Gadgetopia

One thing that continues to amaze me is how poorly people use Microsoft Word, considering its dominance in business word processing. The "barrier to entry" for a Word user is extremely low -- just open it and start typing -- so very few people bother to learn how to really ...

Word HTML Cleaner: Dean Allen has always done a great job with his Word HTML Cleaner. You save a Word document as HTML, upload it, and you get HTML back that's stripped of all the Word HTML funkiness. "This utility strips proprietary Microsoft tags and other cruft from Word HTML ...

Blogger: Download Blogger for Word: I knew this would happen sooner or later. Now you can use Blogger right within Microsoft Word. Just download and install the Blogger for Word add-in and a Blogger toolbar will be added to Word allowing you to: Publish to your blog, save drafts, edit ...

Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows: Microsoft Office Word 2003 Preview: A look at new features in Word 2003 from the perspective of an average user, not geeks like us.

Turn Word Into a Syndication Client: This article is about using Word 2003 as an RSS client, but it also sheds some light on the fantastic new features in Office 2003: The most visible aspect of Word's XML support is its ability to act as a native editor for XML ...

Word docs from Movable Type: I have to say that Microsoft is doing some great things with the new underlying XML format in Office 2003 and up. Using that functionality, the guys at Movable Type's Pronet published a simple template that outputs Word ML, and thus creates what's essentially a ...

When Word-to-XML Conversion Get Nasty: A good, solid look at Word conversions which drives home an important point: a conversion is as good as the construction of the underlying Word document. If the author used styles well, then it's not so bad. But if the author ran rampant with the ...

Authenticity of new Bush military papers questioned: The question of whether the damaging military records on President Bush are accurate or not is coming down to a Word formatting question. Independent document examiner Sandra Ramsey Lines said the memos looked like they had been produced on a computer using Microsoft ...

Blogging from Word 2007: Microsoft is apparently building blogging support into Word 2007. Seriously -- they're adding the ability for it to use the MetaWebBlog API to communicate with most blog platforms. Word is a great tool for writing stuff, right? Blogging is all about communicating with words (and pictures, ...

EU Rejects Spam Maker's Trademark Bid: This phenomenon is interesting. The company that makes Spam has essentially lost their name -- it was stolen by the rest of the world and there's nothing they can do about it. Even if they claim a legal victory, it's not going to help ...

My church is building a huge new addition, and part of it is going to be a computer lab. This means that I'll finally have a nice spot to teach some free computer classes, which is something I've wanted to do for a long time. I got to thinking the ...

Office 2000 HTML Filter 2.0: This is a handy little tool. Once you have completed editing an HTML document in Word 2000 or Excel 2000, you can use the Office HTML Filter to remove the Office-specific markup tags from the final copy of the HTML document. I took a 45-page ...

Why 'Bottom Up' is on its way up: Interesting look about how the Internet is enabling the common man to start trends, spread the word, and push agendas. What do these things have in common: the TV show American Idol, Howard Dean's presidential campaign, eBay, and the open-source Linux operating ...

ActiveWords: If you don't like all the mousing around Windows, ActiveWords aims to eliminate it. ActiveWords adds words to Windows, providing a personal, portable, context free user interface with immediate response. Your words launch programs, jump to websites, send email, substitute text, and more. Receive information about any word or ...

Word of Mouth Marketing Association — About WOMMA: I didn t even know such a thing existed. WOMMA is the official trade association for the word of mouth marketing industry. WOMMA s mission is to promote and improve word of mouth marketing by Promoting best practices to ensure more effective marketing Protecting consumers and ...

Engadget is running a contest where they're giving away an MP3 player if you can find a word they've hidden somewhere in their archives. The code-word you're looking for is "tangential", but lest you think you can just use our search function (or Google) to automatically find the code-word, we're ...

Blah - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: I just had to post a link to this. "Blah" is a word that I use when I need to test something by printing out a garbage string (I think I got this from Joe). I was making a little widget to query Wikipedia ...

Google: An explanation of our search results: Google bought their own AdWord for the "jew" search term and uses it to link to a page explaining why the first link is an anti-semitic site. If you're confused, here's the background of the problem. If you use Google to search for ...

And not just to Mac (and Linux) users. Mini seems to think so too. One of the pages on the miniusa.com site will load a Flash animation showing a car trying to parallel park (link). When the driver finds there isn t enough room (and bashes the bumper of the truck ...

"Once again, we find ourselves in the middle of a language evolution process. When referring to the 'Web,' do we capitalize or not? Intranet Design Magazine has decreed that the first letter of the word 'Web' is to be capitalized ONLY when reference is made to the World Wide Web. ...

