How to edit your iGoogle tab themes en masse

This appeared first on my personal blog, but I hope you find it useful here also.

If you’re like me (and God help you if you are), you have an iGoogle home page set up at www.google.com/ig that displays all of your favorite newsfeeds, weather, etc. You may even have gone so far as to create a custom theme using the new ‘theme maker’ or are using one of the thousands of (slightly tacky) themes already available.
In addition to that, you may be slightly OCD about organizing your stuff into multiple tabs…me, I have 18 (Mac, …

Tech tips for beginners

Compiled by best selling author David Pogue in todays New York Times:

* You can double-click a word to highlight it in any document, e-mail or Web page.

* When you get an e-mail message from eBay or your bank, claiming that you have an account problem or a question from a buyer, it’s probably a “phishing scam” intended to trick you into typing your password. Don’t click the link in the message. If in doubt, go into your browser and type “www.ebay.com” (or whatever) manually.
* Nobody, but nobody, is going to give you half of $80 …

Optimize your Wordpress database

Over on BabyGotMac, I was suffering with a SLOW load time. Looking into the issues, I noticed that my Wordpress wp_options database was a whopping 23mb. I started looking for the offending entries, and found that a plugin I had installed a long while back had added some 500 rows that contained the phrase ‘magpie rss’.

After determining that I no longer needed the rows, I uses phpmyadmin and removed them. I recovered over 12mb of database and the site now loads considerably faster.

The moral of the story: keep an eye on the database and let plugin authors know …