Monthly Archives: January 2007

Full Text vs. Summary Feeds

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What the hoopla is all about.

I’m encouraging subscribers now and it’s a full text feed, so I invite you to subscribe.

It’s a hot topic among bloggers. Full feeds or Summary feeds? I’ve exchanged some words with a reader here about it, but I’ve always been sitting on the fence.

RSS Feed Basics

For those of you who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, let me take a moment to cover the basics.

This blog (and its individual categories or topics) is available in two formats: HTML viewable in a Web browser and RSS viewable in a feed reader (or aggregator). The HTML format includes nicely designed pages (if I do say so myself), access to polls and comments, and full site navigation features. The RSS format includes just the most recent posts in whatever format a subscriber’s feed reader displays them in.

The benefit of the RSS format is that content is automatically delivered to subscribers as it is published. There’s no need to visit the site to see what’s new. The feed reader will automatically gather all new content for reading at the subscriber’s leisure. You can learn more about RSS on Feedburner’s Feed 101 page.

Full-Text vs. Summary Feeds

Bloggers normally have the option of creating feeds as full text feeds or as summary feeds. (To set this option in WordPress, go to Dashboard > Options > Reading. We provide full instructions in our WordPress book.) A full text feed publishes the entire content of each post to the feed, making it unnecessary for the subscriber to come to the source Web site. A summary feed publishes just the beginning of each post to the feed, making it necessary for the subscriber to come to the Web site for the remaining content of each post he wants to read. (In WordPress, this is only the first 55 words.)

It’s pretty well established that full text feeds attract more subscribers than summary feeds, so if getting more subscribers is a blogger’s goal, full text is definitely the way to go. But full text feeds have several drawbacks that have kept me from jumping on board:

  • Full text feeds eliminate the need for subscribers to visit the site at all. All your hard work on blog design is completely wasted on feed subscribers.
  • Because full text feed subscribers are less likely to visit your site, they’re also less likely to comment on entries. This reduces the interactive aspect of your site. I think this is a serious problem, since RSS subscribers are more likely to have something constructive to say about technical topics, which is what I often write about here.
  • Because full text feed subscribers are less likely to visit your site, they’re also less likely to click ads there, thus potentially reducing your revenue stream. (Of course, it’s a valid argument that RSS subscribers are more tech savvy and less likely to click ads in the first place.)
  • The appearance of feeds in a subscriber’s feed reader is dependent on settings within that reader. As a result, entry formatting can be lost, resulting in ineffective appearance to the reader. For example, headings may show up as boxes in the margins rather than as headings.
  • Full text feeds are more likely to be scraped by splogs. That means your content may be used by “bloggers” to build content on their advertising-heavy sites, as well as link farms and other unsavory Web traffic-generating or revenue-generating schemes.
  • If you write very long entries or include many posts in your feeds, you could reach feed length limitations with FeedBurner (if you use it).

For summary feeds, the only drawback is that they’re less likely to get subscribers since a lot of folks don’t think it’s worth subscribing to a feed if the entire content does not appear in their feed reader.

Sitting on the Fence

With all of this in mind, I’ve been using summary feeds since I switched to WordPress about a year ago. I haven’t been very interested in building the number of subscribers. This drew a lot of flack from a subscriber, especially when I couldn’t make up my mind and switched back and forth between the two kinds of feeds over the period of a number of weeks. I assume that she dropped her subscription when I stuck with summary feeds.

Now I’m more interested in building my subscriber base. So I’ve switched back to full text feeds. It’s been about a week, and my feed has already been scraped once, with a pingback that I assume was supposed to help the scraper’s Google placing. (I deleted that pingback comment as soon as I found it.) One subscriber (Miraz) has already joyfully commented on the switch. Others haven’t commented. I don’t expect them to, since there’s no way to comment from within the feed reader software (see drawback list above).

Anyway, I’m encouraging subscribers now and it’s a full text feed, so I invite you to subscribe. But please do stop by once in a while to share your comments with other site visitors.

Upgrading WordPress to 2.1: The New Privacy Options

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A new option for bloggers who don’t want to be indexed.

Privacy OptionsOne of the new features of WordPress 2.1 is the Privacy Options administration panel. This panel offers two options that control whether your blog is visible to search engines and archivers:

  • I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers. This option, which is selected by default, allows search engine spiders and robots and crawlers to index your site and include it in search results.
  • I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors. This option makes your blog invisible to search engines and archivers but allows normal visitors to access it.