Underscores are now word separators, proclaims Google: This is interesting for a couple reasons. First, because it s just good to know. Second, because it confirms the value of keywords in the URL, as I ve questioned in the past. One key development that Matt shared with the audience was that underscores ...

Writing For Packt: Packt Publishing has done a nice job here of shedding some light on how much you'd make if you wrote the ultimate tech book that I just know you've been contemplating. This focused business model translates into higher royalty rates for you as an author: 15% of ...

Blatant Plagiarism: Another instance of Web content being stolen, just like Shirley's a couple of weeks ago. And, just like that instance, they took the page down after word leaked out. "Not only is our text being used word-for-word, but two of the images (for Syndic8 and Daypop) are images ...

Author Quest: If you've ever wanted to break into the world of technical book writing, here's your chance. David Pogue of The Missing Manual fame is looking for his next author: "If this sounds interesting to you, I'd like to give you an assignment. I can't think of any other ...

Gadgets Galore at CES: Every once in a while, you find a word used totally out of context. Can you find it? I don't find this word used too much beyond this site, actually. There are a few cases, but not that many.

Behold! The fascinating world of Asian word processors: Twenty-one years have passed since the advent of the Japanese word processor, or wapro -- the culmination of a long and arduous quest for a machine capable of typing Japanese faster than the human hand can write it. Via memepool.

I'm on one of my "shiny object" tangents lately. The latest thing is non-Microsoft software. I don't know why, but I suddenly feel the need to be all counter-culture-ish and find alternatives to the standbys. I've been browsing with Mozilla all week, and I don't think I'll go back to ...

The Australian Bible Society has just released the SMSBible, with all 31,173 verses of the Holy Word translated to phone-speak. Some examples: Genesis 1:1 In da Bginnin God cr8ed da heavens & da earth. Da earth waz barren, wit no 4m of life; it waz unda a roaring ocean cuvred ...

TVEyes always watching...: This is an alert service that searches the text from TV's closed captioning. "Type in a search word or phrase. The instant your requested word is spoken on a TV show, we'll send you en e-mail alert with a brief transcript." Via MetaFilter.

Funfurde: word. clock.: Too bad it looks like a toilet roll dispenser. The clock doesn't use numerical notation to show you what time it is, it uses ... words. With the Word Clock, 11:55 becomes "Five minutes to twelve." And 11:57:02 becomes "It's about twelve."

I'm wondering if there's any training to help users navigate text. The more I watch people work on a computer, the more I see that navigating text from the keyboard is a big time waster. I read a big book ten years ago on Microsoft Word that taught me the ...

I worked on improving the search on this site today. Search has been through a number of iterations. First, I used the basic Movable Type search. But it was slow and I wanted to do some interesting things with search. So last year, I switched to using a SQL "LIKE" ...

Mozilla Thunderbird Inline Spell Checking Test Build: Good stuff coming to Thunderbird. [...] the feature highlights potentially misspelled words with a red dotted underline (much like applications such as Microsoft Word). Users can easily pick from the top seven spelling suggestions using the context menu. This would actually be a ...

BumpTop Prototype : This is farily insane. It's a prototype of a Windows desktop replacement that emulates real-word physics and real-word methods that people use to organize stuff on their real desks. Keepin' it Real: Pushing the Desktop Metaphor with Physics, Piles and the Pen Watch the YouTube video. At ...

I just found scribbling.net this morning via spid.ero.us, and found two great articles: one with some great common-sense tips on site design, and the other on how to help Google's spider index your site. Gadgetopia usually does pretty well in Google searches, but I imagine there's always room for improvement. ...

Software Paraphrases Sentences: Microsoft tried something similar to this with their AutoSummarize feature in Word. Cornell University researchers have tapped a pair of unlike sources—on-line journalism and computational biology to make it possible to automatically paraphrase whole sentences. The researchers used gene comparison techniques to identify word patterns from ...

ReCaptcha kills two birds with two words: This is brilliant. Reminds me of the guys who used porn to lure people into solving captchas for them. ReCaptcha ensures Web site users are human by requiring them to type in distorted and obfuscated words. The computer knows what one of the ...

The functionality of software exists in two dimensions: theoretical and actual. Theoretical functionality is everything a piece of software can do. Actual functionality is what you're actually going to use. The gap between what a piece of software can do and what you actually use it for is something I'm ...

Happy Google Hacks Week 2004 #4: GoogleJack: Blackjack via Google results. Thus GoogleJack, with a score total of 101 instead of 21. You pick a word and give Google a word. Google searches and counts the cache size. You can "Hit," do the next search and add that result count ...

Digital Inspiration: Convert doc, xls, ppt, rtf, pdf to HTML: Brutally simple hack to get a ton of different document formats into HTML: send them to a GMail account as an attachment, then "View as HTML." GMail will show the following types of files as HTML: .pdf, .doc, .xls, .ppt, ...

TypePad News: Some Frequently Asked Questions: Six Apart has released a list of TypePad features. Still no word on pricing.

A Plan for Spam: In the last few months, we've talked about Bayesian-this and Bayesian-that quite a bit, but what does "Bayesian" mean? Here's a great article that explains the concepts behind Bayesian filtering for spam. It's long, but a worthwhile read. The Achilles heel of the spammers is their ...

PureText Home Page: This is a wicked handy. Microsoft Office includes a "Paste Text Only" option between Office applications, but it's really handy to have this system-wide. Have you ever copied some text from a web page, a word document, help, etc., and wanted to paste it as simple text ...

It's possible to ditch Microsoft Office: I actually used OpenOffice (used as opposed to played with, which I've done a number of times) the other day to write a document. It was fantastic. In many respects, better than Word. I'll admit that a lot of my desire to use Linux ...

Use Targeted Keywords in URL: A month ago, I questioned the use of keywords in URLs. These folks did a test. They put a garbage word in the URL of a page. They used the word nowhere else on the page or in the linktext to that page. Before we ...

IF Quake: This is Quake as a text adventure. I downloaded it and walked around a bit -- it seems like a perfect re-creation, as closely as I can remember: >look The Necropolis You find yourself in a room with three corridors, each leading to a slipgate. On either side ...

The Great Pyramid of Agile: This is some great commentary in an unlikely place on programming methodologies and why they generally don t work and are just like so many other fads. And therein lies the problem: most developers are not good. By the very definition of the word good, most ...

Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient: This essay is years old, but it high-lights some points about WYSIWYG editing that are still very true today. The author is distracted from the proper business of composing text, in favor of making typographical choices in relation to which she may have no expertise ...

Here's something that's been in the back of my mind for a couple of weeks, but it hasn't been pressing enough to really dig into research. So I'm going to be lazy and throw the question out here. If you take a document from Word or whatever and convert it ...

Yes, there really are pirates in 2005, and not just the ones that steal software. I heard a news report today that pirates in speedboats attacked a cruise ship off the coast of Somalia. None of the passengers were injured, and the bad guys ran off scared & empty handed. ...

Talking about metadata, like cooking with metafood: It's actually pretty eerie that I stumbled on this post because I had been thinking about this exact thing: when is something "metadata" and when is it just "data"? Technical conversations about information and data can sometimes include the word "metadata," which commonly ...

Jon Udell: Exploring Office 2003: Here are some screencaps of the XML capabilities of Word and Excel in Office 2003. The mind reels at the possibilities. Here's something a little more in-depth on the topic from MSDN: Importing XML Maps, XML Lists, and Dynamic Chart Sources in Excel 2003: "Excel ...

I wonder how long it will before Web-based Office apps trump client-based apps in intranet environments. Slowly but surely, Google Docs has become my default choice when I have to write a document or a spreadsheet. How long before this infiltrates the enterprise? I got to thinking about this when ...

The Darwin Awards (2005)" I found this on IMDb tonight. No word of a release date. A forensic detective and an insurance claims investigator trek to investigate a potential Darwin Award winner.

Blog wine Stormhoek doubles sales: Seriously, give us free stuff. Cars would be nice. Computers are good too. Anyway, this South African winery was really upfront about a blogging-focused marketing campaign, and it appears to have paid off. Around 100 bottles of the Stormhoek Shiraz 2004 and Sauvignon Blanc 2005 ...

XML Workshop Ltd. - WordML: Here are some samples of the underlying XML format in the new version of Word. Microsoft has also just released a WordML to HTML XSL convertor.

Sounds like the long expected release of Office 12 for the Mac is well on it's way through the halls of Redmond's Mac Business Unit. The thing most potential customers are looking forward to is a version that will run natively on Intel Macs, but it will also have many ...

Key Events in Microsoft History: I found this Word document in Microsoft's download center. It's actually quite good. Review important dates and events in the history of Microsoft Corporation from 1975 to the present.

I've been working with content management for a long time, and there's one thing that's been constant: at some point, a user is going to write and format some text in some kind of control. How good are they going to be at this? Their level of skill here will ...

HTML provides formatting tags for headings, so why don't we use them? H1, H2, H3...you wouldn't believe how often designers re-invent the wheel by enclosing headings in DIV tags with stylesheets classes attached. I used to do it, then I learned a few things: Search engines will weight terms in ...

Cheat Sheets: A nice set of cheat sheets for mod_rewrite, PHP, and CSS. Nicely done. (Warning: The CSS sheet was apparently written in a fantasy world where all browsers obey every last word of the spec. Real-world mileage will vary.)

T9onym: This strikes me as insanely dorky. A T9onym is a word that shows up on mobile phones that have T9 text entry that is equivalent through T9 to other words. T9onyms appear by pressing number keys while in T9 mode. For example, Bus and Cup are T9onyms. Indirectly via ...

Look at this screencap. I searched for just the word "mint." In the middle of the search results, Google switches gears and shows me three results for "mint credit card" (follow the arrow), then goes back to my results for just "mint." Did I just notice this, or is this ...

Can we finally admit that the FrontPage experiment has failed? You know -- the promise that FrontPage will allow novice Web authors to create and maintain (especially maintain) good, solid Web sites? Can we finally admit that this just isn't going to happen? How many people know someone that is ...

The Apple Store has a Special Deals section where they sell refurbished hardware, and there are some sweet deals going on (don't let the word "refurbished" scare you off; you get what is basically new hardware and the standard warranty without the new hardware price.) For instance, you can pick ...

Publisher: 'Blog' No. 1 word of the year: Surprising that this would come during an election year. Merriam-Webster Inc. said on Tuesday that blog, defined as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks," was one of the most looked-up words on its ...

Amazon.com Research Services for Microsoft Office System: No more research for creating bibliographies or footnotes. The Amazon Research Pane download for Microsoft Office 2003 allows you to search for Amazon products from within Microsoft Word or Excel documents, and to insert product information and footnotes into documents and spreadsheets. The ...

Subliminal advertising in spam?: I followed this link, and I think I bought 100 shares. The spam contains an animated GIF with four frames. One of the frames (which contains the actual spam message) remains visible for 17 seconds. The other three frames are displayed for 10ms or 40ms, and ...

Group warns parents about 'killographic' games A public interest group had a holiday warning and a new word Monday for parents of video game users: Beware of "killographic," defined as the "graphic depiction of brutal violence." [...] "If pornographic is the 'graphic depiction of sex,' then killographic should enter our ...

Microsoft Small Business Software: Microsoft has released a six-month free trial of Small Business Server 2003. The rumors were true: there is a Standard Version without SQL Server, and a Premium Version with it. Still no word on pricing, and I can't find it for sale in retail outlets, so ...

Google Web Search Features: More new stuff. To see delays and weather conditions at a particular airport, type the airport's three letter code followed by the word "airport." For example, San Francisco International Airport updates can be found by searching for "sfo airport." Here's the search for the bustling hub ...

ieSpell - Spell Checker add-on for Internet Explorer: "ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage. ... The program installs as a new button in the IE toolbar (as well as a new menu item under 'Tools') after filling in ...

Official Google Blog: Writely so: Geez, that was quick. Watch out, Google may buy you next. For the last five months, I've been part of a Silicon Valley startup called Upstartle, which makes Writely, a collaborative word processor that runs in a web browser. Well, as of Monday, I'm happy ...

Microsoft's Latest Take on the Desktop: "....a Word document is not just a stand-alone document. Rather, it can stay linked to all the people to whom you've sent it or who have worked on it by keeping a record of what's been done to it and by whom. Longhorn will ...

Spam (Monty Python) - Wikipedia: You ever wonder how the term "spam" came about? Well, apparently there was a Monty Python sketch that ended with a bunch of people yelling the word "Spam" so you couldn't hear someone else talking, and... "The phenomenon, some years later, of marketers drowning out ...

E-mail worm bent only on destruction: How nice. It's like the aliens from Independence Day. The Kama Sutra worm -- also referred to as Nyxem.E and Grew.A -- is unnerving because, unlike other e-mail worms, it appears to be detached from any profit motive. It is designed to destroy all ...

Overused, misused nano- becoming pervasive prefix: The subtitle for this article on their index page was "Because we already beat e- and cyber- into the ground..." "Even though nanotechnology is still in its infancy, the nano- prefix is quickly growing into one of the most over-used and misused phrases in ...

LaTeX: It's Not Just for Academia, Part 1: Here's a good introduction to LaTeX. This has been another one of those acronyms I've heard many times but never bothered to go looking for. LaTeX (pronounced Lah-tech) is a macro package written by Leslie Lamport. This macro package uses the typesetting ...

Sanity check: 10 dirty little secrets you should know about working in IT: The brutal honesty of this article made me smile. Every word is the God s honest truth. The pay in IT is good compared to many other professions, but since they pay you well, they often think they ...

FCKeditor - The text editor for Internet: A neat little Web-based WYSIWYG editor with an extremely unfortunate name. I'd love to see this name come up in a board meeting of some kind. This HTML text editor brings to the web many of the powerful functionalities of known desktop editors ...

Internet Toilet Roll Browser: Nothing here besides a picture and this text, but still enough proof that the word is ending. Please, someone, tell me this is a hoax. "Fancy catching up with your emails? The Internet Loo Roll Browser is a novel and unique product designed to make best ...

Google has a made a subtle but big change with site searches. You can now do a "site" search with no keywords and Google will return all pages in its index for that site. Here's one for this site, though I'm curious how Google thinks it has 7,170 pages. You ...

Make: posted a cool but totally useless thing this morning. Web of Letters will generate words in pictures for you. Just type in the word or words you want picture-ized and it will show you the results. There must be a sizable number of pictures for each letter... ...

FARK.com: Frequently Asked Questions: Farkisms: I hate it when people comment on something with First or First Post. Fark found a good solution. For whatever reason message boards on sites like Fark are forever plagued with morons posting First Post anytime a link is posted. Fark automatically turns the words ...

30 must-have PC skills - Part 1: This is good list of skills you should have with a computer. Move and copy files Navigate using keyboard shortcuts Use shortcuts in Word Install and remove new hardware [...] Our church is undergoing a big expansion, and they're adding a computer lab. ...

From a CNN article about the Celtics beating the Lakers last night: It was a group effort by this gang in green, which bonded behind Rivers, who borrowed an African word ubuntu (pronounced Ooh-BOON-too) and roughly means I am, because we are in English, as the Celtics unifying team motto. ...

Bullfighter: Stripping The Bull Out Of Business: Too much 1999-ish Internet crap-speak in your documents? This little add-on will give you a "Bull Index" for your documents, so you know just how much crap you're spewing. Bullfighter is software that runs in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, within Microsoft Office 2000 ...

Spook Words: There's a theory that government intelligence agencies monitor Web pages for certain word combinations. That's the theory, anyway. "Need more hits? Try adding some of these 'spook words' to your meta tags if you'd like more traffic from your friends at the NSA." Metafilter has links to some ...

Bold Redesign Improves Office 2007: These interface changes should go over nicely. In Word, Excel and PowerPoint, all of the menus are gone -- every one. None of the familiar toolbars have survived, either. In their place is a wide, tabbed band of icons at the top of the screen ...

Creating Your Own Research Service for the Microsoft Office 2003 Research Library: Office 2003 has an enterprise search engine built into the apps. Microsoft Office 2003 Editions add a powerful new tool to the Office task pane: the Research Library.By default, the Research Library allows you to type in a ...

e-Minister will make every public library a Wi-Fi hotspot: I want to live in a place where public libraries have Wi-Fi and people still use the word "keen." [U.K.] Government minister Stephen Timms [...] confirmed that his plan to put an open Wi-Fi hotspot in every public library was "going ...

Google Presentations Released: Google has just added its Power Point replacement, alongside its Word and Excel replacements. The first impression is that Google Presentations does all it’s supposed to do (and without resorting to Java or Flash, at least judging by the parts I checked – it’s DHTML/ Ajax technology). ...

The New Diamond Age: This was a great feature in Wired magazine about 18 months ago. It details the current state of the precious gem market, and how diamonds can now be made for less than they can be mined. "These are cubic zirconium?" Weingarten says without much hope. "No, ...

I've waxed poetic about the joys of OpenOffice here before, but here's a really neat trick. Create a "Word" document in OpenOffice Writer, then save it. Now, using an archive tool like WinZip, open it -- unzip it just like it was a zip archive. You should find the following ...

Sun exec sees opportunity in Chinese software shift: Sun is awfully happy with the recent developments in the Asian OS market. "John Gage, Sun's chief researcher, told Reuters a Chinese plan to develop operating systems using either local or alternative software like Linux spelt the end of dominance by rival ...

log4php - log4j ported to PHP!: Log4j and Velocity were the only two things I liked about Java. Smarty can replace Velocity, and now Log4j is covered too. Log4php is a php port of Log4j, the most popular Java logging framework...Supports configuration through xml and properties file... Supports File, RollingFile, ...

Weblog Links: Part 1 The Impermanence of Permalinks: Some good thoughts about links in blogging, and how you get tied to both your domain name and your permalink structure. "This happened recently with a well-known weblogger, John Robb. When John left his old employer, Userland, his Userland-hosted weblog was ...

e Boo Boos - Misspelled Items and Auctions on eBay: Bargains can be had on eBay when people misspell the items they're listing. Since they're not spelled right, no one finds them, and no one bids on them. Proving that no hole goes unfilled, here's the first (see comments) a ...

