Following this method allows you to create a “shortcut” link on your website which takes your visitor to the real link. This can be done a number of ways, but nothing beats the simplicity of using the .htaccess file. Now this is only for Apache-hosted websites (if you use cPanel you’re in the clear) and requires adding a line in the file. If you’ve never done something like this before, don’t worry, it’s quite easy.

The line to add is this, which I’ll explain later:

Redirect 301 /myshortcut http://myshortcutsite.com

First of all, create the .htaccess file if you don’t have one already, and don’t forget the dot “.” at the beginning of the file. This is like hiding a file in Linux, perhaps the equivalent of a system file on Windows where it’s there but you have to jump through a few loops to see it. You can use the cPanel file editor or simply telnet or ssh directly to your server and edit the file there. Replace /myshortcut with the shortcut link that you want to have and http://myshortcutsite.com the actual destination.

You can use this technique to redirect to different directories within your own website as well.

Redirect 301 /myolddirectory /mynewdirectory

Another way to use this is to make “pretty links” which are a way to turn ugly, long URLs into something short and easy to remember. You can also use it to cloak links.

Why cloak links? Because your web visitors nowadays are getting savvier and savvier. Some visitors have learned to suspect Amazon links, for example, as having an affiliate ID coded in the URL. For whatever reason, some visitors are simply against the idea of you earning a commission off any link and will refuse to click it. When you cloak a link, it looks like a normal part of your website and no visitor will suspect where is really takes you. It is a good idea in general to cloak all your Amazon links as well as links to other sites where you earn a commission.

I know Bejeweled Blitz has been around like, forever, but it’s never too late to profess your love of something. Today I am professing my love for what is basically the only game I play in my busy schedule. If you haven’t heard of this Facebook phenomenon: get on it now!

This is an easy game to play that falls into the puzzles category. It has its own sub-category too as a “gem matcher” game specifically. The premise is so very simple: match three or more gems by swapping any two adjacent gems, score points by matching gems, beat your Facebook friends week after week.

The Bejeweled Blitz tips offered here are great for beginners who are just looking to up their games as well as advanced players who may want to scope out what the competition is doing. Keep in mind this is just my own personal strategy guide, though I have confirmed many of the tips I used to be utilized by another great player.

We regularly battle each other every week and with the introduction of coins, power ups, and gems, it’s been an ever-increasing battle for highest score. Developing some of your own personal tips and strategies is critical to staying ahead of your friends (or in my case at least in line with).

And without much further ado, I present to you the ultimate strategy guide to Bejeweled Blitz:

Tip #1 – Jump Start Each Game

You can move gems before the game clock starts. Use this to your advantage to begin matching gems immediately. This will give you an extra second of game play. As you get better, you’ll be able to find matches more quickly and this small 1-second window will become more and more important as a good start is key to a high score.

You can see in this picture that the timer is still at 1:00 yet a match of red gems has already been made. Make use of this free extra time!

Tip #2 – Work Top to Bottom

Player strategies vary on this but for me, in order to build speed, I tend to look for gem matches from the top to the bottom of the board. This gives me a chance to continuously break gems so as to get the speed power up. If you have never encountered this before, you get a small window of time (like 10 seconds?) where the board catches on fire and glows gold. During this time, any gems you break will explode the gems around them.

If you break from the bottom, it affects the gems on top as they fall and rearrange the board. This makes it harder for your eyes to find the next match and every tenth of a second will cost you. Meanwhile if you start from the top, while you are breaking the match your eyes can look for the next match below. The position won’t change even after you break the gems on top, allowing you to find consecutive matches more quickly.

Newbies may enjoy starting from the bottom as it seems to generate more activity (and points), but that is shortsighted in my opinion. If you want to score high, you need to get the speed bonus… multiple times in a game. To get the speed bonus, you must match quickly. To match quickly, start from top to bottom.

Tip #3 – Speed, Speed, Speed

If you haven’t guessed already, more critical than anything else in the game is speed. Speed, speed speed! And by that I mean the speed power-up. This is the best way to get a lot of activity going on the board so you can score those big scores. To get it, you have to string together a certain number of consecutive matches quickly within a period of time. The specifics I am not sure, but it’s something like 10 matches in 10 seconds or maybe even faster. Don’t take my word for it, I am just giving an idea of what it takes to get the power-up.

Besides the benefit of matches breaking surrounding gems, you also get faster gem movement and an overall better feel. It’s like feeling the turbo kick in when driving in a turbocharged car. Things just get taken to a new level.

Tip #4 – Work Side to Side

Your thinking, didn’t you just tell me to work top to bottom a few tips ago? You’re right. However, this is another strategy that is equally important. For example, if you are in the midst of a speed power-up, your matches will explode. This can impact the gems below. A great way to not slow down when this happens is to break a match on one side of the board, then break a match on the other side, and continue finding matches on opposing sides. It utilizes the same idea to let your eyes find a match on an area of the board that will not be affected by the gems you are currently breaking. You could apply this rule to opposing diagonals or anywhere for that fact. If you know gems are going to explode, don’t spend time finding a match near it that may not be there after the current gems break. Move your eyes to an unaffected region and look there.

Tip #5 – Don’t Admire the Explosions

Did you know that whenever you break a hypercube or a lightning cube (I’ve no idea what it’s called, I’ll just call it that), it pauses time? Don’t sit and watch the pretty explosion or wait for the pieces to settle before making your next match. While time is paused you should be not only looking for the next match, but predicting where it will be. That’s because a whole line or color could be erased by the explosion, so you need to be good enough to predict what the end result will look like. This is so that you can find the next match without using up extra time.

Tip #6 – Use Hypercubes Immediately

Which brings me to the next time. I got into a philosophical discussion about hypercubes about whether they were worth saving. Did you know that if you use a hypercube to break another hypercube the entire board explodes? This is horrible. You will lose time as you have to adjust your eyes to find the first match and then try to keep up your speed. NEVER use hypercubes to break hypercubes if you ever get the opportunity.

This has only happened to me a few times, and for good reason: I follow the philosophy of using hypercubes immediately. Rather than save them for a rainy day when you can’t find a match, I’ve found it more beneficial to use it up as soon as it is formed. It doesn’t really even matter what color you decide to break with it as it is really just used so you can stop time and find the next match. Remember, Bejeweled Blitz is all about speed.

Plus, I’ve found it easier to get more hypercubes within the same game by doing this. You see, when you destroy all gems of a color, the result is a higher concentration of the other gem colors, meaning more opportunity to form more lightning cubes or hypercubes. These gems are great as they stop time.

Tip #7 – The Power-Up Trifecta

If you plan on expending your hard-earned coins on power-ups, please don’t waste them on just one or two. In Bejeweled Blitz, getting a high score is an all-or-nothing deal. If you don’t go all out with stacked power-ups then you’re better off saving your coins.

Now if you are going to use power-ups, then you must choose these three, only these three, and all of these three: the 5-second time extension, the special gem to start on the board, and the free multiplier. Use these and use these only. I believe these are the three most expensive power-ups to buy but that is for good reason. Do not waste your time with the swap gem or the other one which I don’t even know what it is. Stick with the power-up trifecta I mentioned for maximum effect.

Why the time extension? As I said before time is critical. That extra 5 seconds could tack another 100,000 to your score easily. Why the special gem? You can get lucky and get a hypercube or lightning cube. For this reason alone it is worth it. And why the multiplier? Because like speed, it is one of the most important factors in getting a high score. In fact, the only real reason I stress speed is so you can build the multiplier more quickly. You get this by exploding a certain number of gems at one time. Usually a lightning cube or hypercube will do it, a chained explosion, or blowing up tons of gems during the speed boost. If there is anything as critical as speed in the game, it is the multiplier. Unfortunately there is not much you can do to control this, hence the focus on speed in my strategy guide.

