Over the past few weeks we’ve posted a number of articles on ways you can enhance your Mac experience.

Some of the most popular posts have been about how to make your Mac a phone, what we really wanted with an enhanced AppleTV, and how to take advantage of screen sharing in OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Other popular articles discussed how to combine a Mac, Wii, and HDTV to get a new media experience in your living room.

If you missed any of these articles, now is your chance to catch up!

Over the past few years RSS feeds have been transforming the web. Automater on OSX 10.5 allows you to transform RSS feeds from text to your own audio files or podcasts that you can take with you on your iPod.

RSS FEEDS TO AUDIO FILES

To transform your favorite RSS feeds into audio files open Automator in OS X 10.5 and add the following steps:

1. Get Specified URLS (Add the URL of the RSS Feed you want to convert to an audio File)
2. Get Feeds from URLS (This extracts the actual feed from the URL)
3. Get Text from Articles (This step pulls out the text from your RSS feeds and saves it to a text file)
4. Text to Audio File (Have OSX read your new text file and save it to an audio file. Be sure to select the voice of the file, I suggest Alex, and where you want to save it)

If you’d like to import the new audio file into iTunes you can add the step: Import Files into iTunes.

From here you can take your favorite RSS feeds on the go with you. Listen to the articles at your convenience.

Try it out with the maciverse.com RSS Feed.

For those of you that like things the easy way, you can download the Automator workflow here.

Last week apple announced a number of software features and additions to the upcoming release of iPhone 2.0. One of the most significant features was the support for Microsoft Exchange servers.

Now users will be able to access their work based email with full Microsoft Exchange support on their iPhone.

Since Apple often mentions how the software you use on your iPhone and iPod Touch are based on the same code as their counterpart applications on your Mac computer, it suggests that Microsoft Exchange support will also be coming to mail.app.

This possibility is significant as it helps push Apple’s products more into the business market

IF Mail for OS X does gain full Microsoft Exchange support then users will be able to take full advantage of their work email without needing to purchase Microsoft Office 08 to gain access through Entourage.

Apple may have added one more feature to their iWork package, Corporate Email Support through MAIL.

The new track pad on the Macbook air adds many of the touch gestures that many of you have become accustom to on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

In addition to adding these features, the track pad is larger than those you’ll find on the Macbook or Macbook Pro.

While many of the examples that apple displays in their videos focus on how to use the new gestures with photos or some files, the gestures are great with Safari.

Increase Font Size in Safari

To increase the size of the font on any web page that you’re looking at simply place your two fingers on the trackpad in a pinch position and separate your fingers across the track pad. Repeat this if you want the text to be even larger.

Do the opposite of this (Pinch your fingers in) on the track pad to reduce the size of the text on any website.

Navigate Forward and Backwards

The gesture that I find myself using most often is the swiping my fingers left or right to advance back and forth on the pages that I’ve visited in Safari.

Swipe three fingers to the left to move back a page and with three fingers to your right to move forward.

NOTE: All of these gestures currently only work on the track pad on the Macbook Air

iWeb, Apple’s website creation application that comes with each new Apple computer is designed to allow users to quickly create websites and blogs. While the process is quick and simple it also lacks some of the more complicated features that you see in many blog sites today.

If you’ve created an iWeb blog but want to add features and a bit of complexity to your site, moving to Wordpress may be just what you’re looking for.

Wordpress is one of the most popular free website and blogging software options that allows you to create custom blogs with all the features you like. Additionally, setting up Wordpress so that it is easily indexed by Google and other search engines is easy, something that iWeb has never done well.

The rest of this article will walk you through the process of moving your blog from iWeb to a new Wordpress install.

SETTING UP WORDPRESS

Before you move your site to Wordpress you need to get it installed on web server. You can download the files you need to then upload and customize to your webserver at wordpress.org.

After you’ve downloaded the file you can follow the 5 minute install instructions :

“Here’s the quick version of the instructions, for those that are already comfortable with performing such installations. More detailed instructions follow.

