Do you have a Lightbox plugin?

Do you have Photo Shop 7 or above?

Do you have an HTML editing program with Advanced Search & Replace?

Do you have FTP software and know how to use it?

If you answered Yes to all of the above, read on…

• First, place all of your photos in a folder
• Open Photo Shop
• Click File > Automate > Web Photo Gallery
• In Styles, choose a simple HTML gallery that displays thumbnails in a table
• In Source Images choose Folder and then Browse to the folder that contains your source images and also to one where you want the output to go
• In Options > General you can choose to include image dimensions in the code
• In Options > Large Images, choose to Resize the images and constrain the height to somewhere around 450 or whatever works for you
• In Options > Thumbnails, choose a size that will allow them to fit neatly across
• Set the number of Rows to the number of gallery pages you want to make from your images
• Set the number of Columns to the maximum number of images per page (or the total number of images if you want them all on one page)
• Click OK and wait for Photo Shop to launch the finished output in your web browser
• Now open your HTML editor
• Open the index.html file that was created by Photo Shop
• Using Advanced Search & Replace, remove all of the <td> and </td> tags and the white space in between
• Using Advanced Search & Replace, add any style attributes you want to the <img src tags (e.g. replace <img src with <img style=”margin: 4px;” src)
• Using Advanced Search & Replace, change all of the links that end in .html to .jpg
• Using Advanced Search & Replace, change all of the href and image paths to your intended Wordpress paths (usually /wp-content/uploads/whatever…). Make sure the image and href paths do not point to the same folder, because your thumbnails and large images will have the same filenames
• Upload all of the images from the Photo Shop output /images folder to the href path you just specified
• Upload all of the thumbnails from the Photo Shop output /thumbnails folder to the img src path you just specified
• Now, with the Wordpress editor in HTML mode, copy the code between <tr> and </tr> tags from the Photo Shop output index.html page that you have altered into a Wordpress page or post

Voila! You now have a photo gallery and you didn’t manually resize any photos or write any code!

Note that the reason for not using tables is that you may change themes one day and the table layout that was output by Photo Shop may no longer be convenient for you.

Examples:

Single Page

Multi-Page

This article copyright © John Nasta 2010 – All Rights Reserved

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If you’d like to do this, first ask yourself if you feel comfortable editing the code in your theme files, and if you feel comfortable using FTP to upload the edits to your web server. Remember to use a plain-text editor to make all of your edits, not a word processing program like MS Word. If you can do those things without hesitation, you’ve made it over the first hurdle.

The next thing you have to do is decide whether you are going to make the domain name point to your Wordpress folder or if you are going to copy the site files from your Wordpress folder to the folder that the domain name points to.

• If the domain name is changing, you can often point the new domain name to the Wordpress folder when you add it in your hosting control panel, and not have to copy or move any files at all.
• If the domain name is not changing but the path to the site is (e.g. moving Wordpress to the root folder), and/or you don’t know how to point your domain to a specific folder at the hosting level, you can simply copy all of your Wordpress site files via FTP to the folder that the domain name points to.

Two things to do before you upload your site files

Check the .htaccess file in the Wordpress folder: Wordpress usually writes entries to a .htaccess file in the main Wordpress folder. If you are moving the site from a sub-folder to the root or vice-versa, you will have to edit this file. If your site is in a sub-folder called /blog, the .htaccess file in your Wordpress folder will contain these lines:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

If your site is going to be in the root folder, the references to the sub-folder need to be removed, making it look like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Add two lines of code to the functions.php file of the Default theme: As shown in the Wordpress Codex article Changing The Site URL, you can add these two lines of code to the top of your functions.php file to tell the database the new site URL:

define('WP_HOME','http://example.com');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://example.com');

Replace example.com with your actual domain name and any sub-folder name that points to your site. The only reason I suggest doing this to the functions.php of the Default theme is so that you don’t have to mess with your active theme’s files. If you prefer to edit the functions.php of your active theme, that will work too. It is advisable to make backups of your functions.php file and your Wordpress database at this time.

If you have chosen to edit the functions.php of the Default theme and that is not your active theme, go to your site’s admin at the old URL and activate the Default theme. If you edited the functions.php of your active theme, you can skip this step.

Now that you’ve done your edits, you can upload all of the necessary files to the proper folder. If the folder is not changing, you only need to upload the new functions.php, and possibly the new .htaccess file. If you are changing the folder, upload the entire site to the new folder.

Now simply go to your site at the new URL. It should work. Assuming it works fine, you can upload the backup version of the functions.php (i.e. one that has not been edited). It is important to remove those extra lines of code. Your site is now ready to go.

Additional considerations:

• If you are using a plugin that references a file in your folder structure such as the Google XML Sitemap Generator or a database backup utility, you may need to change the path in the plugin’s settings to the new path.
• You may also need to change the path to your uploads folder in Settings > Miscellaneous
• You may want to use the Broken Link Checker plugin to make sure that you don’t have any broken internal links or redirects in your site caused by the URL change.
• If you feel brave and have a lot of internal links that need to be changed, you can use the Search and Replace plugin to change them all simultaneously.
• If you have moved your Wordpress site to a new folder on the server, remember to delete the old files.
• If you have changed your domain name remember to put in a .htaccess 301 redirect from the old location to the new one.
• It is advisable to put a robots.txt file in your root folder so that search engines will crawl and re-index the site. Google may reject your sitemap if you don’t have a robots.txt file giving them access to crawl the site.

If this seems too difficult for you, you may be interested in my article on Accessing Your Wordpress Site From The Root Folder, which explains how a simple .htaccess redirect file can point requests from your root URL to your Wordpress folder.

Have fun!

This article copyright © John Nasta 2010 – All Rights Reserved

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Much like the Thesis theme from DIY Themes, you get a complete back-end interface for customizing the theme. However, Thesis starts at $87 for the Personal license, and Atahualpa is free.

The most important thing to know about how to customize Atahualpa is that you can create your own PHP templates for pages such as multi-post archives (including category & tag pages), search results, single posts, etc. People are often confused by the fact that the theme does not come with templates such as archive.php, search.php, single.php and others that you might expect, but what is not entirely obvious is that you can create these templates and upload them, and Wordpress will automatically use them.

Take for instance one of the most popular questions asked about customizing Atahualpa in the BFA Forum. How do I get Atahualpa to display full posts on archive pages instead of post excerpts? The answer is diabolically simple. Just download the index.php file from Atahualpa and save it as archive.php. Remove the part of the template that calls in The Wordpress Loop:

<?php /* This is the actual Wordpress LOOP.
The output can be edited at Atahualpa Theme Options -> Style & edit the Center column */
bfa_center_content($bfa_ata['content_inside_loop']); ?>

and replace it with loop code from the archive.php of a theme that displays full posts on the archive pages, such as the Wordpress Default theme:

<div <?php post_class() ?>>
<h3 id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>"><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>
<small><?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?></small>
<div class="entry">
<?php the_content() ?>
</div>
<p class="postmetadata"><?php the_tags('Tags: ', ', ', '<br />'); ?> Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> | <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ' | '); ?> <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?></p>
</div>

You can edit this code as well. One thing you might want to do is replace <div class="entry"> with <div class="post-bodycopy"> so that the body text will follow the styling guidelines set by Atahualpa.

If you don’t want to display the time & date above the post, simply move or remove <small><?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?></small>. If you don’t want the meta data to appear below your posts, simply remove that whole paragraph.

If you are familiar with Wordpress coding, then you know that <?php the_content() ?> is what displays the full post content.

When you are finished editing, just upload your new file and Wordpress will recognize and use it.

This also applies to using plugins that require you to add a piece of PHP code to one of your template files that Atahualpa does not come with. If the template doesn’t exist, just create it, upload it, and Wordpress will use it.

Diabolically simple, yet not obvious…

This article copyright © John Nasta 2010 – All Rights Reserved

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If you read the wordpress.org support forum you’ll find posts suggesting that you move the Wordpress index.php file to the root folder and change a few things in that file. You’ll also see replies from people who have tried it unsuccessfully.

Here’s a little trick that will allow you to access your Wordpress site from the root URL without moving or modifying any of the Wordpress installation files. This method will “hide” the Wordpress installation’s folder name when people access your home page but they will see the folder name in URLs when they start clicking around…

Check your root folder for a file called .htaccess (note that the dot is before the file name). If there is one, download it. If not, create one with a plain text editor such as Windows Notepad. Make sure that when you save it, the file type is set to “All Files” so that your editor doesn’t try to add an extension onto the file name.

Make sure that these lines are included in your .htaccess file. For this example the root URL is shown as domain.ext and the Wordpress folder is shown as wpfolder. You will have to change these values to match your own domain name, extension, and Wordpress folder name:

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} domain.ext$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !wpfolder/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ wpfolder/$1


Upload this file to the root directory of your web server as a plain text file. You’re done!

Now go to Google Webmaster Tools and let them know the “preferred URL” of your home page so you don’t get penalized for duplicate content.