Tip #8 – Which Rare Gem?

With the introduction of rare gems, scores above 1,000,000 have become commonplace. The most expensive is the phoenix gem which has a match-any gem that explodes anything it matches. You get a number of these throughout the game. I used to like it, but that was before I acquired my preference for the blazing steed. This is the second most expensive gem but in my opinion it is better bang for the buck. You get to start with an immediate speed bonus. This lets you explode gems very quickly and gets you the opportunity to build a high multiplier early in the game. I would rather take the chance to get a high multiplier in the early game than to have some random gems explode on the board as you know how I feel about uncontrolled or unexpected explosions– they are speed killers.

Use the rare gems with the power-ups. After your first game, you will be offered the chance to buy the same rare game at a discounted price. Do it if your score isn’t high enough. Remember, you are going all in here and you won’t get another chance to score a deal this low. After your second game you’ll get yet another chance to buy it at an even steeper discount. Again, if the score isn’t high enough, do it. This will last three games which is perfect as it matches exactly how many games the power-ups last. This will get you through three pumped-to-the-max games to get your score up and it will be worth it.

Tip #9 – Music or Sound Effects

I find them distracting though I know some people play perfectly well with them on. For me, it becomes added pressure especially when building speed if ever the pitch of the sound effect drops because you know you’ve dropped the speed meter and have to rebuild it. I turn off all music and sound effects and have found it to better increase my concentration. This is personal preference, get used to one and stick with it. Don’t change.

Tip #10 – Practice, Practice, Practice

Don’t think for one second any of these tips will do you any good unless you practice. You’ve no idea how many hours of game play I’ve put into the game to get to where I am at today. There is no substitute for practice. This single strategy will get you a higher score than any of the others. If you want a high score then you have to attack with an athlete’s mentality. An athlete practices over and over and over again until there is no one better at it. The same goes for Bejeweled Blitz. If you are a casual gamer, then don’t set any expectations that you will be breaking the 7-figure score mark any time soon. This comes with practice, dedication, and devotion to the game. Of course this ultimate strategy guide helps too.

Well, that’s it for the guide. I hope you’ve enjoyed what is probably going to be the longest post ever written on GHG. Put these tips and strategies to good use and you’ll be frustrating your friends on Facebook in no time. Stay tuned for an advanced tutorial for iPhone, iPod, and iPad users who like to play Bejeweled Blitz on their mobile devices!

If you have a blog and a decent number of visitors to it, the idea of monetizing your web traffic may have crossed your mind at some point. Of the variety of ways to make money off your blog, I am presenting what may be the easiest way to generate a little passive income for your blogging efforts.

What I am talking about is using URL shorteners. You may have heard of the king of all shorteners, bit.ly, but there is no way to make money off of it. Instead, other services have popped up that offer the same URL shortening technology as bit.ly, except that they pay you for every visitor that you get to click your link! Imagine that, getting paid simply when a visitor clicks your URL-shortened link!

My favorite service to use is adf.ly. Their motto is very simple and sums it up nicely: “Shorten URLs, Get Money.” Anyone can sign up for a free account and you can be up and running in just minutes. You get the benefit of shorter links that you can use to share stuff easily and you get the added benefit of cloaking the link as well. The easiest place to use this is on Twitter, where the 140 character limit restricts the length of the URL that you can share. While bit.ly is a mainstay on Twitter, adf.ly will do the job just as well, plus they will pay you for each click.

So how does it work, what’s the catch? There isn’t really any catch, at least for you. What happens is adf.ly generates money by showing each visitor who clicks through your link an advertisement. Now everybody knows that advertisers pay money to have their ads shown and on adf.ly this is no different. Since all visitors to your shortened links must go through adf.ly, what they do is show a short intermediary ad before taking the visitor to the final link. Below is a pictorial representation of how this unique business model works, complete with an example ad:

You can see that both services take you to the same ultimate destination. The difference is that one does not make you any money and the other does. On adf.ly, an ad gets shown for 5 seconds, after which a “Skip Ad” button appears and allows your visitor to continue on his way. This helps traffic quality by ensuring that each ad impression lasts at least 5 seconds. They then split the profit with you.

