How to post links to your blog on blogspot dot ca on Facebook

As of May 27, 2012, Facebook blocked all links and text referring to blogspot dot ca (written out here as dot ca instead of ".ca" so it won't be blocked when posted to FB).
I am assuming they blocked this due to a number of complaints about SPAM sites using Blogger in Canada.
However, this blanket blocking of Blogger sites from Canada is unfair to the thousands of legitimate bloggers in Canada who use Blogger. 

SOLUTION
For now, here is a workaround:
To post a link, first, copy the link to notepad, then replace .ca with .com in the URL. Now, copy and paste this edited version of the URL to Facebook. The link will direct to the correct location. 

Please write to Facebook and ask them to stop blocking all of Blogger in Canada. If they have complaints of specific blogs in Canada, they should block those specific URLs, not the core URL.


UPDATE
As of a couple of days ago, Facebook unblocked blogspot.ca
  

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Fix Thunderbird Tabs Position

Thunderbird 11 changes the tab position from being below the menu bar to above it. If this is annoying to you and you would like the tabs back below the menu bar, download this add-on for Thunderbird and install it.To do so

• Go to this page, right-click on  the Download Now button and save the file to your computer.
• Open Thunderbird (if you haven't update to version 11 yet, do so by clicking on Help, About Thunderbird, Check for Updates...), Tools, Add Ons.
• Click on the button with the cog wheel on it beside the Search for all add-ons field
• Select Install Add-on From File
• Navigate to where you saved the file, select it and choose Open
• Now your tabs should be back below the Menu bar

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Libre Office 3.5.1 is available

If you are using Open Office still, or Libre Office 3.5.0 or earlier, you should upgrade to Libre Office 3.5.1.
It is available here for download, along with the help installation file.

Remember, if you have Open Office installed, remove it first before installing Libre Office.
If you are going to install the help file, install it after installing the program.

Extensions for Open Office generally work in Libre Office. You can get them here.
I recommend the Canadian spellchecker (for working in Canadian English), and Pagination (improves the implementation of page numbering).

Here are the release notes for Libre Office 3.5.1.

My earlier post about Libre Office.

 

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Replace Open Office with LibreOffice

Open Office was great, but it stopped being developed April 2011. 
If you are still using Open Office, you may have begun to see problems - files crashing for no apparent reason, among other things. Many people who had Open Office 3.3 installed and then installed Internet Explorer 9 (either knowingly or via a background Windows update) found that Open Office would often crash and was not workable. 

For the end user (you), what matters is if it is working or not, and if not, how to fix it. 
For anyone out there still using Open Office 3.3.0 or earlier, I would strongly recommend switching over to LibreOffice. 

LibreOffice is continually being developed now, whereas Open Office is no longer being developed. LibreOffice is basically Open Office, but more evolved. The interface is pretty much identical (some of the icons are a bit different, but they do the same things. And, it is still free. Yes, you can still open the latest MS Office file formats, and you can export any file to PDF format.

To upgrade:

• Download the program and the help part of the program from here.
• Remove Open Office by going to (Win XP) Control Panel, Add or Remove Programs..., or (Vista, Win 7) Control Panel, Programs and Features...
• Install the LibreOffice Program, and then the help program (must do it in this order).
• LibreOffice should automatically see and incorporate your basic settings from OpenOffice
• To ensure that LibreOffice is seen by Windows as the default program - in Windows Vista/Windows 7: Start Menu, Default Programs, Set your Default Programs, Choose LibreOffice in the list on the left. Set This Program As Default. (Note: This will set your simple txt files to open with LibreOffice Writer. If you still want Notepad to open for simple txt files, go to a txt file, right click, chose Open With, choose Choose Default Program, check off the Always open with this box, and select Notepad.)
• If LibreOffice is not in this list of programs (above in the Default Programs), close this window and re-install the LibreOffice  program and choose Repair. If it is still missing, restart the computer and check again.
• done.

 

Further information on LibreOffice can be found at their site here, or at the Wikipedia entry here.  

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Facebook Tips Update - Notifications Overload and Social Fixer

Notifications.
After the recent changes on Facebook, if you moved any friends into the close friends list, you may have noticed that you get tons of notices now about everything they do. If you don't want this - if you just want to be notified about the usual stuff you used to be notified about - here is the fix:
Go to your Facebook homepage, look on the left for Lists, find Close Friends and click on it. 
In Close Friends, click on the Notifications button and choose Off.

