Adding the UIC address book to your Mac

An email I sent out to all of my classmates:

Hi MUPP students,

I have a tip that will give you a major productivity gain when you have to email classmates and you don’t know their addresses. I can only give you directions for Mac OS X, though, so if you use Windows… well, just get a Mac.

This productivity gain will allow the Apple Address Book and Apple Mail applications to search the UIC address book for emails of classmates and faculty as you type the first few letters of someone’s name.

Let’s say you forgot *my* email address and you can’t find your syllabus. You can access the UIC address book online, or you can tell your Mac to look in the UIC electronic directory. Type in “steven vance” and you see the results in the attached screenshot.

Here’s how to do it: (I am using Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5)

1. Open Apple Address Book.
2. Open the Address Book preferences by pressing Command (Apple) + Comma, or by clicking Address Book>Preferences.
3. Click on the LDAP button in the Preferences window.
4. Click on the + (plus) sign at the bottom of this LDAP pane.
5. In the dropdown sheet, input the following information: Name = UIC Directory, Server = ldap.uic.edu, Port = 389, Search Base = ou=people,dc=uic,dc=edu, Scope = One level, Authentication = None.
6. Click Save. Close the Preferences window.
7. Test out the new functionality by clicking on the Directories item in the Groups list of the Address Book application. In the Directories list, click on UIC Directory. Click in the search form and type, slowly, a classmate’s or professor’s name. The names of people who match the query will show in the result list.
8. Apple Mail now also has this functionality to use when you address a new email.

If you have issues, let me know.

The information is the same for other colleges and universities that offer public LDAP access. The University of Chicago has instructions on this page.

Why you should outsource comment management

I outsource blog comment management on Steven can plan to Disqus.

Analyzing my own behavior about commenting on blogs, I recommend that you, too, outsource your comments to Disqus or IntenseDebate.

Here’s why: It makes commenting SO MUCH FASTER AND EASIER.

For people registered on Disqus, your login follows you from site to site and you don’t have to input your credentials (blog, email, name) each time. You maintain your profile on Disqus’s website. For people not registered, they can easily connect their Facebook or Twitter account on a per-comment basis. They can elect to use their OpenID provider. Using a profile maintenance service (like Facebook or Twitter) increases the commenter’s credibility, links back to their own web properties while at the same time making commenting SO MUCH FASTER AND EASIER.

Sorry, I haven’t tried IntenseDebate so I can’t compare the two for you, but I can say that the only issues present with Disqus are the rare downtimes. Their WordPress plugin, though, deals with this gracefully, going back to the original WordPress comments system when Disqus is down.

I think LiveJournal works well partly because of the community centered around leaving comments and the way users manage their comments: Most LiveJournal users lock their entries so only other registered users can leave comments.

Wrong slogan, because people see more than you know

What follows is an email I sent to a small, technology-oriented organization about their slogan.

I take issue with the slogan, “Because if you can’t see it, you can’t find it.”*

Blind and visually impaired people can’t see and are able to find things everyday. Outside, inside, on the computer, and on the web. And when we make websites – or cities – with accessibility in mind, we make the task of finding “it” easier.

I understand why they chose that slogan (it seems clever and it fits what they want to promote), but I think they hastily made the choice to roll it out, and ended up coining an unimaginative and careless tag line.

*I don’t want to link directly to the group who uses this line, but I’m sure you can find it.

My tips about blogging

There are probably a million pages listed on Google about “blogging tips.” Many are developed and published in order to help get you more traffic. Mine are so that you can write higher quality articles and keep readers.

1. Don’t post instantly. Schedule your posts to appear the next day or in 20 minutes. This gives you time to make changes, fix mistakes, or add more photos.
2. Don’t whine or complain. It’s a turnoff. If you feel you must, choose your words wisely, consult a thesaurus, and offer some suggestions about how to make things better.
3. Always. Use. Photos. Sometimes these are more appealing than what you write.

Bit.ly, the best URL shortener, now with competition

At least one person commenting on yesterday’s New York Times article about Google’s service that might compete with Bit.ly doesn’t understand the importance of URL shorteners. They’re necessary because of Twitter.

On an unmoderated forum, that person would have been attacked for being ignorant and for having such strong views about abolishing URL shortening services. What I’m concerned about are people’s issues with linking to spam and malicious webpages. Thankfully, Bit.ly has three features that reduce the likelihood that you click on a link that takes you to a malicious website:

1. The new “white label” service. http://nyti.ms will only take you to pages on the New York Times website.
2. The + sign. Append the + sign to any http://bit.ly link and be taken to the bit.ly website where the link’s final destination will be listed.
3. The bit.ly sidebar. Keep open the bit.ly sidebar (works in all browsers) to discover the destination of shortened URLs present on any webpage.

One goal of Goo.gl is to “protect users from malware and phishing pages”