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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• Light – Rating icons are shown only for dangerous sites, No pop-ups
• Basic (Recommended) – Rating icons shown for all sites, Search Results ratings shown in pop-up window
• Child Safety – Blocks access to sites that contain adult language and content, All unrated sites are blocked

Set to Basic default, WOT will warn you if you attempt to connect to any sites that have a poor level of Trustworthiness, Vendor Reliability, or Privacy. A “poor” or “very poor” rating in any area will trigger a warning. When child safety mode is in place, it will also block sites that contain mature or inappropriate content.

Once installed the security levels can be customized or turned off. Settings include the ability to choose whether WOT will give you a warning that lets you choose whether or not to proceed, or block the site completely. The utility also gives you the ability to rate sites that you visit (if you create a user account) as follows:

From mywot.com…

Trustworthiness: Do you trust this website? Is it safe to use? Does it deliver what it promises?

A poor rating may indicate identity theft potential, Internet scams, credit card fraud, phishing, lottery scams, viruses, adware, or spyware.

An unsatisfactory rating indicates that the site may contain annoying advertisements, excessive pop-ups, or content that makes your browser crash.

Vendor reliability: Is the site safe for buying and selling, or for business transactions in general? A poor rating indicates possible fraud or a bad shopping experience.

Privacy: Can you trust the site owner, safely supply your e-mail address, and download files?A poor rating indicates spam, adware, or spyware.

Child safety: Does the site contain age-inappropriate material (content that is sexually oriented, hateful, or violent in nature) or encourage activities that are dangerous or illegal?

How to rate sites:

• Use your mouse to move the user rating symbol
• By moving the user rating symbol you indicate what you think of the site
• Your rating will be saved when you close the rating window or click outside it

WOT generates these statistics based on user feedback:

Confidence: Indicates the amount of supporting evidence.

Scorecard: Shows rating details with comments from users and trusted sources. You may also leave your own comment.

Download it for free at http://www.mywot.com

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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Domain Name

• By installing Wordpress on your own server, you can drive traffic to your own domain and increase your web site’s overall search engine ranking.
• On wordpress.com you can buy a domain name for $15 per year or map to an existing domain name for $10 per year. If you don’t have a domain of your own and don’t wish to purchase one, you can have a subdomain on wordpress.com (e.g. http://yoursitename.wordpress.com) for free.

Installation & Setup

• Setting up on wordpress.com is as simple as providing a valid email address and filling out an online form. Just about anyone can do it.
• Installing Wordpress on your own server can also be very simple. Many web hosts provide an automatic installer, which again only requires completing an online form. I like Lunarpages because for only $4.95 per month you can get unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, and an unlimited number of subdomains, add-on domains, POP email addresses, and databases. They also have an automatic installer that allows you to set up multiple instances of Wordpress whether on one domain or different domains.

Disk space

• You get 3GB of disk space for free on wordpress.com. You can add 5 GB for $20/year, 15 GB for $50/year, or 25 GB for $90/year.
• On your own domain, you potentially have unlimited disk space. With Lunarpages, unlimited disk space costs $4.95/month, $59.40 per year, or $118.80 for 26 months (approximately $4.57/month).

Advertising

• When you install Wordpress on your own server, you can host ads and generate income from your site.
• When your site is on wordpress.com, Wordpress places ads on your site (they only show to visitors who are not logged in). If you don’t want the ads on your site, that will cost you $30 per year.

Users

• When your site is on wordpress.com, you are limited to 30 users. If you want to remove the limit, it will cost you $30 per year.
• When you install Wordpress on your own server, you can have an unlimited number of users.

Privacy Settings

• On wordpress.com, privacy settings allow you to make your site public, hide your site from search engines, or make your site only accessible by logging in.
• When you install Wordpress on your own server, you can make your site public or hide your site from search engines, but making it only accessible by login requires a plugin.

Themes

• On wordpress.com, you can choose from over 60 themes, and you can customize the CSS.
• When Wordpress is installed on your own server, you can choose from literally thousands of free themes, purchase premium themes, or design your own themes. You can also modify the CSS as well as the theme scripts, which allows you to modify a stock theme to make it look completely original. Checkout the Wordpress Themes Directory. You can also search Google or other search engines for Free Wordpress Themes.

Widgets & Plugins

• On wordpress.com you can choose from about 25 widgets. Wordpress adds widgets to the list by popular demand. You can’t install plugins.
• When you host your own Wordpress site you can choose from thousands of free plugins that add functionality to your blog including email subscription managers, shopping cart, database tools, social bookmarking, photo galleries, event calendars, the list goes on and on. Many of these plugins include widgets that allow you to display additional information in the sidebar along with the standard Wordpress widgets. Check out the Wordpress Plugins Directory. You can also write your own plugins and widgets, or have custom plugins and widgets developed for you.