If you do have one or two friends who you want to be notified about everything, go to their page, hover over their name on a post and Subscribe. When you Subscribe for the first time, you subscribe to everything. You can modify this by going to the Subscribe button and clicking it and then checking/unchecking your desired settings.

Social Fixer/Better Facebook
I wrote, a while ago, about Better Facebook and how it was a great script to use. Then Facebook kept changing things and the script didn't work so well any more (or at all).

Now the script has become an add-on and it has been much improved. 
So, remove the script (or disable it) and go here to install the add-on for your browser. 
Once installed, you may need to restart your browser.
Then, go to Facebook and click through the wizard that pops up. When you get to the sign-in page, cancel the wizard. Once you log in, the wizard will pop up again - go through it this time.

Settings
I found that some settings I made in the wizard did not stick. I had to open up the Social Fixer options (icon beside your name on the Facebook toolbar) and re-do them.
 

Here are some of the settings I found to be very useful:

- Comments: Popular, check off: Fix "Enter Key" behaviour...   Also, in Posts: check off Fix the missing cursor problem ...

- Chat: Popular: check off Change profile pictures in Chat to names. And, Chat: check off: Show all online friends in chat list, group friends by online status, and Use compact chat list (no thumbnail images).

- Images: Popular: check Show full image previews when hovering your mouse over pictures.

- Applications/Games - if you play games and use applications, you may like to show different game/application stories in different tabs - to do so: Popular, check off Automatically move posts from Applications (games) into their own tabs. Also, if you play games and don't like the new game sidebar that shows up on the right of your screen, you can get rid of it: Layout: hide the game icon sidebar

 

- Filters: Don't play games or use applications and don't want to see stories about these filling up your newsfeed? To hide these stories: Filtering, Type, scroll down and click on Posts by any application, then check off Hide under Action.

 

- Ticker/Friends Activity: to hide this: Layout: Hide the ticker feed of friends activity

Once done with the settings, SAVE, and then reload the Facebook page (don't just click on "Facebook" - use your browser function to reload the whole page.)

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Better Facebook

There are a lot of things that annoy Facebook users, especially when FB makes big changes. Some changes are good and take some getting used to. But a lot of changes can make things more annoying. Better Facebook is a script that works in all browsers except IE. It combines controls that many different scripts have individually into one great script. I was using FFixer, Unfuck Facebook, Facebook Comment Fixer, and a couple of Adblock Plus filters to make Facebook work in a better way. I've switched to only using Better Facebook (for now, as of Sept. 2011) as it takes care of all that the above-mentioned did and more.

Go to

http://betterfacebook.net

to install.

If you have Greasemonkey in Firefox, and you know how to use it, you can install it that way instead (make sure to disable other scripts first before installing Better Facebook as there may be conflicts) 

Here are my settings in Better Facebook

• all the recommended default changes plus:
• Added the old Comment button
• Lock the header bar at the top so it scrolls
• Change profile images in Chat to names
• Force the News Feed to be chronological and hide Top Stories
• Layout, Right Column: Hide the live feed (The Ticker) of friends activity (you can do this instead of using the AdBlock Plus filters).
• Chat: Show all online friends in chat list, Group friends by online status, Use compact chat list,
• Theme: Light Sky (yes, there are different themes available that will change the background from white to other things)

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Facebook Notifications Overload

Since the recent Facebook updates (Sept. 2011), you may have noticed that you are getting far more notifications than before. This is most likely due to adding some people into the Close Friends group. Depending on how you have arranged your lists, you may need to follow these instructions for more than just the Close Friends list.

To get the notifications back to normal (this applies to notifications from everyone on the list):
* In Facebook, on your Home page
* On the left, click on Close Friends
* In the top right, click on Manage List
* Click on Choose Update Types ...
* You will see: Updates to Show - under this: Status Updates, Photos, Games, Comments and Likes, Other Activity.
* The one that will generate the most notifications is Comments and Likes. Un-check this. I would also recommend un-checking Games if any of your close friends play Facebook games because now, you will be sent a notification any time they do anything in a game
* Depending on how many things show up in your notifications you may want to leave checked or un-check other of the items on this list.

If, for some reason, you like all the notifications you are getting, but just not from certain individuals, you can adjust only the notifications from each person by hovering over a link to their name, hovering over Subscribed, and then choosing which items you want to be notified about or not.

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