Archive for April, 2007

20 Apr 2007

Fumbled Fumbles on the Microsoft Excel “Save As” Issue

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I read a Digg post today, that some how made it to the front page, that just made me laugh. The author of the post was obviously very ignorant in his approach and lazy on research that went in to his blog post.

See if anybody can find the Big Save As Button on the picture below.

Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Save As

As one commenter on this article put it:

floppyllamadigg: We’ve met the one user on the planet that can’t function without Clippy.

I tend to agree with floppyllamadigg in that any user that cannot find the huge circle button with the Windows Logo in it or isn’t at least curious enough to click that huge target probably should stick with Notepad or the more advanced WordPad.

Update: (17:30 EST) And the lemmings follow along.

Update: (2007-4-21) And the good times keep rolling over at Fumbled.org. The new post on Fumbled.org seems to be more of a backhanded apology. However as I have said before when you make a mistake, fess up, there is nothing more refreshing in this days world than that. So kudos to R Lee Creasy, who I featured above in the lemmings update.

17 Apr 2007

Sitemap Auto Discovery And You

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Last week all the major search engine providers, announced that they were going to support a new specification at sitemap.org that allows them to auto discover your sitemap without you having to submit it:

Yahoo did a good job at summing up the advantages to putting your sitemap location in the robots.txt file.

All search crawlers recognize robots.txt, so it seemed like a good idea to use that mechanism to allow webmasters to share their Sitemaps. You agreed and encouraged us to allow robots.txt discovery of Sitemaps on our suggestion board. We took the idea to Google and Microsoft and are happy to announce today that you can now find your sitemaps in a uniform way across all participating engines.

If you want to see my implementation of this for my sitemap go to http://www.coderjournal.com/robots.txt. Further details about this can be found at http://sitemaps.org/protocol.htm or for your convenience I have included them below.

Specifying the Sitemap location in your robots.txt file

You can specify the location of the Sitemap using a robots.txt file. To do this, simply add the following line:

Sitemap: <sitemap_location>

The <sitemap_location> should be the complete URL to the Sitemap, such as: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

This directive is independent of the user-agent line, so it doesn’t matter where you place it in your file. If you have a Sitemap index file, you can include the location of just that file. You don’t need to list each individual Sitemap listed in the index file.

16 Apr 2007

Speeding up a Slow Outlook 2007

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Just found a recent post by Scott Hanselman on how to speed up the slow load times of Outlook 2007, and I thougt it was worth passing on to my readers.

Outlook 2007 has been pretty slow for me since I installed it. If you’ve got RSS Feeds Enabled and/or if you’re a packrat, Outlook 2007 can be a downright performance pig. I’ve got internal contacts that say that the Office team is hot on the tail of a number of really interesting issues.

What can you do today? A patch KB933493 went live yesterday to help speed up access to large PSTs and OSTs. For now, you have to go get it. We’ll see what the future holds for this, but I suspect that Office SP1, whenever it comes out, is going to be a very snappy performer.

Initial reports on this patch are positive. Searches are faster, Undos are faster, moving messages is faster, and moving quickly while reading in the preview pane is faster. The future bright on this one…I was really starting to get bummed about Outlook’s performance.