For the record, before the hit count was reset by the move to the new domain, Hawk Wings’ most popular posts ever were:

1. Top ten things every Mail.app user should have (6904)
2. MacFreePOPs: Getting emails from hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, SquirrelMail, AOL, etc (5464)
3. Talking Mail.app: John Gruber (4311)
4. 202 different Apple Mail icons (3434)
5. MailTunes: A great idea, but…. (3431)
6. Talking Mail.app: drunkenbatman (3088)
7. Mail Appetizer – Notification for those who can’t wait (3078)
8. Getting Things Done in Apple Mail (2916)
9. Mail Act-on – Getting sorted, saving time (2787)
10. Switching from Thunderbird to Apple Mail (2786)
11. Mail Forward: AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, Yahoo! to Apple Mail (2700)
12. MailTags 1.1 released (2662)
13. Importing email from Outlook and Outlook Express (2574)
14. Talking Mail.app: Merlin Mann (2508)
15. Got some things done in Apple Mail, Part II (2496)

hawk wings, mail.app, apple mail, tips, plugins, GTD, top ten, icons, talking mail.app

OK. Thanks to Brady’s advice, the domain name switch and redirects seem to have worked. Huzzah!

Still, there are a few things to mention:

I’ve adjusted the feed at feedburner, but if you’re not getting RSS through feedburner, you may need to manually change over your feed to http://www.hawkwings.net/feed/.

Not everything made it over. The comments of the last few days are gone. Sorry about that — no disrespect.

The stats tables for “most popular entries ever” were too big to shoehorn into the new setup which has a 40MB upload limit.

For some reason that I can’t work out, the “Live Comment Preview” plugin is not working.

Given my general inattention to detail and ham-fisted coding, other things are doubtless broken. If you can’t find what you are looking for or something else goes wrong, please let me know.personal, hawk wings

Hawk Wings (avec les enfants charmants) is off to the beach. It’s Summer down here. I see Gin and Tonics, rockpools, the drive-in, barbecues and John Grisham novels.

I also see dial-up. Updates might be erratic or not happen at all until I get back in two weeks’ time.

UPDATE: Actually, dial-up is not as bad as I remember. Limited posting continues underneath this sticky post.

In the meantime, if you are looking for Mail.app tips and tricks, you could try:

1. The top ten things every Mail.app user should have — the very best add-ons, plug-ins and resources that no Apple Mail user should be without.
2. Hawk Wings’ Greatest Hits 2005 — the five most popular (as voted by you) and the five best (as voted by me) entries of last year.
3. Five great online articles for Mail.app users.

You can also search for what you want using the search field in the top right, or browse using the categories list or tag cloud in the sidebar on the right.

Have a good two weeks. I know I will.

You will notice (I hope) that advertising is appearing in tasteful and restrained places on Hawk Wings.

TUAW, NonStopMac and some other sites are linking to my posts, which is nice. It is also sending the bandwidth usage through the roof.

So I have to upgrade my web hosting package. So it costs more money. So the wife wants to know who is going to pay for this extravagance. So the ads appear.

You know the rest of the drill. Be nice. Click once in a while. Ease the domestic pressure. Make the Baby Jesus smile.

No doubt the Internet will be soggy with self-indulgent nostalgia today. Here’s my contribution.

Hawk Wings spluttered into life at the end of July this year as a way to learn about blogging and as a tribute to a little app that I quite like.

It was relaxing and a pleasant distraction from the real world, so I continued. Over the last five months, a few of my posts proved popular (by Hawk Wings’ standards) with readers:

Top Five Most Popular Posts

1. MacFreePOPs: Getting emails from hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, SquirrelMail, AOL, etc. MacFreePOPs just seems to run and run. I don’t know where the hits come from, but it is by far the most popular thing I ever blogged.
2. Top ten things every Mail.app user should have. Recent and popular, some people found this a useful entry point into the world of plug-ins and/or fun to disagree with.
3. Switching from Thunderbird to Apple Mail. With help from Andreas Amann, this post collected some helpful ways to make the break from Thunderbird.
4. Getting Things Done in Apple Mail. Never was a niche market focussed on time-efficiency willing to spend so much time reading about how to do it :-)
5. Apple Mail: The Early Years. My first blogging “triumph”. The pre-history of Mail.app as NeXTMail in NeXTSTEP.