Why would you choose the second option? Well, suppose you have a private, family blog which is maintained solely for the use of your family. You wouldn’t want Google listing your entry about Aunt Sally’s colonoscopy as part of its search results, would you? The same goes for company-only blogs that are on the Internet but contains relatively confidential information.

Keep in mind that the Privacy Options do not prevent unauthorized site visitors from reading site content. Only password-protecting a post or securing the blog behind a firewall can do that. Instead, the search engine blocking feature just reduces the chance of someone stumbling onto the blog by accident as a result of a search.

To access this new feature on your blog, open Dashboard > Options > Privacy.

The Importance of XHTML Validation

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When will I ever learn?

Miraz has told me again and again — validate your pages after making changes to your WordPress theme templates. She even advised readers in our book, WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide. And every time I validate, I find errors, proving that it’s a step I really do need to take.

Yet I continue to skip this step when I tweak my theme’s template files on every single blog I run.

This morning, I got an e-mail message from someone named Tine who wrote:

I’m completely new to WordPress but found your site because of the book you have made and was curious.

Are you aware that your blog don’t look good in Explorer 6? Some of the text to the left is cut off.

I use Explorer 6 on XP Pro and 1024×768.

Uh-oh.

I fired up my PC and loaded up my home page in Explorer 6. The situation was worse than Tine reported. What appeared did not look much like my site at all. And in the status bar, Explorer was politely telling me that page had errors but didn’t offer any way to find out what they were.

My first instinct was to panic. But then I remembered the XHTML validator at http://validator.w3.org/. I ran the page’s URL through the validator and settled down to find and fix the 110 errors it found.

Sheesh.

The main culprit in this case was some code I’d inserted into my post.php file to display RSS links beside category names in each post’s header. This rather slick piece of coding, which I was pretty proud of, contained the dreaded unencoded ampersand error. That means I’d included & in the code when I should have included & in the code. That error was all over the place, but Explorer seemed to be choking on it in the new code. When I fixed its first occurrence and reloaded the page in Explorer, the page appeared fine, although the status bar smugly reported that there were still errors in the document.

Other problems included <ul> and </ul> tags without <li> and </li> tags. Oops. And <p> tags without </p> tags. (It appears that ecto was causing that problem in the way it codes Technorati tags. Good thing I’m not using tags in my posts anymore.) Of course, all my Amazon.com book cover links were missing alt attributes. And some of my rotating ads used IMG instead of img for coding. The list goes on and on.

Of course, if I’d been validating the XHTML after each template change as Miraz recommends, I would have caught these errors as I introduced them. I wouldn’t have spent my Sunday morning debugging code.

Have I learned my lesson? I think so. At least for a few days.

Upgrading WordPress to 2.1: Fixing Link Lists

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An unexpected side effect to upgrading.

This afternoon, I did my first WordPress 2.0.4 to WordPress 2.1 upgrade. The site I chose for the upgrade was the companion Web site for the WordPress book I co-authored with Miraz Jordan, WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide.

I followed the official WordPress Upgrading Instructions. (I am not an idiot.) I also followed the instructions I included in the first article of this series, “Upgrading WordPress to 2.1: Dealing with Plugin Compatibility,” to make sure my plugins were compatible and to get updates of plugins that were installed.

The upgrade went pretty smoothly. I updated 3 of the 10 plugins Miraz and I use on the site and inserted some if-then logic to disable plugin-specific code when a plugin isn’t available. Then I backed everything up, turned all the plugins off, and started the upgrade.

When the digital dust settled and I was able to view the site again, I was pleasantly surprised. Most of the site looked just fine. I enabled the plugins one-by-one and tested the site again after each one. I discovered that Rate My Stuff and CG-Feedread, which weren’t listed as plugins that worked with WordPress 2.1 did indeed work. (I added them to the list in the Codex.) The Search Pages plugin didn’t cause an error message, but didn’t seem to work, either. In addition, there appeared to be a slight formatting problem with the form generated by WP-ContactForm; but it may have been like that before the upgrade. And, of course, WP-Cron is no longer necessary, since periodic backup is now built into WordPress 2.1 with WordPress Database Backup 2.0.

There was, however, a relatively serious problem with the links list. This has to do with the way WordPress 2.1 handles link categories and changes made to the tag we used to display them: wp_get_links.

