Yearly Archives: 2010

Using Symbolic Links to Backup Your Files to Dropbox

Dropbox is an excellent little service that I’ve written about on more than one occasion. It’s a nice off-site backup tool, as well as easy way to keep data synced between multiple computers.

I imagine it would be nice to get one of their larger plans and automagically sync all of your files between a desktop and a laptop, but not all of us are willing to pay for that luxury.

Now if you have a few assorted folders that you want to keep synced with Dropbox, what’s an easy way to do so without physically moving them into your main Dropbox folder? You can use the magic of symbolic links. (A magic that only exists on Mac OS X, Linux, and Unix…)

Open a command line and type the following two commands, changing the paths to whatever is relevant in your situation:

cd /Users/Matt/Dropbox
ln -s /Users/Matt/path/to/my/files The_New_Folder_Name

Now if you go back to your Dropbox folder, you should see a new directory called “The_New_Folder_Name” that, when clicked, should bounce you right over to the original folder. Dropbox will see this “shortcut” link as the real deal and back the files up to the cloud.

BlogBuzz January 30, 2010

The iPad Will Find its Niche: My Thoughts on Apple’s Tablet

Unless you’ve been living in a cave somewhere, you’ve almost certainly heard about Apple’s new iPad tablet. The $499 device is essentially a giant iPod Touch, but with a few additional features. The integrated ebook store (or iBooks, as Apple prefers to call them…)…

Is Firefox Losing its Focus?

Firefox is a great web browser, certainly the most extendable. In the beginning, one of Firefox’s strong points was how lightweight it was. It wasn’t full of extraneous features, it was pretty snappy. It did one thing, web browsing, and it did it well.…

The History of the Emoticon

Have you ever wondered where the ASCII “smiley face,” and the later emoticons, came from? It was first used on a Carnegie Mellon bulletin board in the early 1980s, September 19, 1982 to be exact. The motivation behind the symbol was to devise a…

An API for the Web: Learning YQL

I just read one of the most interesting articles Net.Tuts+ has published in the last few months: An API for the Web: Learning YQL. Web apps and web services multiply like rabbits. They’re all fun to play with (like rabbits) and fun to integrate…

WordPress Category Templates + Custom Taxonomies

Here’s a part of WordPress that many people overlook: Category Templates. It’s actually quite easy to set up your theme so that it adapts to the content being displayed, allowing you to set up “departments” or “sub sites” that are styled differently. This isn’t…

BlogBuzz January 23, 2010

jQuery 1.4 Released

Version 1.4 of jQuery has been released, and Net.Tuts+ has published a nice guide to some of the more interesting features that are now available. I’m particularly interested in the first item, which sounds intriguing. Pre 1.4, jQuery supported adding attributes to an element…

Poll: What Do You Look For in a Premium Theme?

There is no shortage of “premium” WordPress themes nowadays, and their creators are fairly large in number as well. You have the monumental WooThemes, the bargain ThemeForest, and DIYthemes, the people behind the ever-popular Thesis theme, to name just a few. Companies aside, what…