This article in Wired, The Best: Web 2.0 Acquisition Bait, lists the top 10 web 2.0 sites that might potentially be bought out by larger corporations. A friend of mine showed me the article in Wired magazine, and I hadn't visited Wired's site for a while. Surprise -- it's totally a magazine blog, and they've organized it in a very readable way. The top ten sites are as follows: Facebook Digg Techmeme Wikipedia Zillow Technorati Wordpres...
Do you have about 20 programs in your start-up folder? Check out the little icons near your computer's clock. That's the system tray. Whatever is in there starts up when your computer starts up -- and consequently makes your computer slower. You can improve the performance of your computer pretty easily by doing the following: Go to Start > Run. Type msconfig and click OK. Click the Startup tab. Clear all the check boxes. Click OK. ...
Digg is one of the most interesting sites to get news from. Digg is a user-driven site to which users can submit stories they find online. If others like the story, they rate it higher (digging it). The stories that are dug the most rise to the top. So in one day, you can look at the top story, or the top story of the week/month/year. It's an example of human-selected aggregation. The stories are usually quirky but almost always noteworth...
If you have not yet seen or explored Google Groups, I really encourage you to, especially if you are trying to solve a problem. I was able to get oodles of knowledge about macros out of the Word > Tables and Word > Mailmerge groups. I also found good solutions from the Robohelp group. Basically all the Microsoft MVPs hang out on Google Groups. Subscribing to groups and unsubscribing is easy, and of course you can access your group anywher...
I have been extremely impressed with http://sparkpeople.com. This is a web 2.0 site that allows you to count calories, track cardio and other goals, interact with others via spark blogs, spark email, and spark teams. It is interactive all the way to the bone. As the New Year rolls around, I think many are looking to implement a diet. I have been using this site for a few days now and I think it is certainly the coolest tool I've ever see...
I didn't realize WordPress could be reprogrammed in such a way as this, but someone has created an online budgeting software tool out of WordPress: http://Mo.neytrack.in. (I'm assuming that moneytrackin.com was taken.) Basically you enter transactions that are either positive or negative, and then tag them with a keyword. Mo.neytrack.in can then aggregate similar keywords (categories) and show you the money spent on that category, and so...
I've been a devout WordPress follower for some time now, but this past weekend I realized why Blogger is by far the most popular blog platform: usability. While WordPress is really flexible, most users want ease of use more than flexibility. My wife was trying to load pictures onto her blog, but WordPress really fails when it comes to images. You have to pretty much format your images prior to uploading. I even installed the Chenpress edi...
I've started using Gmail as my application for listserv messages -- I think it has more potential, but I'm still getting used to it. Someone posted this link on Digg: http://g04.com/misc/GmailTipsComplete.html It has about 50 tips for using Gmail. Looks useful. The reason I started using Gmail is because it threads conversations from listservs. The problem with Outlook or Outlook Express is that if you want to read a conversation on a lis...
This is an interesting article on how to design for Web 2.0 audiences. While I don't agree with the author's use of the term web 2.0 here (because I don't see how any of the design draws upon the audience's collaboration or participation), the principles the author highlights are worthy of a closer look. Here's a summary of the principles: Simplicity Central layout Fewer columns Separate top section Solid areas of screen real-estate Sim...
Listen here: In this podcast, Karen Bachmann, manager of the Usability and User Experience SIG, provides an overview of the user-centered design process. This is part one of a two part series. More specifically, she describes the following: How usability is defined Typical steps in the usability process Fitting in usability with a typical development life cycle User analysis User interface prototypes Usability test pla...
Update: For steps on removing the Skype-Firefox extension, see this post from howtogeek.com. Skype 3.0 has just been released. An interesting feature is the Skype extension for Firefox. When you browse a website and see a phone number on the site, the Skype extension automatically converts it into a button that you click to call the person using Skype. Unfortunately, with Skype 3.0, calls to cell and home phones now cost money. Here's a p...
This is my first post from Word 2007. In creating a new document, you have the option of writing a blog post. I think that is about the coolest thing in the world. I was actually seeing testing out Word tonight to see if the numbering structure fixed the numbering problem when generating a print output from RoboHelp. Nope, but I'm pretty sure the problem is with RoboHelp rather than Word. Here's a little formatting. Wow, Word 2007 is amaz...
If you need a free tool to open zipped files, tar files, or other types of compressed folders, and to likewise zip folders yourself, check out 7 Zip. I've been using it for a month now (after my Power Archiver trial ended), and I've found 7 zip does everything I ever need it to -- and it's free. Here's their site: http://www.7-zip.org
Word 2007 is available. It looks quite interesting -- definitely different. Here's a post from the Microsoft Team blog about it, with a demo video. Be sure to watch the video. I haven't experimented with it yet, but hope to soon.
I've been trying to figure this out for about two days, so now that I've actually gotten it to work, I'm posting the instructions here. I'm planning to go back and revise these, but for now, proceed with caution. They're probably not that easy to follow without screenshots. We have a lot of Wordtemplates that developers use in the software methodology process. The documents all have embedded help, but that makes the document actually qui...