Book CoverIn WordPress 2.1 links are now called bookmarks. And link categories have been merged with post categories, which are just called categories. Sound familiar? It should. That’s the way links and categories have been handled on the WordPress.com site for close to a year now. (Consult pages 69-73 in our book.)

To make this work, the upgrade process renumbers all of the link categories (unless they have the same name as a post category, I suppose). This isn’t a huge deal unless you use tags that refer to link categories by their numbers — as Miraz and I did. As a result, the <?php wp_get_links(3); ?> tag we had in the sidebar (for example) didn’t display anything because there weren’t any links in post category 3. This problem existed for all of the links we listed by category in the sidebar. All that displayed were the h2 level headings for each group of links.

Our Links ListWhen I discovered the problem, I substituted the new category numbers into the tags. The result was a list of link names and descriptions, formatted without bullets (see illustration). This isn’t the way it appeared before the upgrade.

At first, I thought the wp_get_links tag had been changed. But that wasn’t the case. Instead, WordPress 2.1 changed the information it recorded for links. In previous versions, it enabled you to include “before” and “after” attributes that were used, by default, to display links in a list. Those fields were gone, so “before” and “after” attributes had to be manually included with the wp_get_links tag.

It turns out, I needed to provide some additional attributes. Here’s what the wp_get_links tag needed to look like:

<?php wp_get_links('category=9&show_description=0&before=<li>&after=</li>'); ?>

Our Links ListThe resulting list looked like it always did (see image). I modified all of the tags as necessary, saved the modified template file, and was done.

In researching this problem, I looked into the Codex’s list of link tags. I noticed that there are some new link tags that will only work in WordPress 2.1. Unfortunately, the Codex entries for these tags were not complete when I consulted the Codex today. The one that appeared complete (but is still being edited) is wp_list_bookmarks, which I thought would meet my needs. Unfortunately, I was unable to get the desired results with this tag, even when using the attributes discussed in the Codex. I’m not sure if the information is incorrect or incomplete or I just made some kind of mistake I can’t figure out.

In any case, be aware of changes to the way links are displayed on your site when you upgrade to WordPress 2.1.

And stay tuned; I’ll be sharing more tips about completing the upgrade as I continue to upgrade my six WordPress-based sites.

Creating a Printer Pool

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A good tip for anyone with access to multiple printers…especially when they always seem to be busy.

From “Apple – Pro – Tips – Need the First Available Printer?” on Apple.com:

If you’ve got a print job on your hands and you need it as soon as possible, but all the printers on your network are often busy, you can pool these printers together so your document will automatically print to the first available printer.

The article goes on to explain how to do this; it’s a lot simpler than you might think!

Upgrading WordPress to 2.1: Dealing with Plugin Compatibility

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One of the first steps to upgrading.

WordPress 2.1 is out and its a major upgrade to what I believe is the best blogging platform. But your decision to upgrade should be based, in part, on whether you can make good use of the new features. (You can learn more about what’s new on the WordPress.org Web site.) But that’s not all that should be considered when making the upgrade decision. What might be more important is the amount of work your blog may need to complete the upgrade.

Before I launch into my discussion of plugin compatibility as it applies to the upgrade, let me make a clear distinction between the two groups of WordPress users. If you’re using WordPress with a WordPress.com account, you don’t need to worry about upgrading the software. The folks who manage WordPress.com will do it for you and you’ll see the new features online. But if you’re running WordPress on your own server or on a hosted server, you have a bit of work ahead of you to complete the upgrade. This article is for you.

Why Care?

I operate six WordPress-based blogs on a hosted server account. Most of them are “mission-critical,” meaning they could cause loss of business if they were to become unavailable. So I can’t take a major upgrade lightly. That’s why I’m thinking through the upgrade for each site, one at a time, before actually moving forward.

(I do want to mention that if you follow the instructions on the Upgrade page, if the upgrade goes bad, you can always go back to the site the way it was before the upgrade. That’s why its vital to follow the upgrade instructions.)

