I sent a feature request to Smile On My Mac the makers of Text Expander. I asked if they had any plans to support Drop Box as a syncing system. Below is the reply I got.

It can be done, but is not support at the moment, but worked fine for me. The command in step 4 didn’t work for me as that isn’t where my Drop Box is saved.

The answer is to open the Terminal, type ln -s (that is a lowercase L) then drag the folder you make in step 3 (the TextExpander folder) to the Terminal than copy this command to the end - ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextExpander and hit return.

My version looked like this:

ln -s /Users/username/Documents/_personal\ files/Baz\'s\ Folder/Dropbox/Library/TextExpander ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextExpander

One your primary machine:
1.  Install Dropbox (https://www.getdropbox.com/)
2.  Close System Preferences
3.  In the Finder, go to your Dropbox folder and create a folder called "Library."
3.  Drag the ~/Library/Application Support/TextExpander folder to your Dropbox/Library folder.  Your TextExpander settings and snippets are now stored on Dropbox.
4.  Open Terminal.app and type the following command:
ln -s ~/Dropbox/Library/TextExpander ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextExpander
The symlink will then redirect TextExpander to your Dropbox folder to grab the snippet information.    Take note that you won't get any sort of confirmation in the Terminal that this operation succeeded.  You can confirm it by going to [Home]/Library/Application Support and checking to see if the TextExpander folder is an alias now. It should look like this.

 

On your subsequent Macs:
1.  Install Dropbox (https://www.getdropbox.com/)
2.  Close System Preferences
3.  Delete the ~/Library/Application Support/TextExpander folder.  Since the snippets are on Dropbox, we need to symlink it like we did on the primary machine.  
4.  Open Terminal.app and type the same command as in the previous step 4. It will work fine if your DropBox is in the same path and machine 1.

Tags: Text Expander, dropbox, Smile On My Mac

Our studio server died a few weeks back and I had to rebuilt it. I suddenly realised that it was our Quark QLA server. A feeling of dread came over me, but to my relief and Quark's credit, it was very simple to reinstall. In fact v4.5 is very nice. It will now email me when the backup server has taken over. While installing it I found the screen below. Our license seem to last a very look time. Quark obviously plans to be around for a some time to come.

Tags: Quark

Over the weekend I had to update my cricket club website, reedcc.co.uk, and I had an awful lot of trouble getting it uploaded. It was slow and crashed a lot. Blocks pages seemed to take the longest. I put a query up on the developers website knowing that Isaiah, who writes Blocks is very active in his forums.

He offered to take a look at my site file for me. I sent him the 66mb file and he explained to me the issue, the site was too large. Not only that, he gave me some advice to get around the problem. The problem isn't with his product or with Rapidweaver, but just the number of pages in the site, over 600. This is excellent support. He could just have said, sorry, too big, not my fault and walked away, but no. He want beyond his product and went the extra mile.

All his plug-ins are excellent products and the support, as you can see, if second to none. This is what a developer should be able to do. Have close contact with their customers and be hands on with issues. I have to deal with big corporates during my day job and that is why I am so appreciative of Isaiah taking the time to help. Thanks Isaiah.

Tags: Yourhead, Rapidweaver