Murphy Mac

Is your household heterogeneous? Macs and Windows living together? Do your Macs share their files with the Windows machines? Why so many questions?

For years Windows machines that weren’t part of a Domain / Active Directory plunked themselves into a “workgroup” called Workgroup by default. When browsing the network using Microsoft’s My Computer / Network Neighborhood you could see machines grouped this way. You can always rename the workgroup, and in fact some versions of Windows call it MSHOME by default.

On a home network it might be cleaner to have all the computers in the same workgroup. The screencast will show you how to move your Mac into a different workgroup using Directory Access. If your Macs don’t share files on the network using the SMB protocol employed by Microsoft this probably doesn’t matter much to you.

But in cases where you have both Windows and Macs living together, and sharing files amongst themselves, it might make sense to use the Windows sharing instead of Apple. As a general rule of thumb: the fewer protocols running on your network the better.

If you connect your Mac to a Windows network where you work you should talk to your IT department. They might have a preferred workgroup for non-Windows machines or they might help you join their Active Directory.

More on file sharing tomorrow.

Command+K is great for connecting to a network location. But if you’ve got lots of different servers and shares in your midst the list can get cluttered. Sometimes it’s hard to find the server you’re looking for.
Lucky for you, the answer is simple. Create an alias for the resources you frequently access. When you click the alias you’ll automatically be connected to the server. The screencast example uses a Windows server. But you could use the same technique to connect to a Mac-based share.

Check back later in the week. We’ve got more networking tips on the way.

iPhoto books look great in print. But you can share your book as a movie too.

An apparently undocumented feature facilitates exporting straight to a Quicktime movie from your iPhoto book. Just hold the Option key when you click the Play button within your book. You’ll see the same panel you see for a regular book slideshow, but when you click Play within the panel you’ll be prompted to save the show as a movie.

Murphy discovered this while reading an article at Macworld and watching a YouTube video that explained how to send your book to iDVD in order to produce a movie. Great tip - but the process didn’t seem very Mac-like, so Murph tried the Option key. And….it worked.

So the capability has always been there, but now there’s a more direct way to do it. You don’t have to open iDVD, or close it, or delete a useless iDVD project. Don’t know what we’re talking about? There’s a screencast, click Watch Now below.

This must be what it feels like to discover a new galaxy or something.

If you’ve been a regular on MurphyMac you probably know Murph tends to take the weekends off. But you’ve still got a hunger for Screencasts, right? Take a look at the eContent blog. It’s got all kinds of resources for web-based and podcast learning.

The site is run by a Honeywell corporate education manager who’s a pretty interesting guy! He’s also developed a series of custom search engines using Google Co-op, including one for screencast search.  If you’ve got a favorite site for software education go ahead and ask him to add it to the index.

If you’re not familiar with Google Co-op it’s a free service that lets you create a custom search engine that indexes the sites you specify. You can then place the search box on your own site. The eContent site covers its use in a Google Co-op screencast.

With iWeb it’s easy to make fantastic looking content in a matter of minutes. To keep things simple, iWeb never shows you a single line of html. For some that’s good. For others it’s frustrating.

If you check around on the web you’ll find some workarounds. A common theme: Put a placeholder on your page - like a word that will stand out. After publishing you can scan your html for the standout word and replace it with whatever html code you want on your iWeb page.

Murphy’s going to make it even easier. He’s using a free tool called iWebMore. We’ll put a rounded-rectangle on the page as a placeholder. We’ll add the html inside the rectangle, then let iWebMore do the dirty work of updating our html after we publish.

You could use this method to add all kinds of code scraps. Digg buttons, videos, Adsense banners - all kinds of content. Even just a few simple lines of html that iWeb couldn’t do for you. Suddenly iWeb isn’t half as limited as you once thought.

Remember, you’re altering the pages after you publish. That means if you publish again you’ll have to process your pages again using iWebMore to update the html. iWeb doesn’t know you altered the html.

In the screencast we’ll add a small piece of Google script to our page that pulls our favorite stories from Google Reader. As we mark stories as favorites in Google Reader, our iWeb generated page will update with new links. This is a great way to keep your site fresh, and provide your readers with content that interests you.

Down the road we’ll take a look at making the changes manually. For now, iWebMore makes it really easy. Who knows, maybe the next version of iWeb will take care of this for us??

Related information: See the screencast for automating iWeb syncing with a third party host.