'AIM this story' on FOXSports.com: FoxSports has a new feature to make it easy to IM a story to one of your buddies. "I just learned that FOXSports.com has added 'AIM this story' links on its story pages (example), right up there with 'Print this story' and 'Email this story' ...

The First 100 Days: Observations of a Nouveau Blogger: Guy Kawasaki has been blogging for 100 days now. He has some good insights: The more popular a person thinks he is in the blogosphere, the thinner his skin and the thicker his hypocrisy. This should be exactly the opposite: the ...

German city picks Linux over Microsoft: We've known about this deal for a while, but what's interesting is the lengths Microsoft went to win and was still rebuffed. Microsoft offered last-minute concessions that would have made Windows and Office cheaper than switching. USA TODAY obtained city records that revealed Microsoft: ...

S.F. officials locked out of computer network: Whoops. A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco s new multimillion-dollar computer network, altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail on $5 million bail [ ] [The engineer] has worked for the city for about ...

Sweden mines space for tourist dollars: Ten thousand dollars gets you on Sweden's version of the Vomit Comet, starting this summer. Late this summer, a company called Xero AB begins offering the first zero-gravity flights from Kiruna, 200 kilometers (124 miles) north of the Arctic Circle. [...] Xero AB, founded ...

Microsoft is pushing to make their licensing program more understandable (all right, quit laughing!) and wants to send you some info to help you on your way. The cool part? The info is on a USB thumb drive. No word on how big the drive is, but free is free. ...

EEE :: European Experts Exchange: This site is a competitor to Experts Exchange. Read the entire front page of the site, as their are quite a few digs in there. Welcome on EEE (European Experts Exchange), the one, the only one collaborative site for IT people from all over the ...

Hackers Hijack PC's for Sex Sites: Hackers are getting control of computers with broadband connections, and installing a little Web server that delivers pornographic banner ads. The user may never notice, and while he or she is writing a letter in Word, their machine is serving up naughty graphics behind-the-scenes. ...

Blogging Solutions for Business - Movable Type Enterprise: I guess the only big differences I'm seeing from the standard version are LDAP integration and Oracle as a possible data backend. Of course, these are both huge for a lot of companies. The most popular platform for business blogging now offers ...

The Basics of Search Engine Optimization: This is the most brilliant article on SEO I've ever read. Seriously, this is what everyone should be doing, and this is most solid, perfect advice I've ever read. Finally, sanity. You want to rank well in Google, but you need to ask yourself: ...

Next year, I'm going to be doing some adventure racing and mountain hiking. Figured I better learn how to use a compass and topo map. I didn't even know that declination was a word. Also did you know that: As well as the magnetic deviation east or west, compasses also ...

Voynich Manuscript: The geek quotient is very high with this one. The Voynich Manuscript (VMS) is a mysterious illustrated book of unknown contents, written some 500 years ago by an anonymous author in an unidentified alphabet and unintelligible language. Over its recorded existence, the Voynich Manuscript has been the object ...

Business motivation: Kottke explains what I've always felt about Apple and what I've tried to get across with my endless Honda vs. Audi analogies. Apple is basically a luxury computer and software company, akin to Gucci, Bang & Olufsen, and Calphalon in their respective industries. They aim to produce well-designed ...

CNET posts an interesting New York Times article about a group of European researchers who have found ways to 'un-black' blacked out text in documents like those released by the government in recent months by using a process-of-elimination technique to figure out what words fit under the obscured area. The ...

New 'NBOR' Software to Debut Next Month: This looks interesting, but I got confused halfway through. This guy has spent 15 years of his life building it. Here's to hoping it works out for him. The software, called "No Boundaries Or Rules," or NBOR, includes an intuitive user interface for ...

Selecting a CMS: This is probably the most well-reasoned, intelligent bit of writing I ve ever read on choosing a CMS. Every word is absolute gold if you find yourself in the situation of having to make this decision. Rather than ask does your product have this? (you know the answer ...

BBC NEWS | UK | Google calls in the 'language police': Why do companies insist on doing this? Google has called in the lawyers to try and stop people from using "Google" has a verb ("Did you google that new girlfriend of yours?"): "The company's lawyers are trying to stamp ...

The Secret Life of XForms: XForms will be pretty cool when/if it happens. It's a W3C recommendation, but in the Microsoft-controlled world of browsers, that doesn't count for much. The idea here is pretty simple the View, or user interface, provides a set of controls that give the "public" ...

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: Auto PopUps Dead?: He makes a good point about those sites that insist on controlling every aspect of your browser window: "Since Mozilla 0.9, most modern browsers have given users the ability to turn off self-launching windows. And most of us do just that, thereby eliminating unwanted ...

