Lately I've had the urge to abandon my main desktop tools and use online tools instead. It's not just that some online tools are more capable than desktop tools, but it just feels right to be online. When you're online, you're connected, integrated, at home. The world is at your fingertips. Because of the limitations of bandwidth, I can't fully break free from my desktop, but for many applications, the potential is there. Here's how I can...
I added a new audio feature to my blog -- you can now listen to the posts. It's a robotic voice automated from Talkr.com. I thought I'd experiment with it, even though I think no human can listen to a robot-generated voice and find much enjoyment from it. However, if you're visually impaired, or want to listen to the post while doing other things, or if you're an audio learner, you might like it. There's also a voice feed (look in the si...
I stumbled across a well-designed WordPress blog yesterday. It has several qualities that make it stand out: Ample white space Simplicity of design Contrast between headers and paragraphs The ample white space and openness of the design is what I like the most. The cat in the upper-left corner (is it a cat?) and the author's picture on the right also provides a nice balance. Ample white space is a key principle of graphic design. I thi...
WordPress is already a micro-CMS, but if you have a site that has a lot of pages, it can get a bit cluttered. By CMS, I mean a site where you have an abundance of static pages that you want to manage, rather than just an endless number of posts. You can use a Subpages plugin in your sidebar to make it easy for your users to find the pages. The context-sensitive Subpages sidebar can give your blog more of a CMS feel. I just finished redesi...
This is NY Times columnist David Pogue's review of the much anticipated, over -hyped iPhone. I love Pogue's videos.
The Rise of the Creative Class is a phenomenal podcast by a world famous expert on urban economies, Richard Florida. Florida's point is that a region's economic prosperity is not based on having an abundance of companies with high-paying salaries. Instead, the prosperity depends on the degree of openness, tolerance, and quality of life in the area. So even if companies in your area offer attractive, high-paying salaries, the creative clas...
Search engine optimization helps you crank up your rankings in Google. Here are three easy techniques to make your posts land on the front page of Google's search returns: Put keywords in the title and first paragraph. Google places a heavy emphasis on keywords appearing in the title and first paragraph. The best placement is actually the first word in each. You can also install an SEO plugin in case you can't fit the keywords into the t...
Ann Gentle of BMC has been researching the use of wikis in documentation. Although wikis have been around for at least ten years, they are finally getting more attention. Ann writes, It's funny, in an early blog post I wrote on the internal blogs at BMC I said that I did not see how wikis would be used successfully for technical publications. I have since changed my once low opinion of wikis but I still see them supplementing other docum...
Listen here: In this podcast, I talk with Kevin Shoesmith about information architecture and the challenge of organizing complicated websites. Kevin explains about the importance of metadata, providing user-driven organization, taxonomy vs. folksonomy, the Dublin core, the usability of web menus. Music from Podshow. Check out Kevin's blog.
Lucy has a great smile. I wish I were always this happy, even when giants held me up.
Context-sensitive help is usually perceived as being tedious or difficult to implement. However, if you're writing help for a web application, this little javascript trick makes delivering context-sensitive help easy. Using this method, the developer doesn't have to manually configure any of the URLs, and you as a tech writer have only a minimal amount of work as well. Each page in the application calls the right help topic for the right ...
Popurls is a news site that aggregates the top stories from Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Flickr, Metafilter, Tailrank, Newsvine, Youtube, Google News, Yahoo News, Netscape, ifilm, Wired, Slashdot, Boing Boing, Odeo, Fark, NowPublic, Stumble Upon, Furl, Clipmarks, dzone, Videosift, AOL Video, and then from about two dozen popular sites all on one page in one consolidated view. Talk about taking in all the news from the Web from one central ...
Shannon's latest Makes Me Smile Monday theme is fathers. When I think of my childhood and spending time with my father, I think of us playing catch in the field near our house. He always pretended I was throwing the ball so hard and fast that it hurt his hand. He would also swing a rope with a ball around the end while I batted it. My dad was more supportive with me for baseball than any other sport -- perhaps because he could participate...
Google Reader offers a Shared feature that allows you to share select posts from your list of feeds in Google Reader by simply clicking a Share link (see image below). You can then provide your readers with a link to your shared items page as well as your shared items feed. I just added my Shared Items page as a link in my header.
Have you ever run across Postsecret? It's an interesting site showing anonymously submitted confessions on postcards. This latest post has a father's day theme -- some are sad confessions, others are downright funny, like the one below:
