Scott Explains

Facebook Privacy Settings, a how to

Everyone loves Facebook, I mean can you think of a better way of staying in touch with people you never really wanted to know in the first place?

However, Facebook has lots of information about you (that you're entered yourself) that you might not want to share with everyone. I created this quick screencast about Facebook privacy settings for my day job, and thought it would make a great Scott Explains post too.

Why should you care about these privacy settings? Well, if you check out openbook, a service that allows you to search Facebook postings that are totally public (i.e. you don't need to be logged into Facebook to see them, nor do you need to be a person's friend) you can see that people are posting all sorts of things to Facebook without thinking about who will see them.

Taking a few moments to review your Facebook privacy settings is time well spent.

Put a Fav Folder in your iPhone's Dock

 One of my favorite iPhone tricks has to be assigning the camera app to launch whenever you double click on the home button. Sadly, if you’re running iOS 4, Apple’s latest and greatest operating system for i-Devices, this trick no longer works. Double clicking the home button now brings up an application switcher, allowing you to scroll through all the recently launched apps on your iPhone (as seen to the right).

Don’t despair, Apple giveth when they taketh away, though. You can now create folders of apps on your iPhone. Just press down on an app’s icon until it wiggles. Then drag that icon onto another icon you want to group together and a folder is created. You can drag in up to 12 apps into one folder, and you can even name that folder whatever you want.

Back to our camera conundrum, though: can I still get easy access to the camera? I could just put it in my iPhone’s Dock (that’s the row of four icons at the bottom of your iPhone’s screen), but I don’t use the camera enough to devote one of those four coveted spots to it alone. I do, however, have a few apps that I use quite frequently.

 I bet you can see where this is going: create a folder with your most used apps and put that into the Dock. As you can see I created a folder named ‘Favs’ that includes Twitter, the Camera, We Rule, and TaskPaper. Now tweeting, snapping a pic, wasting some time, or getting stuff done are all a tap away.

Each folder can hold up to 12 apps, and the Dock itself can hold 4 icons (either singular apps or folders) so you could cram up to 48 apps into your Dock if you like. I have found that 4 is the number that I can manage without being overwhelmed, but your mileage may vary.

Check out the video to see this tip in action.

How to delete Gmail messages on an iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 4

Google's free email service, Gmail, is quite popular. If you're a long time Gmail user you'll recall that Google wanted to reinvent email by giving folks what seemed like unlimited space for their email accounts. All that space meant you would never need to delete an email message again. In fact, at the beginning there was no easy way to delete an email from your Gmail account, the only thing you could do is Archive messages (which removed them from your inbox, but they would still show up in searches and the like).

Gmail users who updated their iPhones, and iPod touches, to the latest version of the iPhone operating system (called iOS now) might be experiencing a little dejavu. By default you can't delete messages from your Gmail account on your iPhone/iPod touch running iOS 4. Luckily, you can revert back to the old deleting behaviour pretty easily.

iOS Gmail default

Here you can see my Gmail account with the iOS 4 default setting. Swiping an email message reveals an 'Archive' button (which used to be a delete button). As Jacqui at Ars points out in her great iOS 4 review you can move an email message to the Trash folder manually... but that is far too many steps.

Launch the Settings app

To turn off message archiving just tap on the Sattings app and select "Mail, Contacts, Calendars." This will list all the email account you have on your iPhone under the 'Account' section. Tap on your Gmail account.

Turn off Archive Messages

This is what your Gmail account settings should look like (roughly). Tap on the On/Off switch next to "Archive Messages." Now you can delete emails like a mad man.

Deleting like the good old days

And there is the familiar Delete button we know and love. If you decide you rather liked Archiving messages just pop back into your Gmail settings on your iPhone and toggle "Archive Messages" to On.

Improving your WordPress blog's permalinks

Many people use WordPress to host their blogs (heck, I even wrote a book on that very subject). WordPress is a fantastic piece of software, however it always pains me to see someone using the default permalink structure.

