What makes a good content writer

For anyone looking to become a content writer, check this out:

"Web content is a newer form of writing that demands its own sets of rules and etiquette. A good website content writer will know how to write content so that a viewer will be able to read without becoming bored or clicking to another site. There are several rules that all of the best web content writers follow.

Sentences

Short and to the point. Good web content is direct without using any unnecessary words. This goes for paragraphs and even for words, too.

Reverse Pyramid

A good web content writer will put the most important information, or the conclusion, at the very beginning, grabbing a reader’s attention.

Word Choice

Simple, easy to understand words are the best to use. A good web content writer understands that people of all reading abilities browse the web, and to connect to as many readers as possible, the simplest words should be chosen at all times.

Highlighted Text

The best web content writers put important words in color or bold so that a reader can scan the text and find the information that they want easily and efficiently.

Brevity

Again, probably the most important, good web content writers are careful to only include the most important information because long, wordy paragraphs will turn off the reader and end up in little readership. The Internet is a place where information is found quickly with little effort spent. The best web content writers always say what they are trying to say using the fewest words possible."

Read the whole story here

Find better Windows, Mac, Linux and online applications

Pretty cool site that gives you alternatives to other software you use, found this originally on twitter and it's pretty interesting to see what alternatives there are to software we use everyday!

"AlternativeTo is a new approach to finding good software. Tell us what applicatio

Save Now

n you want to replace and we give you suggestions on great alternatives! Instead of listing thousands of more or less crappy applications in a category, we make each application into a category. Think of it like forever evolving blog posts about good alternatives to the software that you're not satisfied with. And the "blog posts" are generated by you through suggestions, comments and votes. "


http://alternativeto.net/

10 Transition Effects: The art of Showing/Hiding Content

"Delivering informative structure is the primary task an interactive user interface should be able to cope with. The more intuitive layout structure is designed, the better users can understand the content.

Whatever content you have to present, you can present them in a more interactive & more responsive ways. In this article we’d like to present 10 smart javascript techniques for showing and hiding content using different JS libraries."

Whole post here

10 Dirty Little Web Development Tricks

"We all have them - little coding tricks and snippets of knowledge that we’ve picked up over years of experimentation and evolution of our processes, that are now part of our regular routine and save us time, gnashing of teeth and allow us to work quickly and efficiently. Here’s some of mine - perhaps you know a few of these already - I’d be interested in hearing yours in the comments."

Read whole article here

Vertically justify column heights through JQuery

The Problem

Unequal column heights make CSS layouts difficult to manage when the height of content cannot be known in advance, particularly in scenarios where absolute positioning is in use. There are a variety of strategies to deal with this issue — here's a jQuery based fix.

Read rest of the solution here, this is what we're using:

http://michael.futreal.com/jquery/vjustify

Create Picasa slideshow to use on your website

Put this together for a client of ours, figured I should share it with the world:

Capture your screen in seconds

Whiteboarding online tool

Web-based meeting playground for white boarding over images and websites. check it out here

Google sites

What is left for them to do??? Maps, email, word docs, excel sheets, blogs, app development platforms.... and now sites themselves!!!

Check it out, maybe the new LW site will launch here: http://sites.google.com/

How to fix some YSlow items on IIS for Windows servers

This goes along with the YSlow Firefox extension I put in the previous blog post:

http://www.melrosesolutions.com/blog/index.cfm/2008/5/26/How-to-tweak-IIS-to-improve-your-coldfusion-sites-performance

http://blog.grushin.com/2008/04/21/iis6-compression-including-js-css-etc/

http://turtle.net.nz/blog/post/YSlowUsingIIS/comments

Firefox Web Developer tools

Here's some tools we use in house for development:

ScreenGrab: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146
Screengrab saves entire webpages as images.
It will save what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame... basically it saves webpages as images.
The following little keywords are at the request of those who can't remember the name ScreenGrab! and want searches to work. It takes screen shots, screenshots - that is, shots, of web pages.

MeasureIt: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/539
Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.

