Mac 911 – Dec. 2007

Hiding iWeb pages

Q: Every time I make a page in iWeb, a link to it appears in the navigation bar at the top of every page. I’d like to make some pages accessible only through links that I put on particular pages in the site. Is this possible?— Amal Chandaria

A: If you know where to look, it’s easy to do this in Apple’s iWeb ’08 (part of the $79 iLife suite;   ) or the original iWeb. Select the page you want to hide in iWeb’s Source list, choose View: Show Inspector, click on the Page tab in the resulting Inspector window, and deselect the Include Page In Navigation Menu option (see “Control iWeb Pages”). The link to that page (or set of pages, if you’ve added a template such as Blog) will disappear completely from the site’s navigation bar.

Copying Keychains

Q: I have a lot of passwords stored in my PowerBook’s keychain. I want to put an exact copy of the keychain on my iBook, just in case my trusty PowerBook gives up the ghost, but Mac Help is vague about how to do this.— Jason M. Krellenstein

A: The first step to copying your keychain is finding it. Look inside your user folder /Library/Keychains. Login.keychain is the default user keychain file that OS X creates—the one you unlock with your login password. (If you’ve created a new keychain—Chris’s keychain.keychain, for example—you’ll find it here as well.)

Copying a keychain from one computer to another, however, can be problematic. If that other computer uses a different user name or password, it’ll bombard you with password requests. Even with the same user name and password, you’ll run into the occasional request for a password you know is in the keychain. For example, when I copied my keychain to another computer that used the same user name and password, Internet Connect asked me for my virtual private network (VPN) password—despite the fact that it never did that on the original computer.

If you subscribe to Apple’s .Mac service ($99 per year), you’ll be happy to know you already have a way to avoid these problems. The service gives you the option to sync your keychain between your .Mac account and any Macs you sync with it (see “Keychain Syncing”).

You’ll find the option for syncing keychains—as well as bookmarks; calendars; contacts; Mail accounts; and Mail rules, signatures, and smart mailboxes—in the Sync tab of the .Mac preference pane. Select the Synchronize With .Mac option and then choose from the list.

Easy blind carbon copy option for Mail

Q: I like to use the Addresses window in Apple’s Mail to address my messages. But I don’t see a button there that will let me put an address in the BCC field instead of the To field. What’s the best way to do that?— Marty Grauer

A: The Addresses window (Window: Address Panel) in Apple’s Mail for OS X 10.4 (Tiger) doesn’t include a BCC option. Try a different approach: create a new e-mail message (1-N), choose View: BCC Address Field (1-option-B), open the Address Panel, and then drag the recipient names you want into the BCC field.

Safari’s regrettable memory

Q: Safari does a reasonable job of trying to guess and fill in the Web address I am about to type. After a while, though, its memory becomes cluttered. When I type

g

to go to Google, for example, it guesses that I want to go to a genealogical Web page I visited once. How can I erase all the Web addresses, or at least the undesired ones, from Safari’s brain?— Bill Zagotta

A: Apple’s Safari 2.0.X doesn’t provide one single command for getting rid of these memorized entries. They’re concocted from Safari’s bookmarks, cache, and history. You can get close by choosing Safari: Reset Safari, but doing this can be problematic. In the first place, it doesn’t touch your bookmarks, so some of those entries will still appear. Secondly, it will clear more data than you probably want it to. In addition to deleting the history and emptying the cache, it clears the Downloads window, removes all cookies, and gets rid of any user names and passwords you may have asked it to save. As a result, you might prefer to clear out Safari’s memory piecemeal instead. Start by choosing Safari: Empty Cache. Then choose History: Clear History. Then go into the Bookmarks area and clear out bookmarks you don’t want.

Alternatively, adopt some new habits. The first would be to type more than just that first letter

g

when you want to hop to Google.com. Try

go

and see if that works. Or bypass the whole autofill thing by clicking on the Address field, pressing the spacebar once, and starting to type. Autofill doesn’t work if the first character is a space.

You can help prevent the addition of entries by choosing Safari: Private Browsing when you surf. With this option enabled, Safari won’t cache the Web sites you visit or add them to its history; therefore they won’t appear as Autofill entries.