What is a permalink? That's the permanent URL for a particular post on your blog ( for example, the permalink for this post is http://www.scottexplains.com/2010/04/improving-your-wordpress-blogs-permalinks.html, though Scott Explains runs on TypePad. Oddly enough I'm writing a book about TypePad too. Shocking!). These URLs should never change (hence the "perma") because any time they change you risk breaking all the links people have created pointing to your blog.

By default WordPress produces permalinks that look like this:

http://www.forkyou.tv/?p=238

That permalink tells you nothing about the content of the post, even worse it doesn't tell search engines (all hail the mighty GOOG) a darned thing either. Now, compare that default link to this one:

http://www.forkyou.tv/2009/12/07/homemade-crackers/

That's a lot of information! First off we can tell this post was published on December 7th, 2009 and it probably has something to do with homemade crackers.

I don't know about you, but I like the second one a whole lot better than the first (and so do search engines since it gives them a bit of text to index).

How do you set this up on your own WordPress blog? Read on to find out.

Oh, do note that this tutorial only applies to the self-hosted version of WordPress available at WordPress.org, not the hosted version at WordPress.com (this version uses better permalinks by default).

Go to your blog's Settings

The permalink structure setting can be found in your blog's settings section. Go to your WordPress blog's dashboard and click on the Settings item located on the lefthand side of the screen (partially pictured above). This will reveal a few more options including Permalinks which you should go ahead and click on.

Choose a Permalink structure

As you can see WordPress comes with a few stock permalink structures (including the default) and a way for you to customize a permalink of your own choosing. I generally select the "Day and name" option since it gives both the publication date and the title of the post in the URL, but you can feel free to pick whichever you would like.

If you want to get fancy and customize your own permalink structure be sure to reference this page that lists all the available variables that you can use.

Why doesn't WordPress have a better default?

I know what you're thinking, "If those default permalinks are so crappy why does WordPress use them in the first place?" The answer is simple: compatibility. You see, no matter which permalink setting you use WordPress itself will still be using the default permalink internally.

Let's take a look at that default URL one more time:

http://www.forkyou.tv/?p=238

The interesting stuff starts happening at the question mark there. That question mark tells WordPress, "Hey, I'm going to pass you a bit of information in the rest of this URL so pay attention!"

The 'p' stands for post, and the number following the equal sign is the post ID. Each post you enter into your WordPress blog is stored in a database (sort of like a spreadsheet, though much more flexible). WordPress automatically assigns each post a unique number to identify it. The default URL tells WordPress which post it should display on the page.

No matter which permalink structure you use, WordPress still needs that post ID. Using some server side trickery, called mod_rewrite, WordPress is able to respond to both the default URL and a different permalink. This basically maps the default permalink structure to the alternate structure you pick in the Permalink settings allowing the server to answer to both permalinks, and everyone is happy.

Sadly, not every hosting company supports this and that's why the WordPress default is what it is. This allows WordPress to work on the widest variety of hosting services.

Changing your iPad's email signature

You just got a brand new iPad, and you're excited about it! We all understand the excitement, but do you really want to remind everyone that you have an iPad every time you send them an email? Of course not! However, by default your iPad appends an email signature (basically some text that appears at the bottom of every email message) that says, "Sent from my iPad."

I'm going to show you how to either replace that text with some a little more useful, or just turn off the email signature all together.

Launch Settings

Launch the Settings app, it is the icon with gears on it (did you know your iPad is steam powered? How else do you think it lasts for ten hours?).

Select "Mail, Contacts, Calendars"

All of your email settings are found under "Mail, Contacts, Calendars." Once you're there tap "Signature" (notice that your current signature is displayed here).

Clear the signature, or replace it

You can clear the current signature by hitting the 'Clear' button on the top right of this screen. Now you can either leave it blank, which means you won't have anything appended to your outgoing email messages, or type in a message of your own.

Happy iPad emailing!