Here’s a way to use Flickr again, following the foul and bloated changes that have made it all but unusable for speedy searching. Speed is especially important for those on a deadline, for instance those who need to use the Creative Commons Flickr search for picture sourcing via http://search.creativecommons.org/ in a timely manner…

* In the Chrome browser: Install the addon Chrome User Agent Spoofer. Set it so that Chrome pretends to be Internet Explorer 8 (that worked for me, and apparently for most others). It enables much quicker loading of images, compared to either no loading or the painfully slow loading in any of the other browsers on my PC. The click-through and “View all sizes” still works. The addon can be set to always emulate IE8, when it lands on https://www.flickr.com/

* In the Firefox browser: Install the addon UA Control. Not quite as easy to setup to emulate IE8, and the loading is not as fast as in Chrome, but it works. Add this string…

Site:   https://www.flickr.com/
String:   new_flickr_sucks (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; GTB7.4; InfoPath.2; SV1; .NET CLR 3.3.69573; WOW64; en-US)

This will work, but not via http://search.creativecommons.org/ Instead you will need to bookmark and access the Flickr Advanced Search with CC via https://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/?l=cc The click-through and “View all sizes” still works.

One of the problems found in making a local archival backup of your free WordPress.com blog is that users are not allowed to bulk export their images and other uploaded files. Just the archive .xml file, which has all the HTML of the blog posts inside it. WordPress.com unhelpfully suggest: “uploads and images may need to be manually transferred to the new blog”. That’s possible for the lazy blogger who only ever squeezed out six posts before exhausting their intellectual energies, but not so useful for uber-bloggers with thousands of posts and images.

For those who are self-hosting a WordPress install, archiving all images is a simple matter. Just copy over the relevant folder by FTP access. But for free WordPress.com users that’s not an option.

Similarly, those moving from a live WordPress.com blog to a new self-hosted WordPress blog are also in luck. Import the .xml backup of your blog and the new self-hosted WordPress install should go fetch the old blog’s live images and import them, even reworking all their links to conform to the new site URL. Once everything has been ported across, the old WordPress.com blog can then be deleted.

However, there may be instances where someone wants to make a more long-term local archive of a free WordPress.com blog, especially one that is set to be deleted. A literary executor, for instance, may want to properly archive then close a writer’s substantial blog. Perhaps there are legal problems with the estate that means the blog needs to come down. Perhaps they intend to publish it in book form or online again at some time in the future, but… they’re not sure yet.

But they do know that they want the archive to remain more-or-less portable and flexible into the future. I’m assuming that that person doesn’t have time or the technical savvy to: buy web space; get to the host to activate the database on their website space; get a hosted WordPress install set up and configured with the database; then save the blog out from that. Or to set up a local MySQL etc install on their desktop, something which is dangerously unstable in terms of later moving it to a new PC or a fresh OS install.

In such a case the easiest option for doing this appears to be…

1. Download and install a website ripper (or in more polite parlance, “mirroring”) software. Such as the excellent free HTTrack Website Copier. Use its simple wizard to make a full local mirror of your blog. You’re only doing this to get at the images, and have them accurately mirrored inside their correctly named sub-folders.

Unfortunately the downloading of your target blog may take quite some time, even for a relatively small blog. A test run with JURN’s substantial blog took a ridiculous 90 minutes to mirror, using HTTrack 64bit Windows and standard broadband, including 18,000 “ooh, ooh, share this post on CrapUpon!” and similar WordPress fluff-files.

2. Then download an export backup .xml of your blog, from your blog’s own Dashboard (Dashboard | Tools | Export | Export | Complete | Download Export File). This export will be a text only .xml file, which won’t include any of the blog’s images. (What to do when the export email never arrives)

3. Copy out the images folder (look for a folder titled yourblogname.files.wordpress.com) from the local ‘mirror’ of your blog that HTTrack made. Place this below the location of your blog’s exported .xml file.

4. You now have a relatively clean and simple backup archival copy of your blog, with the folders of blog images aligned (in terms of everything but the base URL) with the URL references contained in the .xml archive file.

5. Make a copy of the blog’s main index.html page, so as to capture any sidebar blogroll links. Perhaps also take a screenshot, and also download the .zip of the template that was used by the blog. Place these items with the .xml and images folders.

6. Save and zip an archive of the blog .xml and and the blog images, plus the index.html, the template .zip, and the screenshot.

The advantage of doing it this way is that the blog is now much more portable across longer periods of time. If — five or ten years down the line, once the author’s estate has been sorted out — you want to put the blog online again, or port it into a book or timeline or whatever, you still have a single-file local .xml copy with code that’s fully accessible for search/replace with a simple text editor. You’d upload HTTrack’s folder(s) of the archived images somewhere, then tweak the archive’s .xml via search-and-place of the image links (perhaps by using the free Notepad++, which can cleanly handle and save huge .xml files without injecting them full of Microsoft Office bloat on saving), such that the .xml archive image links all point to your new online images folder. A new self-hosted WordPress install should then go fetch those images and import them, reworking all the links to conform to the new site URL.

Update, March 2019.

Via the new dashboard, “Export Media Library” newly added…

Tabula. Free Windows software to copy-and-paste rows of data out of PDF files, and into plain CSV format, through a simple interface. You do need the Java runtime installed on your PC, though, which is a huge security risk. But it may be worth it, if you regularly need to move tables of data from PDFs to MS Excel or similar database software.