But sometimes it happens — on blogs and in life — that the best things are not the most popular ones.

Here are five posts that added something which wasn’t there before:

Top Five Best Posts

1. Apple Mail: The Early Years. With help from Don Yacktman and John Kheit, I was able to gather together some oral history before it disappears.
2. Putting your Apple Mail on an iPod. Jeffrey Glover was kind enough to share a step-by-step walk-through on storing your Mail folder on a iPod.
3. What’s in your Mail folder?. A Cook’s Tour of your Mail folder. Poking around in order to write this was fun.
4. Services and Apple Mail. A small contribution to a much neglected aspect of Mac OS X and of working smarter in Apple Mail.
5. Got some things done in Apple Mail, Part I and Part II. Blogging is often about being a magpie, picking shiny things out of the never-ending piles of other people’s posts.

   Here I think I really wrestled something to the ground, got some understanding of GTD, and produced two posts that added a bit to the ways in which Mail.app can be used.

Of course, there were less successful moments too.

I discovered several new Mail features that have been around since Jaguar and completely misunderstood what the new iChat SSL certificates were about. Also my arguments in favour of top-posting proved more persuasive to me than anyone else.

Since its birth in July, Hawk Wings has served 901,547 pages and moved up 3,099,986 places in Technorati’s rankings. Nothing to be too proud of, as there are still 22,669 blogs people would rather read than this one.

See you in 2006 (unless 10.4.4 sees us first).

It’s been five weeks since my last self-indulgent “Hawk Wings Stats” post. So another one is perhaps OK.

Yesterday Hawk Wings served its 500,000th page. The number of pages served to Iceland has increased fourfold.

Also, over the last five weeks, Hawk Wings somehow moved up from 90,216 to 51, 816 in Technorati‘s rankings.

A big thanks to you for reading, commenting and for linking. And to Alternative Web Services who hosts Hawk Wings and has generously provided some extra bandwidth to keep the site ticking over. Thanks.

One final stat. Today is my two year “switchaversary”. I still have a crystal-clear memory of the afternoon my PowerBook arrived at work. The weight. The style. The unpacking ritual. The smell. The startup chime. Opening my own copy of Mail.app for the first time.

The Site

I fell in love with Apple Mail the first time I saw it at work on a friend’s computer. After years of slugging away in Windows with a variety of email clients, it was a revelation.

In Apple Mail, I found a client that not only looked beautiful (and when you spend many hours a day in front of a computer, that’s not unimportant), but had an excellent blend of power and focus – it did everything that I wanted an email client to do with none of the “features bloat” that other clients have.

Within a week of seeing Mail.app, I’d junked my PC and switched. This site is just a little tribute to that program.

The Name

The Apple Mail icon features the Red-tailed Hawk in full flight. This bird, the Buteo jamaicensis, ranges over most of the North American Continent. Its call, a two to three second rasping, will be well-known to anyone who has watched a Western. Or so I read in a posting on the Mac Net Journal .

By all accounts it is an aggressive bird, vigourously defending its territory against intruders. Luckily, its diet is composed almost entirely of small rodents. You can read more about these magnificent birds, as I did, on the Desert USA and U.S. Geological Survey web sites.

This “Hawk Wings” blog contains tips and add-ons to make Mail go further, faster, stronger.

The Author

Tim Gaden is Dean of the Theological School , and Stewart Lecturer in Theology at Trinity College within the University of Melbourne. He teaches Greek (and that kind of thing).

After completing his doctorate on the use of Hellenistic philosophy and ethics in the Apostolic Fathers, he held parish appointments in London and Melbourne. He lives in Melbourne, Australia, is married and has some kids.

He was once an IT journalist. Fleetingly.

Tim Gaden, mail.app, apple mail, Greek, Hawk Wings, Red-tailed hawk