Chiperoni ku Basel

Day: September 13, 2008

  • Useful Mac Tool: Skitch

    It’s been one year and one month since I moved to Mac. And in line with the underlying concept of this post, I’d like to recommend a Mac OS tool which I find very useful:

    Skitch

    If you have a look at my Flickr stream, I tend to post a number of screenshots to collect ideas and illustrate blog posts. Skitch is great for this.

    I found that Skitch is more intuitive than Apple’s Grab. By default Grab creates TIFFs, which I find more cumbersome to handle and an overkill for quick notes.

    I like the Skitch annotation features (text, arrows, circles, squares). This helps to interact with external contractors much faster. And I can easily send the screenshot via Apple Mail.

    I post to my Flickr account directamente without a detour to Flickr Uploader. And Skitch keeps a history of recent photos and screenshots, which I can easily drag to a desktop app like Powerpoint.

    A productivity tool to consider!

  • The RSS Footer

    One of my regular Google alerts currently points to a blog that is scraping entire sections of my content and displaying these on a Blogspot site.

    I have reported the Blogspot site via this website:

    Blogger Help

    And I’m well aware of the fact that anything I publish on the world wide web is up for grabs. It’s a well-known fact. The minute you offer an RSS feeds, scrapers can easily pull your content and display it anywhere they like.

    And you depend on the big search engine company to sort out the original from the copycats.

    That’s why I like this tagline: “Make the scrapers work for you!”.

    If you’re using WordPress, download the plugin and upload it to your plugin folder. Activate it in the Plugins view and then open Settings > RSS Footer to add a text and backlink:

    chiperoni.ch › RSS Footer Configuration — WordPress

    Click Update Settings.

    Finally, ping Feedburner (if you’re using it) and you should see the changes show up in your feed.

    If you’re using Blogger (and you understand German), see Mlle. A.’s excellent tutorial.

    See also:
    How to foil scrapers on your blog
    The Lifecyle of a Blog Post