Upgrades

• On wordpress.com upgrades are done automatically. You don’t even have to think about it.
• On your own installation you simply click a link to upgrade Wordpress or your plugins. Since version 2.7 there is no need to upgrade manually or install an automatic upgrade plugin. Automatic upgrading is built in.

Now that you know many of the differences, what do installing Wordpress on your own server and hosting your site on wordpress.com have in common?

• Create web pages, blog posts, or both
• Pages and posts can be public or private (require user privileges)
• Subscribe via RSS
• On-site search engine
• Allow users to add comments
• Upload and insert media
• Add links to your favorite sites
• Your site can be public or private (hidden from search engines)
• Same great support forums
• Akismet spam filtering (optional on your own installation)
• Import content from other blogs
• Export content from your blog to another blog
• Multiple user levels (visitor, subscriber, contributor, author, admin)
• Delete your site at any time

Still can’t decide? Then start a site on wordpress.com, get your feet wet, and see if you want to dive in. It’s totally free to begin and you don’t have to register a domain name or find a hosting company. You can always export your content into a Wordpress installation on your own server if you decide to do that at a later time. Conversely, if you find that hosting your own installation hasn’t worked out for you, you can always migrate it to wordpress.com.

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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It is not widget-ready and the sidebar is not contained within <UL> or <OL> tags.

The single post template (single.php) does not call in the sidebar, so when a user goes to an individual post the navigation disappears.

single.php also contains over a dozen validation problems. The Minima theme that alternate0 is based on does not use the single.php template, so I can only assume that the person who adapted this template was a terrible coder. If you haven’t invested any time in this theme it might actually be easier to start with the Minima theme and customize it to look like alternate0. They are very similar.

It is set to a fixed width of 700px, which wastes a lot of screen space for most users.

The links in the header are hard-coded and need to be manually changed in order to be of any use.

It does not contain any RSS links.

The comments.php file has Google ads hard-coded into it and you’ll have to know how to remove them.

comments.php also contains a hard-coded link to a subscription management page on the author’s site and a “subscribe to comments” checkbox that doesn’t work. Both have to be removed.

The sidebar contains hard-coded links to the author’s sites under “Good Reading” and the “Alternate0 is based on…” credits. You’ll also want to remove the “Your Google Ads Here” text while you’re at it. The sidebar is full of junk that you’ll want to get rid of, yet doesn’t include things that would be desirable such as Recent Posts, Links, Pages, and Meta sections.

The sidebar Categories drop-down has a hard-coded /blog/ path, so if your WP installation is not in a folder called “blog” the drop-down will not work.

The footer.php also contains hard-coded links to other sites.

The CSS does not contain several required classes including alignleft, alignright, aligncenter, and wp-caption.

The theme comes with files called templates.php and testimonials.php that appear to be there for no reason other than to promote the author’s other themes and socio-political agenda.

The authors did not respond when I tried to reach them by email, and a comment on the ThoughtMechanics web site in which I politely asked for some help with this template was apparently deleted from the moderation queue without being published or responded to.

In short, it looks nice but be prepared to do a lot of hacking to make it usable.

I am working on fixing this theme because I have a client who likes the way it looks. I’ve gotten all of the above fixed except for the disappearing navigation on single posts, which I am having trouble getting to line up properly (that’s what my question to the authors was about). I also have not made it widget ready because so far my client hasn’t had any need for that, and I have to concentrate on what they do need first. Once it’s fixed I will make it available to others. In the meantime this theme is not one that you can expect to simply unzip and use. I will also try to work some of the WP v.2.7+ features into it such as comment threading. This template was written in 2005 and I have to assume that the author has abandoned it.

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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Noindex is fairly self explanatory. Simply put, a noindex tag tells the search engines not to index this page.

Nofollow is a similar tag. It tells the search engines not to follow any of the links on the page.

That’s just the beginning…

By adding this code to <head> section of all of your pages:

<meta name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />

you can tell the search engines not to do either of the above.

You can also create a plain text file called robots.txt containing this code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Upload it to the root directory of your site. This will tell all “user agents” (a.k.a. search engines) to disallow indexing of all pages in the root directory as well as any directory within it.

So, what happens if you found this article too late and your site has already been indexed. How can you get it de-listed?

There are two answers…

The first is to upload the robots.txt file as described above. The next time your site is crawled, it will be removed from the index.

If you want your site removed from Google, and you can’t wait until the next time it’s crawled, sumbit a Google Urgent Removal Request. Google says that this process will take 3 to 5 business days.

Is there more to the story? Of course there is!