Types of Plugins

Some of my sites make extensive use of plugins. The way I see it, there are four types of plugins, each of which I’ve given an unofficial label:

  • Simple plugins don’t require any template file modifications and don’t make changes to the way you work with your blog. You just install the plugin, activate it, and it works. Examples of simple plugins include Hello Dolly and No Self Pings.
  • Set-It-and-Forget-It plugins are one step above simple plugins. They don’t require any template changes and don’t make changes to the way you work with your blog, but they do offer an administration panel for setting options. Examples include Bad Behavior, Spam Karma, Random Header, and WP-Cron (with WordPress Database Backup).
  • Entry Utility plugins are plugins that change the way your create entries or display them online. These plugins don’t require you to modify your template file(s), but they may change the way you compose blog entries by offering additional options or change the way entries appear online. Some examples include Adhesive, Simple Tags, and WP-Contact Form.
  • WordPress Feature Extension plugins are those that require modification of your blog’s template files to add plugin-specific tags. In many cases, these tags add impressive new features to the site that go far beyond WordPress’s feature set. Some examples include Customizable Post Listings, Landing Sites, and WP-Print, just to name a few. This is by far the biggest group of plugin types and, as you’ll see in a moment, it’s the group that’s most likely to cause problems in the event of an incompatibility.

The upgrade instructions recommend that you disable all plugins before completing the upgrade. With the first three types of plugins, that should be no problem. But with plugins that require modification of your theme files to accommodate plugin-specific tags, turning off the related plugin could result in PHP errors or other problems when the page is loaded. If you don’t turn off the plugin and upgrade and the plugin is not compatible with WordPress, you could wind up with PHP errors, too.

Which Plugins are Compatible?

My advice is to make a full assessment of your plugin situation before beginning the upgrade. Here’s how:

  1. Go to your Plugins Management page (/wp-admin/plugins.php from your blog’s main directory; click the Plugins button in the Dashboard or any other administration panel) and make a list all plugins that are installed and activated, as well as any that are installed and disabled but might be activated in the future.
  2. Compare the plugins on the list to the WordPress 2.1 Plugin Compatibility page.
  3. Check off all plugins on your list that are known to be compatible. These are the ones you won’t have to worry much about.
  4. Circle all plugins on your list that are known to be incompatible. These are the ones that will need to be permanently disabled. If they are WordPress feature extension plugins (as defined above), you’ll have to find and remove related tags that you may have inserted in your template files.
  5. Put a star beside all plugins on your list that are either not listed on the Compatibility page or are lists with unknown compatibility. These are the ones you’ll have to watch.

Proceed with Caution

There are two ways to insert plugin-specific code in your WordPress blog:

  • With If-Then logic uses PHP IF statements to determine whether a plugin’s function exists — in other words, if the plugin is enabled and its code is accessible by WordPress — and, if it does, allows WordPress to access the code. Here’s an example I use in my sidebar with Readers Post: 

    <?php if (function_exists('last_posts')): ?>

<?php last_posts(8); ?>

<?php endif; ?>
  • Without If-Then logic simply inserts the code without any test to see if the function called is available. For example:

    <?php last_posts(8); ?>

You should be able to see which one is safer — the first one. If your template files include plugin-specific code with if-then logic, when you disable your plugins, your blog pages will continue to display without the plugin-specific content or PHP errors.

My advice, therefore, is to go through all your template files and modify plugin-specific code to include if-then logic as illustrated above. This will make it far easier to disable all plugins before the upgrade and turn them back on, one at a time, when the upgrade is finished — as recommended in the Upgrade instructions document.

A Final Word of Advice

While the new features of WordPress 2.1 sound great and you may feel as if you just “can’t wait” to upgrade, don’t just dive in. Think things through. If you have multiple WordPress blogs, perform the upgrade on the blog that’s the simplest, with the least template modifications, and the least “importance.” Follow the upgrade instructions carefully. And be prepared to restore to your current version of WordPress if you need to.

More upgrade tips to come. Keep checking in.

Browser Rendering Engines

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Or why different browsers show the same thing differently.

Miraz Jordan has written an informative article in her Browsers series. From “Browser notes 04: rendering engines — – Technology, Macs, the Internet and other matters.” on Tikouka:

Each web browser uses its own rendering engine. Some browsers share engines and differentiate themselves from other browsers that use the same engine by offering other features. This is like a washing machine: the Fisher and Paykel models (presumably) all use the same motor, but some models are front-loading, others top-loading, some take bigger loads than others, and so on.

Miraz then goes on to list the engines and which browsers use them.

Why is this important? Miraz explains that, too.

