.com is owned by the user mycompanycom, so the web server, running as user nobody cannot access it. Permission is denied.

I searched Google for a solution and came across this question on StackOverflow. Several users suggested creating a separate directory in /tmp/ to separate the stored session data for support.mycompany.com from the session data for mycompany.com and then telling PHP to store all session data for support.mycompany.com in the new directory. This worked perfectly!

Here’s what I did. First, create the new session directory (Note: Make sure the new directory resides inside /tmp/!):

    mkdir /tmp/support.mycompany.com
    chown nobody:nobody /tmp/support.mycompany.com

I then added the following to an .htaccess file in the root web directory for support.mycompany.com:

    php_value session.save_path '/tmp/support.mycompany.com'

And finally, I removed all existing session data in /tmp/ to ensure the new session path would get used immediately:

    rm -f /tmp/sess_*

And that’s it! Now IE7 and IE8 work properly because when visiting support.mycompany.com, IE7 and IE8 do not accidentally find session data for mycompany.com and try to use it.

I’m fairly certain this problem has to do with how IE7 and IE8 request session data from Apache. They probably first request session data for mycompany.com and THEN request session data for support.mycompany.com, even though the latter was the only doman entered in the address bar.

That “On Behalf Of” part is caused by the Sender: header that GMail’s SMTP servers add:

Sender: my.personal@gmail.com
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 2009 10:33:18 -0500
Subject: Re: Project Details
From: raam.dev@mydomain.com
To: important-client@domain.com

Having your personal GMail address show up looks totally unprofessional and prevents you from being able to keep your personal email, uh, well, personal. Unfortunately, Google has already said it’s part of their SMTP server specs, so they won’t change it.

For a long time, your only option was to use a desktop email client like Outlook or Thunderbird to send email using your own domain’s SMTP server. However, this meant accessing your GMail account using IMAP/POP and basically defeated the purpose of the web client (unless you didn’t mind switching between the web and desktop client).

When Google offered GMail for Domains (now called Google Apps for Domains), I eagerly set up a free account using one of my domains and tested to see if email sent still included the Sender header. Sadly it did and I abandoned the idea of using GMail as my primary email client.

A few days ago I accidentally discovered that now both the standard GMail and Google Apps for Domains have the ability to specify your own SMTP server when you add an external email address to your GMail account. (Here’s the announcement from a few months ago on Google’s Blog.) This means you can receive email from you@yourdomain.com and also reply to emails from within GMail as you@yourdomain.com and the receiver won’t know that you’re using GMail!

Here’s how to get this set up:

Login to GMail and click Settings at the top right. Then click the Accounts and Import tab:

Now make sure the “Reply from the same address the message was sent to” is selected and click “Send mail from another address” to add your external email account.

Fill in the name you want to show up when you send email from this account. This will probably be your name, but it might also be something like “Company Support” or “Sales”. Now enter your full external email address in the second box and then click Next Step.

On the next screen, select the second option box, “Send through SMTP servers” and fill in the SMTP Server, Username, and Password fields. When you click Add Account, Google will try connecting to the SMTP server using the credentials you supplied. If it successfully connects, you’ll be brought back to the Accounts and Import tab with your new account added. Otherwise, Google will display the error it had when trying to verify the SMTP connection details.

Now you should see the new account listed on the Accounts and Import tab, along with a note at the bottom showing that email will be sent using the SMTP server you specified:

Now, you can send and receive email using this external account and the receiver won’t see that annoying “On Behalf Of” message! Your GMail address won’t even be visible in the email headers if they choose to view the email source (they’ll see that the email was routed through a Google server, but Google is well known enough that they probably won’t care).

If you want to change the default application used to open all files with a specific extension, the steps are slightly different:

Select the file and choose File -> Get Info (or Cmd+i) and expand the Open With section:

From here, select the application you want to use for opening those file types and then click Change All. This will update the OS X Launch Services Database, which is consulted when opening files. Now all files with that extension will be opened with the application you selected.