The amount you can make is obviously dependent on how much web traffic your blog has. If you are only getting a few visitors a day, don’t expect a couple of shortened URLs to pay for hosting. Another thing that affects the payout is the country. US traffic is highly valuable due to its spending power. Advertisers simply pay more for US traffic. Expect to receive higher payouts for English-speaking countries versus non-English speaking countries.

To give you an example, last month GHG averaged a $2.24 cpm payout, which means this blog earned $2.24 on average for every 1000 clicks. That’s actually quite a fair payment. If you are in advertising or have advertised on a cpm basis at all, you would know that even paying $2.24 cpm is on the medium to high end range. And this isn’t even taking into account adf.ly’s cut, whatever it might be.

If you are looking for an easy way to make money off your blog, start with the links. They are easy to swap out and interchange for shortened versions, plus they pay quite competitively as mentioned.

If you’re one of those bloggers who have already gone the route of tacking on AdSense or using Amazon affiliate links or even allowing those intrusive text-link ads like InfoLinks and Kontera on your site, you may be able to squeeze just that much more income out of your blog. I’ve seen very few bloggers who have thought to monetize their links and in doing so are just leaving easy money on the table.

On top of that, you can easily throw up a banner ad like on the sidebar of GHG for referrals which pay out 20% of any commissions earned by people who sign up to the service through your link. Full affiliate disclosure here: yes GHG will earn commissions off referrals. It does not affect your payout, that cut is paid for by adf.ly.

If you don’t mind having your visitors sit through 5 second ads for any links you provide, then consider adf.ly as a great alternative to bit.ly. Another service I’d recommend is lnk.co as it is quite similar.

Previously, I posted about using the Maxmind database to personalize a website to the location of a web visitor. Today I’m going to show you how to further utilize the Maxmind geoip script to perform country-based redirect in super-easy Javascript.

Maxmind, for the uninitiated, is a company that keeps track of location information based off an IP address. So if you were to pass your IP address to Maxmind’s database, they would be able to tell you what city you were surfing from, the state, country, and even longitude/latitude coordinates. There’s no voodoo to it, simply a one-line Javascript include in your HTML file. After including it you are free to use a variety of useful location variables. This example makes use of the country code.

Redirecting a web visitor based on his or her country is a great way to show localized versions of your website if you have special languages that you wish to display. You can also use it to show the most relevant content to your visitor as well. For example, if you had a page with US currency and then had a visitor from the UK, you could convert everything to pounds sterling for a friendlier user experience. Country-based redirection is also great for serving relevant advertisements and localized business offers. The possibilities are endless.

To do it you need to have an entry point page where all your visitors go before getting redirected to the country-based page. The Javascript below can be added between the <head> tags in your HTML.

<script language="JavaScript" src="http://j.maxmind.com/app/geoip.js"></script>

<script language="JavaScript">
var country= geoip_country_code();

if(country == "US") {
  window.location = "http://geekhelpguide.com/us/";
} else if(country == "CA") {
  window.location = "http://geekhelpguide.com/ca/";
} else if(country == "UK") {
  window.location = "http://geekhelpguide.com/uk/";
} else {
  window.location = "http://geekhelpguide.com/";
}
</script>

The first line is simply used to include the geoip script from Maxmind. Since Javascript is completely client-side, Maxmind can pull the IP from the visitor and then do a look up for country information. The country code uses the standard two-letter abbreviation which is available here for your reference.

CommentLuv is a great WordPress plugin that allows commenters to be rewarded for their comments with a link back to their blog. I discovered some sites that were using this and so I wanted to get in on the action too. Unfortunately, my initial attempt was thwarted by “A feed could not be found” error.