I’ve finally found a decent PDF reader, for speedily launching straight into full-screen, double-page spread + cover page. It’s the free Foxit Reader, set thus…

1. Set it to always launch “Full Screen Mode”, in Preferences…

2. Set to always launch with “facing pages” and “fit page”, in Preferences…

While you’re in Preferences…

* uncheck “Show Advertisment” in General. (To prevent future updates forcing advertising on you, also uncheck “auto-update”).
* uncheck “Enable Javascript” in Trust Manager (doing this increases your security).
* you probably also want to enable clickable Web links in PDFs. This is hidden deep in: Preferences | Trust Manager | Internet Access from PDF files… | Change Settings | “Allow PDF files to access all web sites” | OK | OK.

3. Set View to use double-page spread + cover page. Close and reopen the software, and the cover-page setting will hopefully “stick”…

As you can see from all the wrangling shown above, Foxit still needs a one-click settings button marked: “Always launch a PDF straight into magazine mode (fullscreen + facing pages + show cover page + fit page)”.

Tapping “Esc” on the keyboard will escape you from fullscreen.

Foxit is very fast to launch on 64-bit Windows 8, only a few milliseconds slower than the almost instantaneous Microsoft Reader. But unlike Microsoft Reader it always shows crisp text. And you get access to the page thumbnails.

The alternatives:

Microsoft Reader for Windows 8: Lovely speed, simple interface. But the awesome launch / page-turn speed comes at a price: the page often looks fuzzy, which makes reading small text unpleasant. No page thumbnails support, either.

Firefox browser: A very capable and fast integrated PDF reader for use during Web browsing, with an intuitive user interface. But it can’t remember user settings between sessions, and doesn’t respect any “display as double page spreads” settings embedded in the PDF. Copying and pasting text from such a PDF display sometimes shows garbled text, so Firefox may be compromising letter fidelity in order to get a good visual display.

Nitro PDF Reader: Not that bad, I had it on my system for a few weeks. But it can’t launch straight to fullscreen, while Foxit Reader can. Foxit also has the nicer user interface.

Adobe Reader: Ugh… Clunky user interface, and a proven and persistent security risk. Plus, that nasty new “visit links to Adobe!” sidebar that’s impossible to remove. Uninstalled.

Slim PDF Reader: Installed. Very lightweight, free, but meh… it was rapidly uninstalled.

Update, September 2017: It’s goodbye to Foxit, which added one to many nags, extra bits of unwanted software such as its Connected module, and generally got bloated.

I’m now using the freeware Sumatra PDF, with its Book view (Cover + Facing pages) which is found under Settings | View | Book View. Super-quick launch and very smooth page-turn.

You can set it to always launch in Book mode by editing the Advanced settings list. Find:

DefaultDisplayMode = automatic

and change this to…

DefaultDisplayMode = book view

The other initial drawback appears to be a slight sliver of gutter between double-page spreads, which spoils magazine spreads in art / architecture / fashion etc magazines. This can also be fixed in the Advanced settings. Find:

PageSpacing = 4 4

and change this to…

PageSpacing = 0 0

Identify and extract the duplicates in an Excel 2007 column list. It should be a simple one-button task, but Microsoft expects users to jump through hoops to do it. To the rescue: the free Duplicate Master 1.4, which deftly handles the task with a simple four-click wizard…

1. Download Duplicate Master and extract.
2. Double-click on The Duplicate Master.xla file, and accept Excel’s warning about ‘enabling macros’. Duplicate Master should load into Excel, to be found in the Add-Ins tab.

3. Load your .xls and select your column of data.
4. Call up Duplicate Master, and select your options in it…

Duplicate Master then copies your column’s duplicate entries, automatically opens a new sheet, and copies in the duplicates.

For future use, either:

1. Make a desktop shortcut to The Duplicate Master.xla, put it in the Windows Start menu, and then call as it up as if it were a program when you have Excel loaded.

or… 2. Pin Duplicate Master to the Add-ins tab by following these steps: Open the Excel 2007 Start Orb | Excel Options | Add-ins | Managed Excel Add-ins + GO | Browse… load The Duplicate Master.xla | OK, OK, and quit.

Another handy hard-won tip for MS Excel 2007, which may save time for someone new to the software. This shows how to blank cells in Excel that are not really blank (because a formula left some hidden junk in them).

Scenario: You tried copying the data and pasting it back in again, as “Values”. It had no effect. You removed trailing and stray spaces. With no effect. You still couldn’t get Excel to select all the blank cells. Here’s what worked for me, without running more formulas or macros:

1. Download the free ASAP Utilities add-on for Excel. Install, and locate its top button bar.

2. Select all cells in your target column.

3. In ASAP Utilities choose: Numbers & Dates | “Convert unrecognised numbers (text?) to numbers”. This has the very useful side-effect of clearing all the hidden junk that may be clogging up your apparently blank cells.

4. Now in Excel you can go: Home | Find & Select | Go To Special… | Blanks | OK. All your blank cells will be selected and highlighted, whereas before this operation would not find all the blank cells.

To place a text marker into all your selected blank cells: press F2, then type a word or phrase into the first selected cell. Then, instead of pressing Enter as normal, hold down Crtl on the keyboard + press Enter. All your blank cells will then be filled with the typed text.

ASAP Utilities also has a simpler “fill blank cells” option, but it seems to be unable to handle more than 400 rows at a time.

I’ve been playing around with MS Excel 2007, and found that I wanted to paste in two lists and then have Excel automatically identify and extract all the non-duplicates. The second list is a jumbled up variant of the first, with some new additions in it.

Here’s a working .xls file showing my example: excel-sort-two-lists-find-non-duplicates (20kb). The embedded formula spots and extracts the new additions, handily placing them directly alongside their occurrence.

Tip: The formula currently only goes 18 cells down in Column C. To extend it further, click that 18th cell, spot the little “+” in the corner of the cell, and then drag the “+” down for as many extra cells as you need.

There are a zillion bits of advice on using Excel to identify duplicates, but not so many for spotting and extracting non-duplicates in this manner. So hopefully this working example will be of use to someone.