ItsGeekToMe.co
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Issue #299: April 14, 2013
Q: How can I log-in when I’m in your website? Every time I want to submit a question I have to go through the same process of typing out a garbled word before I can submit my question. In most sites we only have to do that one time while we are setting up an account. After that we only need to log-in with our user names and passwords. Would you please put a step by step procedure in the newspaper for us to follow so we won’t have to go through all the rig-a-maroll before it will accept the question.
– Judie D.
Navarre, Florida
A: My website at ItsGeekToMe.co (not .coM) has been up for well over a year now. Other than little tweaks here and there when I discover a problem, it hasn’t changed a whole lot except for the new weekly column content that is added each Saturday night. Nevertheless, I’ve recently had a spate of e-mails similar to Judie’s, spanning everything from an inability to register, to a variety of “How-do-I…?” questions.
First of all, let me explain the “garbled word”. The I.G.T.M. website allows external contributors to generate site content, so I felt it necessary to protect that process from unwanted Internet Bots posting SPAM everywhere. The challenge-response “garbled word” is called a CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. If you could see the site from the administrator’s perspective, you’d appreciate how much this is protecting you. It keeps the comments on the site legitimate, and prevents random ad posts from clogging up the system. Even with this protection in place, I still have to manually delete a steady stream of “trackback spam” that is generated by my site content being echoed out to the blogosphere each week.
The process for signing up is pretty straightforward. On any page of the site, the left-hand button on the navigation bar says “Register to post comments”. Click it, and you’ll be taken to a rather plain-looking WordPress page that almost makes it look like you’ve left the I.G.T.M. site. Trust me, you have not. Fill out the page, especially your username (which is how you’ll be known on the site) and you’re all done. Your first comment will have to be manually moderated by me, but subsequent comments (assuming you’re not a spammer) will show up immediately after you enter them. Right now the main site content is the searchable archive of past columns, but there’s more content in the wings waiting for be added to the site. I need to get a few more users out there to make it worth my time to maintain this FREE service.
READER TIP OF THE WEEK – Subject: After-market ink and cleaning-up forwarded e-mails. Long-time reader Jerry A. had this to say about a recent column (I.G.T.M. #296, Mar 24, 2013): “I really do think that the printer manufacturers, at least HP, program their printers to recognize if their own ink is used or the generic brand. I recently installed a new cartridge in my HP Photosmart 5514 and I received a message from HP thanking me for using its product. I’ve long suspected that various companies write code into their programs to mess up your computer if you don’t use their brand or some other infraction of their policy. I do believe that both Norton and McAfee messed up my computer because I did not renew my Internet security right on the expiration date. Also, for many years I’ve been using a free program called “emailStripper” that removes all those “forwarded” >>>>> or vertical lines that Jim J. inquired about. You copy the message, then click onto your email stripper icon on your desktop, then click on Paste, Strip-It and Copy. You can then create a new message and paste the uncluttered message on that page. It works great. I also use it for copying pages from a webpage, and it eliminates all those ads that usually are on the right-hand side of the page. Here is the website for email stripper: tinyurl.com/2anw88.” Thanks for the comments and tips, Jerry. I sure wish someone could definitively prove whether what you’re saying is true. Can you imagine the class-action lawsuit that would ensue?
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Thank-you for answering my question, Jeff. I clicked on “Register to Post Comments”, as I have done many times before. That takes me to the WordPress page. At the bottom of the square box it says “Log In.” So I clicked on that, as I have done in the past. Then the log-in window comes up and I can type my user name and password. From there it takes me to my profile. The question is: How do I get back to It’s Geek To Me to post a comment. Yesterday I clicked on It’s Geek To Me on the top left of the page and nothing happened. Today I clicked on it and it brought me to this page. You’re site is extremely busy on Sunday’s. I guess that was the problem. Anyway, Thank-You so much for all the help on the many issues that have come up over the years. Judie Day, Navarre, FL