To be honest most of them are just to remind me which sequence of key clicks will let me do something I'm currently struggling to do (often on Excel or Word). Some of them are how to do things with Twitter, though many of those go out of date fairly quickly after writing them.
In the list below I've ordered them thematically rather than by date. Even older posts may be of value as I do go back and add in updates.
This is probably the point at which I have to admit to having a separate WordPress blog called 'How to do various techy things' which updates or goes into more depth on some of the stuff below, and some additional stuff too. It's very Twitter heavy at the moment. You can see the curated / thematic index here, or the full sitemap here.
Posts you can find on THIS blog.
Twitter-related posts
- How to use Storify - it's not Twitter of course, but it's often used to gather together a lot of tweets. My first blog post of 2016. Note that tweets added to Storify will stay there even if the original sender later deletes them.
- Spambots that favourite random tweets on Twitter - a possible (gradual) solution - would definitely work but didn't really come to much cos Twitter seemed to fix the problem
- RSS to Twitter - turning website updates into automated tweets, with IFTTT - examples might include a new job advert added to a website, if the site has an RSS feed for updates you can get them sent to Twitter and view them there along with other news feeds. The example I've used here is for making new film music concerts (added to a film music concert website) more obvious on Twitter.
- Sharing a link to a tweet may now notify that person, some suggested workarounds - this is very visible on desktop Twitter (shows up as a notification) though it's completely absent on Echofon
- April 2014, finding hashtagged tweets from November 2013 - a case study - finding old tweets on Twitter used to be really difficult, now it's really easy, hooray.
- It is not possible to view private tweets but here's what to be aware of to protect your account - one of my most popular posts which has taken on a life of its own, I assume it's showing up in Google searches as all the traffic comes from that.
- Three fairly cool things you can do on Twitter (apart from tweet, obviously) - I just had a quick look, this is pretty decent even if I do say so myself ;)
- Useful posts about Twitter - a collection - some duplication with other posts mentioned in here
- Twitter's new photo preview just takes up more space - here's one partial solution - one of those posts written when Twitter's gone and changed something else that annoyed lots of people. I suspect we've all got used to it now.
- How to send and receive web addresses via Twitter DM - break the URL - an imperfect fix - Twitter solved this problem itself so this is no longer relevant however it's also useful if you want to send someone a link while cloaking it a bit (though it makes more sense to email it if you want to be that stealthy!)
- How to remember who tweeted that article when you want to give them credit later - clicked a link from someone's tweet, left it open in a tab, read it hours later? Me too.
- How to trap tweets in a hurry - for those times when someone's doing something dodgy on Twitter and you need to capture the evidence, ideally before they delete it.
- Thwarting spammers on hashtag livetweeted events - basically use the minus key to run a search that excludes terms or URLs the spammers are using
- Using free tools to capture a handful of tweets or a larger bunch - possibly a bit out of date now
WordPress.com
I've no idea how to do the .org thing I'm afraid, never used it
- How to create a clickable image for Wordpress dot com sidebars - I use this for advertising events. These are generally more visible on the desktop version of blog posts though.
- How to make it look like you've embedded a short Storify into a free Wordpress dot com blog post - right, the challenge here is that WordPress won't let you embed a Storify (or didn't the last time I tried it). If your Storify is manageably small then you can cheat by embedding the embeddable elements (tweets) and inserting screenshots of things with pictures in them (and hyperlink them to the original thing). It looks pretty good I have to say.
- Will it embed? How to embed all sorts of things on free Wordpress dot com blog posts - lots of things won't embed in WP, here are the ones that will and how to get them there.