On a related note, I recently reformatted the post footer for each article on this site to prevent word wrap when the footer appeared in different browsers. I’m a Firefox user and the footer appeared in a single line in Firefox on Mac OS and Windows. But when I viewed the same pages in Safari, the text was a bit bigger, thus forcing the line to wrap in an undesirable place. The best way to fix an undesirable line break is to insert a desirable line break before it, and that’s what I did. But Miraz’s article reminds me why I should be testing my pages in multiple browsers on multiple platforms — as I always recommend to readers. I need to start practicing what I preach.

Opening Web Pages in the Background While You Browse

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A Firefox (and perhaps other tabbed browser?) quick tip.

I’m pretty sold on Firefox and absolutely dependent on its tabbed browsing feature. For those of you who don’t know what tabbed browsing is, it’s a feature that enables you to open multiple Web pages in the same Web browser window. Each window is opened in its own “tab” which is accessible with a simple click.

Tabbed Browsing

Firefox has supported tabbed browsing for some time now. Safari on the Mac does, too. And Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows has finally caught up, adding this feature in version 7.

Today, while trying desperately to catch up with the few RSS feeds that I follow, I ran across an article on LifeHacker by Adam Pash titled “Firefox Quick Tip: Drag and Drop URL Text.” In it Adam explains how to open a URL displayed on a Web page by dragging it to the address bar. Pretty simple stuff, but probably a revelation for someone who didn’t know they could do this.

With tabbed browsing, you can do something similar — but better. Say you’re reading a blog article that includes a lot of links. You want to follow the links, but you want to finish reading the article first. If you’re like me, you know you’ll forget to go back and click the links.

If you already know this trick, you’re probably saying, “Pretty simple stuff.” If so, stop reading and get on with your life. But if this is all new to you, read on.

Drag link to tab area.Here’s what you do: drag the link you want to read to a blank part of the tab bar (the close button at the end of the tab bar works, too) — or to a tab you don’t mind overwriting with other content. Firefox will load that page in the background while you continue to read the page that link was on.

Use the contextual menu.Another way to do this is to Control-click (Mac OS) or right-click on a link and choose the Open Link in New Tab command on the contextual menu that appears.

This is especially useful if you have a really slow Internet connection (like I do at home) and don’t like to wait for pages to load. It enables you to keep busy doing something else while your computer gets the page you want to see. Then, when you’re ready to read the page, it’s ready and waiting for you.

Tabs preferencesOf course, to take advantage of tabbed browsing, it must be enabled and the tab bar must be displayed. In Mac OS, choose Firefox > Preferences, click the Tabs button, and turn off the option labeled “Hide the tab bar when only one web site is open.” Click the close button to close the preferences window and save your settings.

PagePacker

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Make pocket-sized books.

Putting together a booklet in PagePackerI stumbled upon PagePacker from the Big Nerd Ranch while trying to catch up on my Web browsing. It’s a nice little Mac OS X (universal binary app) that enables you to create tiny 8-page booklets. You can either add pages from a library of predefined GTD-inspired planning pages or drag in your own PDFs (which you can create using the Print command from any application). The resulting folding book is small enough to fit in a pocket, wallet, or purse, making it possible to take all kinds of information with you.

I tried out the software and like it a lot. My only problem: I’ve got those middle age eyes and have trouble reading the tiny print. But with a little tweaking on the font size of original documents, I think I can resolve that problem sufficiently enough to make PagePacker a good productivity tool for me.

Mac OS Versions, builds included with Intel-based Macs

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More reference information for Mac OS users.

A week or so ago, I published a quick blog entry with a link to an Apple Tech Note document about Mac OS X builds. Here’s another article with the same kind of information for Intel-based Macs: Mac OS: Versions, builds included with Intel-based Macs.

The article includes some basic information on how to find the build number and a table of Macintosh models and the Mac OS versions/builds that came with them. You might find this information useful if you ever need to boot your computer from an OS X CD or DVD or if you’re interested in running a build of Mac OS other than the build that came with your computer.

Minimize the Ribbon

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Getting back some screen real estate.

One of the things that you might find bothersome about Excel 2007′s Ribbon is the amount of space it takes up at the top of the workbook window. Fortunately, you can get it out of the way and recover that space. Here’s how.

