Quick fix: Unfreeze Endnote when entering CWYW citations

I have been experiencing a particular problem with Endnote X5 recently, and from what I’ve read it’s connected to OSX 10.8.2.  Specifically, when I open Endnote and start using the CWYW feature to enter citations into my document, Endnote freezes up and gets endlessly stuck on the “format bibliography” part of its process.

Here’s a quick fix, courtesy of facop78 on MacRumors.

1. Go to Applications : Utilities
2. Run the Activity Monitor found there
3. Set the “Show” option at the top of the window to All Processes
4. Click the column header “Process Name” to sort alphabetically
5. Highlight the appleeventsd process
6. Click the “Quit Process” button

The only extra thing I did was to shut down and restart Endnote at the end of the operation.  Worked like a charm!

Click here to read the entire thread.

Need images? Try morgueFile

Being a visual learner I often find myself constructing images (photos, graphs, verbal pictures, etc.) to explain things.  This is especially true when I put together presentation slides, whether they are for research conferences or the classes that I’m teaching.

My personal collection of digital photographs can only take me so far, however, so when I need free digital photographs and images for use in creative/scholarly projects I go to morgueFile.

I first learned about morgueFile about a year ago through my talented journalist/scholar/teacher friend, Peg.  I have been using it ever since.  It has a large and constantly growing collection of high-quality digital photographs.  You can use keywords to search through the photo archive, a useful feature that distinguishes the site from other archives.  (Note that photos seem to be tagged in multiple languages.  A search for “chat” turned up pictures of people speaking to one another as well as numerous cute cats.)  Best of all, you can register with morgueFile to contribute your own photos to the archive, which is perhaps the best possible way of repaying the morgueFile community for free use of their materials.

In terms of acknowledging the morgueFile photographers’ images, include a byline underneath each one that states “Photo by [name], morgueFile.”

Where do you go for free use images?

“Page not found”: Troubleshooting permalink glitches

Problem:  You compose a new WordPress blog post.  As usual, when you click “Publish” you see the confirmation message “Post published” at the top of the “Edit Post” page.  However, when you click “View post” or visit your website to check the post, you get the error message “Page not found.”

(Possible) solution:  It could be a permalink glitch, one that is easily fixed, as I’ll explain below.

One of the sites that I manage has a custom setting for its permalinks.  The setting is:

/index.php/%postname%/

This setting gives each post that I create a permalink containing the title of the post, such as:

http://mysite.com/index.php/here-is-my-newest-post-with-its-catchy-title/

I found that blog titles containing certain punctuation — like an apostrophe S (‘s) messed the system up and caused these “page not found” errors to occur.

In my case, changing the permalink setting for the whole website was a very bad idea. I had already spread hundreds of links far and wide in promoting the content.  If I was to change the permalink setting, all of these links that had been shared with the website’s audience would now produce nothing more than dead pages.

The best and easiest solution is to simply deal with problematic posts’ permalinks on a case-by-case basis.

1. Navigate to the “Edit Post” page for the troublesome post.
2. Type in (or keep) whatever title you want for the post.
3. Under the field where you typed in the title of the post, click on the “Change permalinks” button.
4. Remove offending punctuation from the permalink.
5. Update the post.

This worked for me — I hope it works for you, too.

Formatting page numbers in Word 2008

You might be writing a document (a dissertation, a thesis, a book) that requires different types of page numbers for different sections.  In dissertations, for example, you want the first three pages (Title page, Signature page, Abstract page) to have NO page numbers, then you want the fourth page (Table of contents) to have Roman numerals, and you want to have Arabic numerals (1,2, 3…) for the main body of your manuscript.  Here’s how you do this in Word 2008 for Mac.

Insert section breaks (specifically, “NEXT PAGE” section breaks) in between the types of pages.  Using the example of the dissertation above, insert a section break after the text on the abstract page, and again after the text of the table of contents.

Now switch off the default settings linking the sections.  Start from the last section and work your way back to the start of the document.  For example, in the body of your dissertation document, double-click in the footer area to show/open it.  (Alternately, use View->Header and Footer.)  The Header/Footer should be activated now.

Now go to View and click Formatting Palette.  This will activate a new pop up window with options for formatting different parts of your document, including the header and footer area.  Click on the Header and Footer section of the pop-up Formatting Palette to see the options.  Now DESELECT the checkbox that says “Link to previous.”  (This is the heart of all the page number/section formatting problems you’re likely to encounter.)  Use the “Go To” buttons to navigate to the headers and footers of the other sections and make sure to DESELECT this check box again such that the headers/footers of the separate sections are no longer linked to one another.  (It’s fine for them to be linked within a section, but not across sections, if you see what I mean.)

You can now insert page numbers of different sorts into the different sections, or you can have some sections with no page numbers at all.

This sort of formatting is easy once you know how to do it, but it’s not very intuitive, and those default settings can really throw a wrench in the works.

And now back to dissertating.