Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Author: Geoff

The Leopard and Lexmark

I upgraded my 24″ iMac to Leopard (OSX10.5) all went smoothly. Except for my brand new Lexmark X4580 printer/scanner/reader. The printer refuses to print and even worse crashes the programme that is sending the print. Looking up in Google I found the Apple users forums where another user was having similar problems. Emails to Lexmark were met with such comments as:- From Rathna “Please accept my heartfelt apologies for the problems you are experiencing with your Lexmark product. To the best of my knowledge, there are currently no plans to develop Mac drivers to support this model” & from Ben “Unfortunately we do not have any Leopard drivers available for your printer at this moment in time. We are currently developing them, but I do not have a timescale as to when they will be ready”

Question is whether Ellee’s friends at PC World will honour their PC Performance guarantee and replace the printer with an Epson CX8400 or Canon MX700 which apparently work with Leopard.

Update 2 Nov – I’ve just learnt from the Apple Forums that trashing the printers PDE folder gets the printer working and it did 🙂

New beginnings

After 2 years of procrastination I have finally transferred this site over to WordPress . My first WordPress site was for the Our Social World conference in September 2005, which I think is just about when WP was released to the public.

Geoff trying to smileSince then I have set up quite a few WP blogs for friends. Ellee’s being the first and more recently Sally’s

I have been very impressed at the rate of development in the WP community and the huge range of plugins available. WP also seems very stable and forgiving of novices like myself.

If you are interested in WP then a good blog to read is Lorelle on WordPress where she offers tips and advice.

Please let me know of any broken links (all links take you to the home page – no 404’s here!) or unexpected behaviour.

Looking forward to see how the change affects my google ranking for Geoff and Geoff Jones.

Changeover process

I have now imported all the posts created in the past few years created using blogger . These were ftp’d to my site hosted by domain direct. I couldn’t do it the import direct from my old site, so I republished the 697 posts onto a blogger hosted site and then imported them to this WordPress site using the integrated import utility.

I then used the Advanced Permalinks plugin from John Godley which neatly allowed me to adjust permalink structure on the 697 posts imported to be identical to their previous blogger structure.

Using John’s other plugin, Redirection, then allowed me to use a permanent redirection from my old url’s to the new wordpress ones . I can now use html pages or wordpress pages on this site and the users including Google can’t spot the difference from the old site.

Redirection also allows me to automatically correct any 404 (page not found) errors that my users might get, by sending them straight to the home page – whilst also letting me know of the precise error – so I can correct it with a 302 (permanent page redirection).

Its all looking good, so far, with no help from the folks at rentacoder either :-).

Republishing

Have now disconnected the ftp publishing of this blog to geoffjones.com/blogger.html and made it publish to geoffsnewnewold.blogspot.com, with the intention that I can import all the last 4 years of entries to my new wordpress blog.