  1. Right click on any button on the Ribbon. A contextual menu appears:

    Contextual Menu

  2. Choose Minimize the Ribbon. The Ribbon shrinks so it looks a lot like a good, old fashioned menu bar.

    Minimized Ribbon

From that point on, to access the Ribbon, click the tab you want to expand and display it. It will overlap the top of the document window, as shown here:

Expanded Ribbon

When you continue working in the worksheet window, the Ribbon collapses again.

To get the Ribbon back to normal, right-click on any Ribbon tab and choose Minimize the Ribbon from the contextual menu that appears. That will toggle the feature to “off.”

How to Copy iTunes tracks Between Libraries

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A quick How-To from MacOSXHints.

Do you use the multiple library feature of iTunes? If so, you might be interested in this how-to piece, Copy iTunes tracks between libraries on macosxhints:

iTunes users who use the Multiple Library feature may be interested in batch-adding tracks from one library to another. Here’s one way of doing just that.

The article is short, with easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions.

5 Ways to Make Your Blog Posts More Readable

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Learn five easy tricks to help pull readers into your blog posts.

Okay, so you’ve written an article for your blog and you’re all ready to publish it online. You’re confident that the article’s content is well-written. And you’re sure it will appeal to your blog’s regular readers.

But wait! Before you put it out to be read by the world, have you done what you can to make it more readable?

By readable, I mean formatted in such a way that visitors will be drawn into its content and want to read every word. Or have you simply composed 20 paragraphs of good, solid information, formatted as big solid blocks of text?

No matter what blogging tool you use to publish your blog, you should have access to the standard array of formatting features available in HTML. In this article, I’ll explain how and why you should use them.

Break Up Long Paragraphs

What’s less attractive on a Web page than solid blocks of text? Long paragraphs of unbroken text can intimidate readers. They look unapproachable, like a college textbook. (For me, they bring to mind the textbook in my college tax accounting course, which further reminds me of two semesters of boring hell on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.)

Break up long paragraphs at logical points. This will require some writing skill, since you can’t arbitrarily chop paragraphs up — each one must still communicate a complete thought. But shorter paragraphs are a lot less intimidating than long ones — a point that applies to sentences, too (although I can’t seem to get that one into my thick skull).

And one more thing about this: be sure to use a space between paragraphs (usually with the <p> tag rather than the <br /> tag, if hand coding is required). On the Web, that’s the standard way to end one paragraph and begin another. Just starting a new line isn’t going to break the paragraph at all — at least not in the eyes of the reader.

Use Headings

Headings cue the reader about the content of paragraphs that follow them. For example, my Use Headings heading here tells you that I’m going to talk about headings in this paragraph and, likely the few that follow up until the next heading. Readers can scan your article’s headings to get a better idea of what the article covers.

Of course, there are two kinds of headings. There’s the kind that actually reflects what’s in the paragraphs they head — that’s what I’m using in this article. And then there’s the kind that doesn’t quite explain what the following paragraphs are about, but are humorous or witty. Both types can work, but for serious content, I recommend the first type.

Headings can also help with search engine optimization (SEO), but not being an SEO expert, I can’t elaborate much about this. I seem to recall reading that h1 and h2 level headings are more effective for SEO than other lower levels. I use h3 because that’s how formatting is set up on my blog and I’m not terribly concerned with SEO. If SEO is very important to you, you might want to look into this claim. Of course, for headings to be effective at all in SEO, they must be coded as headings using <h2> and </h2> tags (or other level tags as appropriate) around them. The appearance of text coded as headings will vary depending on settings in your style.css file or other style information for your blog. (And now we’re getting a little more technical than I wanted to get in this article.)

Format Lists as Lists

If any paragraph in your article includes a list of four or more items that are longer than four or more words each, for heaven’s sake, format them as a list!

There’s nothing so boring or potentially confusing as long lists within a paragraph, especially when those lists include explanations, commas, and semicolons. Why worry about proper in-paragraph list formatting when you can simply create a bulleted or numbered list that’s clear and easy to read?

Lists, like headings, are also extremely scannable, making it easy for readers to get an idea of the content they include. They draw the reader in by giving them information in bite-sized chunks. Bold formatting used at the beginning of a list item (see below) can act as a heading, letting the reader know that an explanation or more information about the item follows.