Here's one that should whet Deane's recently acquired appetite for BitTorrenting TV Shows. Torrentocracy is a plugin for MythTV that will let you download and watch BitTorrent-delivered multimedia via your TV remote by hooking into RSS feeds. This would basically turn a MythTV-enabled TV into a Tivo that doesn't care ...

Where Sharing Isn't a Dirty Word: Great little article about the magic of iBiblio, where I admit to finding more than one Sherlock Holmes novel. Ibiblio's staff and contributors rescue documents, videos, audio and image files from dusty archives or attics where few could view them and put them on ...

Companies lining up for state's huge laptop order: And they're all going to be wireless-capable, too. "Michigan is getting ready to place a technology order that just may be the biggest single purchase of computers ever ‐ 130,000 laptops, enough to give one to every sixth-grade student in the state. ...

KIMBLE rulez!: I can't believe we're 3,000+ posts into this site and we've never talked about Kimble. Although Kimble's reputation has fallen into disarray of late, he flat blew me away in the late nineties. Kimble was the man. He had the MegaCar and little cartoons with Bill Gates wetting ...

Colorblindness & Usability: A Case Study of Microsoft, Amazon & IBM: I didn't know colorblindness was so prevalent. I am one of the 10% of the male population who is colorblind. Approximately one million people visit Amazon.com each day. If we assume that half of these visitors are male, then ...

You know that dummy text you see all the time? "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amit..." etc.? Well, here's a site devoted to it. This site has exactly one-page and one CGI script a dummy text generator where you can get dummy text by the word, sentence, paragraph, etc. This ...

We need an HTML tag that displays the correct application icon GIF based on the user's system settings. Say I have a file library online. I have links to files with little icon pictures next to them based on the file type. I need a tag like this:    

Deane | May 4, 2004 | in "Web Design and Usability"

BW Online | Apple's Real Worry Isn't the Loss of IE: Good article on the future of the Mac and how it's tied in with Microsoft. "...far more daunting is the prospect of Microsoft abandoning the Mac version of its popular Office software. That's because Apple hasn't yet shown it ...

Lindows WebStation: Lindows is taking another stab at the Web appliance market: $169. The lowest priced Internet-enabled computer ever! The Lindows WebStation is the first ultra-affordable, unbreakable computer designed specifically for Web work. You may think unbreakable is a pretty strong word, but it runs Linux off a CD, which ...

Are Bloggers Narcissists?: I've thought this exact thing for years. I am a narcissist when it comes to blogging -- there's no other way to describe it. When it comes down to it, most blogs have sometype of self serving or self promoting interest. The company does it to inform ...

Amazon moves to front line of shaping 'Web services': We're using the Amazon API on this site, so I can vouch for how cool it is. "Over the past 16 months, Amazon has inspired about 30,000 developers to invent myriad ways to extend Amazon's visibility on the Web. 'Amazon basically ...

Google Plans Service to Store Users Data: Given everything else Google is doing, this is a no-brainer. This is currently a big missing piece of the Google puzzle. Google is preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on ...

On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble: Google has a fascinating little problem on its hands, courtesy of its daycare center. Employees are wicked pissed, which will likely make for an exodus of talent. [Employees] who had been paying $1,425 a month for infant care would see their costs ...

One of the reasons I enjoy open source is that a lot of the more mature packages start focusing on nice little touches that it would take a while for a big company to get their minds around. But since the source is out there, it just takes a little ...

GNU Aspell: I thought this was kind of interesting. Given my ignorance, I'm sure it's been around for years. GNU Aspell is a Free and Open Source spell checker designed to eventually replace Ispell. It can either be used as a library or as an independent spell checker. Its main ...

Seek and Ye Shall Find: This is an interesting article about "the invisible Web" -- large repositories of data that search engines don't pick up on. For instance, Web-enabled databases that use POST forms to search. Spiders don't do POST requests -- if there are no direct URLs to the ...

A design classic: This is an interesting little essay by James Dyson you know, the guy with the oh-so-delicate British accent in the commercials for his neon yellow vacuum cleaner? (These commercials were recently parodied by Saturday Night Live imagine if Dyson invented a toilet...) CNN apparently asked ...

Google won't dump offensive anti-Semitic site: Google is in a bad spot here. Searching for the word "jew" on Google returns an anti-semitic site in the top spot. "I certainly am very offended by the site, but the objectivity of our rankings is one of our very important principles," ... ...

Amazon.com: Books / Search Inside the Book: Looks like Amazon's search plan has actually come into being. Publishers weren't too happy about this when it was announced. "A significant extension of our groundbreaking Look Inside the Book feature, Search Inside the Book allows you to search millions of pages to ...