Note: The steps below were used to prepare a MacBook Pro running OS X Leopard for resale. Although the steps are similar for other versions of OS X, I have only tested them with Leopard.

Backup Your Data

If the Mac you’re reselling is your own, you should do a full system backup before proceeding.

My favorite method for doing this is to use an external USB hard drive and Carbon Copy Cloner (free). Carbon Copy Cloner can be used to take a snapshot of your entire drive and make it bootable. This means you can actually boot from your backup drive, given you’re booting from identical hardware. At the very least, you’ll have an identical copy of everything on the computer.

You can also use Time Machine to backup your data. I don’t use Time Machine, so I cannot recommend it.

The bottom line is, you want to backup anything important on the Mac you’re reselling because the next steps will erase everything.

Reinstall Mac OS X Leopard

1. Insert Mac OS X Leopard Install Disc
2. Restart the computer
3. Hold down the Option key while the computer is restarting. The system will then prompt you to select a startup disk. Choose the Mac OS X Leopard Install Disc.
4. On the “Select a Destination” screen, click “Options” and choose “Erase and Install”. This will ensure a clean installation of Mac OS X Leopard.
5. Follow the remaining steps to install Mac OS X; they are all self explanatory.
6. When the installation finishes, the Mac will reboot and you’ll be presented with the Setup Assistant.

If you’re not interested in installing the software updates or any additional software, press Command+Q to quit the Setup Assistant and choose Shutdown. The next time you turn on the machine, the Setup Assistant will launch again.

Install Software Updates & Additional Software

If you want to be super nice to the new owner of your Mac, you’ll need to complete the Setup Assistant and create a temporary user. We will use that user to download and install the software updates as well as install any additional applications (Firefox, MS Office, etc.). Once we’re done updating the system and installing software, we’ll delete the temporary user and reset the Setup Assistant.

1. Complete the Setup Assistant and create the first user account (we’ll delete this user and reset the Setup Assistant later, so it doesn’t matter what you use). Make note of the shortname for the user you create as we’ll need that in the next section (e.g., user “Raam Dev” will probably have a shortname of “raamdev”).
2. At this point, you should be logged into the newly reinstalled system using the temporary account you created.
3. Connect to the Internet (using a wired or wireless connection)
4. Run Software Update (Apple Icon -> Software Update) and install any available updates. This may take awhile!
5. After the system reboots, run Software Update again. There will most likely be more updates to install. Repeat this process until there are no more updates to install.
6. Install any additional applications, being sure to install for “All Users” if prompted. Also, make sure the new applications are installed in /Applications/ and not ~/Applications/

Clean Up and Reset the Setup Assistant

Now that we’ve installed the latest updates and installed any additional software, we need to clean things up. First, we’ll delete the temporary user we created and then we’ll reset the Setup Assistant to ensure it launches the next time we boot up.

First, you’ll need to start the Mac in Single User mode by restarting and holding down Command+S. This mode does not have a graphical user interface (GUI) and is entirely command-based.

Once you’re in Single User mode, run the following commands and press Enter at the end of each line. (Note: The $ represents the command prompt; you don’t actually type the $.)

By default, the hard drive is mounted as read-only in Single User mode. Before we continue, we need to make the disk writable:

$ mount -uw /

Next, we clean up that temporary user we created. Replace USERNAME with the shortname of the user you created in the previous section.

$ rm -R /Library/Preferences/
$ rm -R /Users/USERNAME/
$ /bin/launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.DirectoryServices.plist &
$ dscl . -delete /Users/USERNAME

And lastly, we need to reset the Setup Assistant so it runs the next time we start the Mac:

$ rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

Now that everything is cleaned up and the Setup Assistant has been reset, we can shutdown the system and ship or deliver the Mac to its new owner!

$ shutdown -h now

If you want to boot the Mac to make sure it looks the way it should when the user gets it (i.e., the intro video and Setup Assistant start), just make sure you press Command+Q and choose Shutdown.