Word
- More Word glitches solved - troublesome HYPERLINKs and apostrophes
- How to get rid of white space / line breaks in Word - when you've copied formatted text from elsewhere and find it's added in a whole bunch of crap
- How to get rid of lines in Word (Microsoft Word 2010) - another hugely popular post. Ctrl+Q is probably what you're after, or select / copy and paste the text into a plain text document to wipe out all the formatting and then reformat. This one has a lot of comments which vary from the really polite and enthusiastic to the amazingly rude. I'm used to that sort of level of rudeness from homeopaths and other quacks who've been challenged, not used to it on techy posts ;)
- How to stop Word 2007 / 2010 (y’know, ‘new’ Word) capitalising words - not at all popular this one, I suppose everyone's worked it out now, but in case you haven't...
Mac wrangling
If I'm honest, I hate Macs. Love iPhones. Just massively prefer PCs for doing stuff, sorry Mac fans.
- How to copy and paste file paths in Mac Finder - not that you can do much with it. Unlike on a PC.
- I've got a new Mac, stuff I've been learning about it - basically spending ages trying to find out how to do stuff I could do easily on a PC ;)
- How to take screenshots - on PCs, Macs and iPhones
Excel spreadsheets
- How to turn two columns in Excel into one without losing contents - concatenate not merge - I've actually discovered an even simpler way of doing this, you can actually write =CONCATENATE and then pick what you want to merge. If it's FIRSTNAME SURNAME going to a single NAME column you have to remember to include a " " between the names.
- How to search across all tabs in an Excel workbook spreadsheet - brilliant, such a time-saver, so glad I discovered how to do this! I asked on Twitter and helpful folk answered.
- How to make sequential numbers appear in Excel - embarrassingly easy. Impossibly impossible if you just don't know how to do it of course.
Powerpoint / presentations
- If you give talks with slides you must do this one thing - because I have commanded it :) Please make your links friendly -
- How to embed audio in PowerPoint presentations and convert m4a to mp3
- How I prepare presentations for giving talks - not a 'howto' techy post as such, just some background on the preparation I do when giving a short talk or hour-long lecture
Dropbox
- Using the address in a public Dropbox folder to find other files also shared - mildly forensic, I suppose.
- How to enjoy media files on iPhone without using iTunes (and using Dropbox instead) - I was pretty happy when I discovered how to do this.
- How to share your Twitter archive via your public Dropbox - it's easy to do but it doesn't mean that you should (while all tweets from a public account are obviously public and visible you are 'surfacing' tweets that might not otherwise be that noticeable).
Google Drive posts
- How to make a Google Fusion table map (ie a zoomable map of addresses) for Sherlock special cinemas - making these maps is such fun
- Alt+Shift+5: How to strikethrough text on Google Drive (Google Docs as was) - Option+Shift+5 for Macs - turns out this is a hugely popular post, not sure why
Miscellaneous
- How to avoid deleting stuff and how to recover from it - at a fairly basic level I think - probably out of date now, think of it as a living history of how we used to recover from system crashes etc.
- Finding things that aren't there any more on the internet, and storing things that are - can be quite useful
- How to turn one PDF file with 10 pages in it into 10 files with one page in them - easy on Macs with preview, but can also be done on PCs using a nifty Chrome tool.
- How to create a thumbnail of a website using Paint and PowerPoint - quite fun
- How to grab the search results URL from NCBI PubMed - it seemed surprisingly fiddly until I found out how to do it!
- Fairly useful pages on the internet - a collection of tools I've found handy
- What is a misleading homeopathy claim, and how to report it to the ASA - uses the example of homeopathy but is applicable in any situation where an organisation is making misleading advertising claims
Posts with me as the intended audience
Doing stuff on websites
- Worked example: redirecting some pages on the work website
- Memo to self on how to set up a page redirect on a website
Posts
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Comment policy: I enthusiastically welcome corrections and I entertain polite disagreement ;) Because of the nature of this blog it attracts a LOT - 5 a day at the moment - of spam comments (I write about spam practices,misleading marketing and unevidenced quackery) and so I'm more likely to post a pasted version of your comment, removing any hyperlinks.
Comments written in ALL CAPS LOCK will be deleted and I won't publish any pro-homeopathy comments, that ship has sailed I'm afraid (it's nonsense).