You can also use this tag in the <head> section of your pages:

<meta name="robots" content="noodp,noydir,noarchive" />

noodp – Prevents all search engines from using the DMOZ description for your site in the search results.

noydir – Prevents Yahoo! from using the Yahoo! directory description for your site in the search results.

noarchive – Prevents sites like archive.org and Google from putting copies of your pages into their archive or cache.

What about Wordpress sites? You may have already noticed that you can click Settings > Privacy and choose the “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors” option. This will add noindex and nofollow tags to all of your site’s pages EXCEPT the Login and Forgot Password pages. A nice way to add these tags to those pages is to use the Robots Meta plugin by Joost de Valk. This plugin actually does more than just that. Read the instructions for a better understanding of the plugin’s features.

So, now your site is not being indexed, but people can still link to it from other sites or manually type in the URL. What can you do about that?

Wordpress users have the option of marking their pages and posts Private, which means that only those subscribers whose Role allows them to see those pages and posts can access them. There’s also the User Access Manager plugin that allows you to assign which subscribers can read selected pages and/or  posts. You can even assign people who are not subscribed and/or logged in by IP address or IP range.

Static sites can be password protected by putting a .htaccess file in the folder. If you don’t know how to create a .htaccess file, most commercial web hosts will do this for you via your Plesk or Control Panel interface.

Who would have thought that there’s as much involved in keeping people out of your site as there is in getting them to find it and come in?

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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In your WP Admin, click Settings > Permalinks

Click the “Custom Structure” radio button

Copy & paste this code into the box to the right to show the year, category name, and post name in the Permalink (this is probably the most popular link structure):

/%year%/%category%/%postname%/

Note that it is a good idea to START your permalink structure with a numeric value to avoid database problems, and END it with the post name (or I.D.) to make sure that it points to a unique post. The Wordpress documentation on this topic can be found here.

The full list of “tokens” that can be used is:

%year% – The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004

%monthnum% – Month of the year, for example 05

%day% – Day of the month, for example 28

%hour% – Hour of the day, for example 15

%minute% – Minute of the hour, for example 43

%second% – Second of the minute, for example 33

%postname% – A sanitized version of the title of the post (post slug field on Edit Post/Page panel). So “This Is A Great Post!” becomes this-is-a-great-post in the permalink URL

%post_id% – The unique ID # of the post, for example 423

%category% – A sanitized version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel). Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.

%tag% – A sanitized version of the tag name (tag slug field on New/Edit Tag panel).

%author% – A sanitized version of the author name.

In the category base box, enter a simple word like categories or topics. This will alter your category links to include the word you entered as well as the category name.

Likewise, enter a simple word like tags into the tag base box.

Click “Save Changes”

You’re done!

A couple of nice side effects of doing this are that your page links will also be modified to include the page name, and when editing your posts you will now have a button that will allow you to enter any words you like into your permalink for that post. Note that if you change a post’s title, the permalink will continue to show the old title unless you edit it as well.

Amazing, and amazingly simple!

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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Event Calendar 3 by Alex Tingle – This plugin was putting all event posts into the Uncategorized category by default. The category checkbox was grayed out and could not be unchecked.

Registered Users Only by Viper007Bond – This plugin caused users who had already logged in (including myself) to get kicked back to the login screen when clicking links within the site. Also, a user who I have never met said that he went to my login screen and my user name was pre-filled in the dialog box. He couldn’t have made this up because my user name is not even a real word, yet he knew what it was.

Role Manager – This a great plugin that works perfectly. Just be aware that changing the roles and capabilities may cause conflicts with other plugins that reference the roles. Also keep in mind that deactivating this plugin does not undo whatever changes you’ve made with it, and some changes can’t be undone. Use with extreme caution.

Weasel’s Login Redirect by Andy Moore – This plugin requires the Role Manager plugin (see above) or it will not work. Modifying the roles can cause conflicts with other plugins that reference the roles such as Wordpress Users, Profiler, and Subscribe 2. Therefore I do not recomment using it. Instead, I highly recommend Peter’s Login Redirect, as it does not require any other plugins to work, does not require modifying any roles, and lets you assign multiple redirects (i.e. by Username, Role, Specific Admin capability, or by All Other Users who do not meet the aforementioned criteria).

Wordpress Users by Jonathan Kemp – This a great plugin that works perfectly. Just be aware that you may have to add a class to your CSS to get the user listing to display the way you want it to.

WP Hashcash by ecb29, donncha – As far as I (and apparently other people as well) can tell, this plugin marks every comment as spam, thus defeating its own purpose.

This will be a cumulative list. I will update it as things come up. Hopefully it will not turn out to be a long list.

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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