1. Download and unzip the WordPress package, if you haven’t already.
2. Create a database for WordPress on your web server, as well as a MySQL user who has all privileges for accessing and modifying it.
3. Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.
4. Open wp-config.php in your favorite text editor and fill in your database details.
5. Place the WordPress files in the desired location on your web server:
   • If you want to integrate WordPress into the root of your domain (e.g. http://example.com/), move or upload all contents of the unzipped WordPress directory (but excluding the directory itself) into the root directory of your web server.
   • If you want to have your WordPress installation in its own subdirectory on your web site (e.g. http://example.com/blog/), rename the directory wordpress to the name you’d like the subdirectory to have and move or upload it to your web server. For example if you want the WordPress installation in a subdirectory called “blog”, you should rename the directory called “wordpress” to “blog” and upload it to the root directory of your web server. Hint: If your FTP transfer is too slow read how to avoid FTPing at : Step 1: Download and Extract.
6. Run the WordPress installation script by accessing wp-admin/install.php in your favorite web browser.
   • If you installed WordPress in the root directory, you should visit: http://example.com/wp-admin/install.php
   • If you installed WordPress in its own subdirectory called blog, for example, you should visit: http://example.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php

That’s it! WordPress should now be installed.”

The most difficult process of the installation is setting up the database that will store all your blog data for you, but your webhosting provider should be able to assist you if following the guide linked to above is not enough information.

Once you’ve finished installing Wordpress you’ll need to get ready to to import your iWeb Blog entries.

PREPARE WORDPRESS FOR AN iWEB IMPORT

Now that you’ve finished installing wordpress you’ll need to navigate to the wordpress login page and login with the admin account created for you during setup. Once you’ve logged in, I suggest creating another account with your “Posting” name so that articles you publish in the future will be listed as something you created.

On the Wordpress Management page, navigate to Manage and then click import. You’ll see that there are a number of other blogging software tools that wordpress lists as options for imports but that iWeb is not included.

Fear not, one option that is listed will allow you to import all of the articles you’ve previously created in iWeb. But before we do that we need to make sure that we have the iWeb files ready for import into Wordpress.

PREPARING iWEB FILES TO IMPORT TO WORDPRESS

Since you’ve been using iWeb for your previous blogging efforts you you’ve already created a number of posts for your blog. To prepare those posts to be imported into Wordpress you need to export your iWeb site to a folder.

1. Open iWeb
2. Select the Blog Site you plan to import into Wordpress
3. Click File and then Publish to a Folder
4. Save the folder to your desktop so that you can access it easily.

Like most new website applications, iWeb has built in RSS support. We’ll use the RSS file that is created in iWeb to import your blog into Wordpress. Since we published to a folder on the desktop we can find the RSS feed for the blog in that folder.

IMPORT YOUR iWEB BLOG TO WORDPRESS

Navigate back to the admin page for your new Wordpress Install and follow these steps:

1. click again on Manage and then Import.
2. Select RSS
3. Click Browse next to choose a file
4. Select your desktop and then the folder you exported your iWeb Blog to
5. Open the folder, and then the Blog Folder inside it.
6. Locate the rss.xml file, select it, and click open
7. select upload file and import

At this point wordpress shall import the posts 1 at a time and show the results with “1. Importing Post… Done” for each post in the rss feed file you have for your blog. When this has finished click the View Site link on the Wordpress Admin site and you’ll see the results of your import from iWeb into Wordpress.

NOTE: Not all formatting and image link structure always imports correctly. You may have to adjust the format of some of your posts to make them look the way you like. Additionally some picture images or links may not have transfered over completely and you’ll have to update their internet linkage.

CONCLUSION

Even though everything doesn’t import across with the same formatting that you set in iWeb, this is a way to import your iWeb blog to Wordpress so that you can make your site more Search Engine (SEO) friendly and have additional customizable features. Be prepared to make adjustments to links and images in addition to restructuring the format of some of your posts. These adjustments are often just a few clicks from the Wordpress Admin page.

To see our example of an iWeb page before check out our iWeb to Wordpress page and then view it in Wordpress.

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