I immediately went to my site’s feed link and checked it out. I noticed that there was a cache date by WP Super Cache so I made some tweaks at first to avail. Then I tried deleting the cache… also to no avail. I finally threw my hands up in the air and just disabled the plugin altogether. Guess what? That didn’t get my feed to update either.

At this point, I figured I’d done about all I was able to do on my own without consulting my favorite IT guy Mr. Google. After a quick search I turned up this little post on Andy Bailey’s CommentLuv website titled Help Desk.

It turns out it’s a fairly common error to get, along with “Empty feed” or “Curl error.” The solution is pretty simple actually. The very first thing to check is if your WordPress theme is properly displaying the RSS feed link. This little link tag in the HTML head section tells CommentLuv what URL it needs to read to access your feed. My theme didn’t have this line inserted. Simply “View Source” on any page on your site and do a search for “rss.” If nothing turns up similar to:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My Blog RSS Feed" href="http://myblog.com/feed/" />

then you’ll need to make an adjustment to your theme. There are two easy ways for this. If you are running WordPress 3.0+, then you can simply go to your theme’s function.php file and stick this line at the bottom (to be safe if you can’t read code):

add_theme_support( 'automatic-feed-links' );

Otherwise the task is only slightly more complicated. Load your header.php file and add this line somewhere between the tags in the HTML:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />

That solved the problem for me despite never figuring out why my feed was still cached by WP Super Cache even though I had it disabled. My CommentLuv comment went through and loaded up my most recent posts to select so I could get a free link. If you are getting the “A feed could not be found” error the solution may simply be a matter of modifying your theme so that it points to the RSS feed, a good practice in general. Most themes I’ve seen should have this already in there somewhere so this should be an uncommon problem. If you’ve got your own custom theme or have a heavily modified one, then this may solve the CommentLuv feed error issue.

Last night I needed a list of all US cities for a custom web app I was building. The requirements were very simple: to get a list or database of the city name, the state name, and the state abbreviation. I looked far and wide but all the solutions I found were not free. Amounts ranged from a couple of dollars to hundreds for a well-maintained up-to-date list.

Since this wasn’t anything mission-critical, I continued to look for a free US city database until I stumbled across the Zip Code Database Project. It’s hosted on SourceForge so it has to be open source. The data is slightly outdated and uses 2000 US census data, but I figured in 10 year’s time there wouldn’t be that many cities incorporated or dissolved in the US plus it didn’t need to be super accurate.

Though it may seem contrary to the name, it actually lists every US city along with its zip code information if you happen to need it. It’s a very simple no-frills list that gets you exactly the information that you need in the universally accepted format of CSV or comma separated value. The information can easily be written into queries to put it into whatever database format that needs to be used. If you also need the geographic longitude and latitude coordinates for displaying on a map, it’s also got you covered. With such a great solution so readily available, I really have no idea why all those list-sellers even have business. I guess you can chalk it all up to marketing. Hmm… a little massaging of this list to just city and state names and you may have yourself a nice little product to resell to people who don’t know better…

Before you decide to go with this list, I’ve given a little preview of the data so you know what you’re getting into before you decide to download that 2MB (extracted) file commitment on your hard drive.