FTC clamps down on stealth pop-ups: I still remember the first time I got one of these. I screen capped it and sent it to my buddies with a note that said, "You won't believe this..." Now it's so common that I shut off the Messenger service on all the ...

Outrage over game urging Haitian, Cuban killing: It took an awful long time for "outrage" to develop here. GTA: Vice City has been out for about a year now. Miami's Haitian and Cuban communities are up in arms over a top-selling computer game that exhorts players to "kill the Haitians" ...

TYPO3.org: Kasper's Korner: Here's an interesting license for Typo3, a content management system. [...] I will express my wish here that Typo3 is not used to spread material that is against the word of the Bible and the human rights. For instance don't use TYPO3 for NewAge publications, anti-christian messages, ...

Here's a good article from the LA Times (this link is bad as July 2003) about the...subversion of the blog culture by traditional journalists. Consider: "Recently, there have been unmistakable signs that blogs are seeping into the popular consciousness. In July, for instance, New York Times language watcher William Safire ...

For a site whose interface consists of a text field and two buttons, Google certainly spends a lot of time figuring out how to make the interface easier. Check out Google Suggest What is Google Suggest? As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and ...

ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers: Here s a great post with a reference to the odd names we have for various ASCII characters. Quick, what is a bracket ? Is it a < or a [ or a { ? What is a bang ? The odds of you knowing that one goes up ...

Collaboration Made Simple with Bracket Notation: This is interesting. It's kind of like "Track Changes" in Word, but it's for plain plain text. These folks used it to write a patent. In the end, we found our solution in the personal trick bag of Jef Raskin, the master of keeping ...

The new issue of my favorite magazine -- This Old House -- showed up yesterday, and they've got a great article on modern-day yurts. They're not just for nomads anymore. The TOH article focused on yurts built by an outfit called Pacific Yurts. The company claims that their structures can ...

Computer makers face slowdown, firm predicts: Gartner is saying that three of the Top 10 computer manufacturers will be gone in two years. I pick Gateway as one of them, given that its workforce has been cut 92% in the last three years. Three of the nation's top 10 personal ...

Larry Taylor Spam Ministries: Word to the wise: don't spam Mean Dean, even if it's for ministry-related stuff. This is a great read. Considering the fact that I'm still receiving unsolicited commercial email after having already complained directly and upstream, I have come to the conclusion that perhaps the best ...

Does a good looking Web site get used more than a plain one? If so, why? Consider two Web sites: Site A is written in plain HTML / CSS / JavaScript, etc. It s a traditional Web app, well-designed and aesthetically-pleasing, but no attempt has been made to engineer a slick ...

A client has their site hosted with a nationally-known hosting company one of the biggest in the nation. The site went down yesterday morning. It was down for 36 hours, during which time the client was told the server was being rebuilt and they would restore from backup. After ...

Roger Ebert s Journal: Fanzines beget blogs: Roger Ebert has a blog now, which is crazy cool in and of itself. This week he talks about how the old world of fanzines preceded the current crop of blogs and perhaps even the Web itself. I have always been convinced that the ...

LEGO: Another great article at Wikipedia. Name one geek who never played with Legos. The company's name was coined by Christiansen in 1934, from the Danish phrase leg godt, meaning "play well." The word "LEGO" is claimed to mean "I put together" or "I assemble" in Latin, although this is ...

Microsoft's Worst Nightmare: Business 2.0 has a good article on the new front in the browser wars: rich client apps. Firefox has XUL, which is a language to create applications within the Firefox browser. This article explains why Microsoft should be worried about it. [...] Firefox's open platform gives it ...

Details take fun out of new A6: I love James Healey's car reviews. In this one, he drifts into the realm of user interface design and usability. Here he is trying to set the time on the Audi A6. That's Multi Media Interface, Audi's version of the what-were-they-smoking control absurdity ...

Book-scanning uncovered: A nice look at a book scanning machine. A technician lays the book onto a special cradle inside the machine and air jets gently fluff up pages on the right side. A robotic arm swings over the book and sucks up one page with a special vacuum, and ...

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web: While still a work in progress, this site is gearing up to be the most in-depth examination of typography on the Web. It's set up like a book -- some chapter examples: Define the word space to suit the size and ...

Keyword density analyzer, and keyword placement & prominence analysis: This is an awfully well-done keyword analysis tool. Input a URL and (optionally) a keyword you're trying to hit on, and this thing will analyze the URL every which way but Sunday. I tried to summarize all the options, but there's ...

Here's something that WYSIWYG editors don't do well: paragraphs within list items. Like this (ironically, Markdown does it just fine): This is a paragraph This is another one. This is another list item. The problem is that one you're in a list item and you press Enter, you get a ...