Ever the glutton for punishment, am I. If you feel the following items are worth being Dugg, please do. I like to land on there once a week or so for something.

Optimizing AirPort Connectivity

Apple Defects Stellar Reporting

MacBook Pro Voltage on the Case

All said, I’m starting to feel the love of Newsvine again. Sadly, as a publisher you just can’t beat the power of Digg for a massive flux of people that won’t ever care about what you wrote again. Oh, wait, that’s not what I want … I want readers. Which is where Newsvine excels.

But, for now, hit me with Digg. I’m all for a short relationship with readers.

Okay, Dugg all to hell now. Thanks.

Is everyone drowning in work lately? I’ve contacted several icon design firms and every last one is too busy for new business or just doesn’t respond to inquiries.

Busy: Icon Factory, Icon Drawer, pixelimplosion

No answer: Iconizer, md3d

So, anyone know of a good, starving icon artist that needs a bundle of cash in exchange for a photo-real icon and a B&W menu bar icon? Preferably with a portfolio?

Lazy Web, I invoke thee. I bring this question from the forum up to the front page because I have the same need. With all the apps out there that do the rest, is there something that does just this? I mean, there’s programs like AppleWorks and Word, but those are hardly minimalist.

Many writers (including me) have for years been looking for a simple app to do the following:

1. Use the built-in OS text-editing functions to compose, edit and spell-check articles.

1. Format the resulting doc for printing in standard manuscript format: double-spaced, indented, with one-inch margins, a header identifying the document, and page-numbering in the footer.

That’s it. No frills, no bloat, no “intelligent” features. In essence, an updated MacWrite v.1, with OSX Services compatibility.

codepoetry forums – View topic – Quest for the minimal word processor

The commenter goes on to explain why various apps don’t fit the bill, and it’s mainly the lack of good header/footer functionality that the smaller apps lack.

[More answers at: LazyWeb

I have a need to carry around an iBook (12”), wireless mouse, iSight, iPod, all associated disks and cables, and possibly a book or two (non-paperback, but not reference-thick, either).

Has anyone seen a bag that can do this? The best so far is the educational backpack from InCase.

Secondly, a folio-style metal case for an iBook (again, 12”) that does nothing but cover it. I’ve seen this for the iPod and Palm, but not for anything bigger. Just enough to protect it when it goes into a backpack with books.

Yes, I’ve seen this hard case for the iBook. This is not what I want. It must fit into a backpack and not add much additional size to the unit. Just a shell to protect it from books and pens and such.

Lazy Web, I invoke thee…

Google’s sending people to my pages’ RSS feeds rather than the real page. The robots.txt file has no control over file extensions (specifically, query arguments). There appear to be no HTTP headers to control crawling (caching is not appropriate).

Is there any way to prevent Google from going to any URL ending in ?rss on the site?

Answer: It was in the FAQ, of all places. grumble

==

12. How do I tell Googlebot not to crawl dynamically generated pages on my site?
The following robots.txt file will achieve this.
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*?

==

The problem was that I was using heredoc syntax, so variables, while being output from MT properly, were being parsed inside the heredoc as they were input. It looked like it would work, but PHP was eating the variables on the way into the string in the first place.

Used single quotes and had MT escape my output and it all works now. Finally. On to the archives and so on…