“zip code”, “state abbreviation”, “latitude”, “longitude”, “city”, “state”
“35004″, “AL”, ” 33.606379″, ” -86.50249″, “Moody”, “Alabama”
“35005″, “AL”, ” 33.592585″, ” -86.95969″, “Adamsville”, “Alabama”
“35006″, “AL”, ” 33.451714″, ” -87.23957″, “Adger”, “Alabama”
“35007″, “AL”, ” 33.232422″, ” -86.80871″, “Alabaster”, “Alabama”
“35010″, “AL”, ” 32.903432″, ” -85.92669″, “Alexander City”, “Alabama”
“35014″, “AL”, ” 33.355960″, ” -86.27720″, “Alpine”, “Alabama”
“35016″, “AL”, ” 34.323715″, ” -86.49278″, “Arab”, “Alabama”
“35019″, “AL”, ” 34.292540″, ” -86.63505″, “Baileyton”, “Alabama”
“35020″, “AL”, ” 33.405559″, ” -86.95141″, “Bessemer”, “Alabama”
“35022″, “AL”, ” 33.346817″, ” -86.95252″, “Bessemer”, “Alabama”
“35023″, “AL”, ” 33.443039″, ” -87.01930″, “Bessemer”, “Alabama”
“35031″, “AL”, ” 34.111425″, ” -86.53380″, “Blountsville”, “Alabama”

As you’ll notice, the same city appears more than once and this happens throughout. That’s because this is a zip code oriented list so you may need to do a little housekeeping to prevent duplicates from being created. Personally I’m going to parse everything into a dynamic 2-D array with state as the first key and city as the second to automatically prevent duplicates.

// if city not exist, dynamically create
// otherwise, overwrite existing value
// end result: no duplicates
$myarray[$state][$city] = 0;

Have you been having issues with your font renderings on Firefox and found numerous tips and references to the Font Replacer add-on only to get to a dead link? You and me both. My personal reason for embarking on this quest was because I had recently installed the Helvetica Neue font on my Windows computer. This is predominantly a Mac font but I was surprised to see how many web developers actually had web styling prioritizing this horrible font over others including trusty old Arial. This causes a horrible user experience for Windows users and personally I wouldn’t alienate the world’s largest OS user base just to be an Apple elitist.

Thanks to Internet Explorer’s font smoothing, the problem was not as bad. However on Firefox it got to be unbearable. With the Font Replacer add-on completely M.I.A. I figured there had to be a Greasemonkey script of some sort that would do the trick and I was right.

Greasemonkey is a great Firefox add-on that lets you basically customize any website you want by injecting or modifying HTML code so you can get things displayed exactly how you like. I won’t go into more details about how great it is, but if you don’t have it you need to install it to get this solution to work.

Download the Kill Helvetica script from userscripts.org and install it as a Greasemonkey script. Simply enable it and you’ll find all web pages using Helvetica Neue will display nicely with Arial instead.

Better yet, you can modify the script if you have other misbehaving fonts that you’d like to replace, just like old Font Replacer functionality. If you take a look at the code, it’s quite easy. Simply replace ‘helvetica’ with the misbehaving font and ‘arial’ with the font you wish to replace. The script is replicated below:

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Kill Helvetica
// @namespace      Hacked from Font Must Die script
// @description    Replaces corrupt and jumbled Helvetica fonts in Firefox. Removes all instances of Helvetica and replaces with Arial by replacing font tags with a CSS-styled span.
// @version     1.7
// @copyright	2010, Daniel P
// @include        http://*
// ==/UserScript==

var tags = document.getElementsByTagName('*');
for (var i in tags) {
        var style = getComputedStyle(tags[i], '');
        if (style.fontFamily.match(/helvetica/i)) {
                var fonts = style.fontFamily.split(',');
                for (var j in fonts) {
                        if (fonts[j].match(/helvetica/i)) {
                                fonts[j] = 'arial';
                        }
                }
                tags[i].style.fontFamily = fonts.join(',');
        }
}

After install, don’t forget to add this user include for secure https connections.

If you recently upgraded to WordPress 3.3.1 like me, you may notice that you may be getting this error message below:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function is_rtl() in /home/user/public_html/wp-includes/general-template.php on line 2102

Or something similar. For me it was a pretty bad error: while the website loaded fine, I was unable to access the WordPress admin interface.

Though it seems like a problem with the WordPress core, after a bit of research I found others with the same problem and it all pointed to one plugin: Popup Domination. So if you have that plugin installed, either rename the folder or just delete it altogether and wait for an update. After deleting the folder popup-domination in my wp-content/plugins folder the problem went away.