Inline Code Finder for Firebug: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9641
Inline Code Finder is an add-on to Firebug, to be able to find HTML elements with any of the below issues:
* Inline JavaScript events
* Inline style
* javascript: links
Detailed description can be found at http://www.robertnyman.com/inline-code-finder/

YSlow: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369
YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they're slow based on Yahoo's rules for high performance web sites.

Pixel Perfect: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7943
Pixel Perfect is a Firefox/Firebug extension that allows web developers and designers to easily overlay a web composition over top of the developed HTML.
* Requires Firebug

ColorZilla 2.0: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/271
With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily. And there's more...

IE Tab: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419
This is a great tool for web developers, since you can easily see how your web page displayed in IE with just one click and then switch back to Firefox.

PageDiff 1.3.0: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4274
Pagediff is a simple page compare application. It helps web developers and designers to see HTML-code(text) differences between web pages.
It doesn't take original page source. It takes browser generated DOM compliant view source. It omits Doctype declaration and HTML tags.
After installation, to use this, one has to
1. Right click on a page & select 'Start DIFF' (this action saves the current page to memory),
2. Go to the page which one wants to compare (with the saved one) and
3. Right click on the page & select 'Show DIFF'.


Html Validator: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/249
HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing.
The extension can validate the HTML sent by the server or the HTML in the memory (after Ajax execution).
The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page.
The extension is based on Tidy and OpenSP (SGML Parser). Both algorithms were originally developed by the Web Consortium W3C. And now extended and improved by a lot of persons. Both algorithms are embedded inside Mozilla/Firefox and makes the validation locally on your machine, without sending HTML to a third party server.
Each algorithm has advantages and inconvenients. The program will give you the choice at startup. But mostly,
- The SGML parser is the same program than the one running behind validator.w3.org.
- Tidy has accessibility check for the 3 levels defined in WAI

Console²: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1815
As of Firefox 1.5, the JavaScript Console is used not only for JavaScript errors, but for CSS errors as well. This extension takes this into account by providing a simple possibility to display errors by type.
Console² let's you display errors filtered by type (Errors, Warnings, Messages), language (JavaScript, CSS, XML) and context (Chrome, Content). Furthermore it provides a simple search box (as seen in the History and Bookmarks sidebars), hiding of duplicates, sidebar optimizations, a customizable toolbar and some more accessibility improvements.

LocalWisdom.com Coming Soon Launched

I am so happy to say that the LocalWisdom.com version 4 is almost there.

The COMING SOON SITE has launched today. Check it out.

Thank you to the team:
Barry Jabloner
Shawn Venkat
Michael Alfaro
and yours truly

The full site is going to be taking things to the next level.

For all you iPhone/iPode cats, here are the slides for the coming soon site made to fit your iPhone or iPod video.

Download the movie LWSiteSlides.mov

Design a homepage! LocalWisdom.com 4.0 is almost here

We're making some major traction on the new LocalWisdom.com website. This is going to be exciting!


As you all recall the homepage of the new website will be editable by all employees. We will be able to upload pics and post to the homepage from our cell phones or from the LW blog.

Download the template psd and design away! (23MB - right click to download)

With the template you'll be able to really create curated and well designed imagery for the homepage. You really only need to know Photoshop basics to work with this.

Download the template demo (19MB - right click to download)... there's no excuse, I smell a contest coming around.

Call me if you have any questions. Email me questions and/or designs: pkathiari@localwisdom.com

;p

Great way to listen to your users for your company, product, project, blog, etc.

Check this out, pretty cool way to get dialog started with your users!!!

http://www.uservoice.com/

• » Listen to your users

  they want to make your service more useful — get consensus on what that means!

• » Respond to your users

  from one place, with less overhead and support tracking

• » Your users will feel empowered

  they will feel more invested and become more fanatical about your service.

Top 5 firefox plugins for serious webdevelopment

A nice list of plugins for firefox that help us in our daily work:

http://ajaxorized.com/top-5-firefox-plugins-for-serious-webdevelopment/#more-5

Check out the rest of the site, awesome code there!

Let's put a effin' post up

Yey! We are here!