Recap

If you encounter this error after upgrading WordPress to 3.3.1:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function is_rtl() in /home/user/public_html/wp-includes/general-template.php on line 2102

Delete or rename your popup-domination plugin folder to deactivate it.

The new Facebook game ticker is either a huge boon or a huge bust for avid gamers on the social network. For this geek–while it was great to see who the other gaming addicts were among friends–I didn’t like sacrificing my own personal privacy. I’m also willing to bet that many of my other friends feel the same way, it’s just they simply don’t know how to remove those updates about themselves. They are hugely annoying as they let other people know exactly what game you were playing at exactly what time… and worst of all how many times a day you’d been playing… Not good during regular work hours.

At first, I tried editing the application settings but if you try to restrict the updates to show to “Me Only” or similar, you won’t be able to utilize the social aspects of many games like asking for a brick part in Farmville and the like. Friends will no longer see these so you’d be publishing to no one but yourself. Plus, even with this setting it still did not prevent the annoying “X is Playing Y” updates from showing up automatically every time I launched Cityville.

By chance today, I hovered over one of my game statuses in the Facebook game ticker and out popped a dialog to the left. You can comment or like this just like you would any regular Facebook status but there is a small “V” icon in the upper right hand corner that is the salvation to all privacy-advocate gamers everywhere.

If you click on this tiny little “V”, another dialog pops up and here’s the hidden setting that lets you banish these game updates from ever showing up again on the game ticker. The very last option is to “Don’t publish ‘is Playing XXX’ posts” which you can select to block once and for all the privacy invasion that is the Facebook game ticker.

Do this for every game application of yours on the ticker. I have confirmed that this works with a friend… he no longer saw my game updates published automatically though one did slip through. A re-ban fixed it right up so maybe I might simply have missed it. Again, this solution isn’t the same as hiding your game updates on your news feed or wall, this setting is for the game ticker only.

On a related note, if you’ve quit playing a game and no longer wish to see your friend’s ticker updates you can similarly hover over that friend’s status and select “Hide all by XXX.” You may also want to do this if you simply don’t play that game at all.

Why Facebook couldn’t make it easier to find or do this (like in the app settings as any normal person would expect) is most likely by design. They aren’t a bunch of dummies and probably thought the game ticker would increase social gameplay activity or boost interaction with the site. Even at the cost of privacy, Facebook is a business and not your friend.

If you’re a Windows user and want to get the famously clean look of Apple’s de facto font “Lucida Grande” you can do just about as good a job with the built-in Windows font Lucida Sans. The differences between the fonts are minimal, but if you just use a straight up substitution in Photoshop, you’ll find the font is still somewhat clumsy looking compared to its Mac OS X counterpart.

With a tiny bit of tweaking, though, you can easily mimic this font using what you’ve already got on your computer. Now, I made these settings myself and they aren’t scientifically measured nor are they certified by a typographical expert. I just used my eyes and it was enough to fool me. You may be able to do better, but at least I’ve given you a starting point.

As I mentioned, the Lucida Grande font is basically equivalent to Lucida Sans or Lucida Sans Unicode. Either one will do. To get it to look like the Apple font, look at the font panel on the Photoshop sidebar. First of all, bold the text. Next, adjust its character height (“T” icon with vertical arrows) to 111% and the character spacing (“AV” icon with horizontal arrows) to -40. Finally, set the text effect to “Smooth.” That’s it! At least for me this was sufficient.

Here are the settings taken from my Photoshop install.

I achieved the effect quite simply by grabbing a screenshot of an existing example of Lucida Grande typography. Then I overlayed some text over it in Photoshop and tweaked the settings until the characters lined up exactly. You may be able to get an even closer effect through this process and I’m sure other readers (including me) would love to know how you did it. Please don’t hesitate to share in the comments!