In summary, lists can do the following for you:

  • Break up long blocks of text. Long lists in a paragraph make big, fat, intimidating blocks of text. Isn’t this much nicer?
  • Make one point easy to distinguish from the next. Since you (and your readers) don’t have to worry about how list items are separated (comma or semi-colon?) you don’t have to worry about someone misunderstanding list items.
  • Take advantage of built-in formatting options. I’m not just talking about standard bullets and hanging indents here. As you can see in this list, a blog’s style.css file can include instructions for graphic bullets or other fancy formatting.
  • Give your readers important points quickly. By presenting information in an easily scannable format, your readers can see what a list is about without wasting time. If it’s what they want to learn more about, they’ll dive in and read it.

Apply Other Formatting…but Sparingly!

There are other, more basic formatting features you can apply to text. Want some basic information to stand out? Use bold formatting (as I did in the bulleted list above). Introducing a new word or phrase? Italicize it. Got a quote to share? Here’s what I say:

If it’s longer than a dozen or so words, consider putting quotations between <blockquote> and </blockquote> tags. This clearly identifies the text as a quote from another author. (Well, in this case, it’s still words of wisdom from me, but you can quote me if you like.)

Don’t use ALL CAPS. It’s childish and unprofessional and considered by many to be “shouting.” And don’t use underlines. On the Web, underlines indicate hyperlinks and you can confuse your readers.

And don’t use too much formatting. There comes a point when the repeated application of bold and/or italic formatting loses meaning and simply fails to do the intended job.

Insert Illustrations

I’m a firm believer in the old adage: “One picture is worth a thousand words.” Maybe that’s why I’ve been writing Visual QuickStart Guides for Peachpit Press since 1995. Those books are full of screenshots — mine average 3-4 per page — and are excellent tools for teaching readers how to perform tasks with various software.

In regular writing — such as the writing you might do for your blog — images can also help communicate information. Did you write a software how-to piece? Screenshots of the steps would be extremely helpful. Did you write about a recent vacation? Include a few photos to show the scenes you’ve written about. Does your article explain the organization of a company or one of its departments? Include an organizational chart to put things in perspective.

On the Web, images do more than just communicate information. They also add visual appeal. Think about it as you visit sites on the Web. Which pages or blog posts caught your attention more? The ones without images? Or the ones with photos or drawings?

If you don’t have illustrations for your article and you want to include some other kind of graphic element, try text in a box. This effect, which is often used in print publications, can add visual appeal almost as much as an image can.

Let’s face it: people like to look at pictures. By giving them pictures that relate to your article, you can capture their attention and reel them in to read more about what the picture shows.

A word of warning here: Don’t use photos that don’t belong to you — doing so is likely a violation of copyright law. You can probably use company logos — if your use is consistent with the company’s rules governing logo use (normally available on its Web site) and you’re writing about the company. But taking photos off another Web site or scanning them out of a print publication for use on your site could get you in a lot of trouble. It’s stealing, plain and simple, and you could get sued. Use photos, screenshots, and drawings that you’ve taken or that you’ve received permission to use. The rule of thumb here is, if you don’t know whether you have permission to use it, you probably don’t.

Conclusion

As you can see, each of these techniques is relatively easy to implement on your blog. While it isn’t necessary to use all of them in one article (as I’ve attempted to do here), you can mix and match them as you see fit to liven up the layout and appearance of your prose.

The main thing to remember is this: the more interesting you make your text appear at first glance, the more likely you are to get readers to stick around and read what you’ve written.

Oh, and by the way, just about everything in this article also applies to your non-Web writing efforts: reports, articles, white papers, and books. You just won’t need HTML code to get the job done.

Three Types of Blog Entries

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And how they can make your blog succeed.

Every blogger has his own style of blogging which combines writing style, voice, and entry type. While writing style and voice are primarily dependent on the blogger and his writing skills, entry type is something that can be easily changed.

The way I see it, there are several different types of blog entries. Each type has its own pros and cons. In this article, I want to take a closer look at the three types I use and explain why I think they’re useful.

Daily or Weekly Link Lists

If you maintain a blog, you probably also read other blogs and visit Web sites. Along the way, you might find articles you want to share with your blog’s readers. That’s what link list entries are all about. They offer a quick list of links to articles and blog entries on the Web with or without brief comments.

Pros

The benefit of this type of entry is that it’s quick and easy to create. It offers value to readers in that it tells them about Web-based content that they might find useful or interesting. But it doesn’t usually add much in the way of content. Sure, your comments can explain what the link is all about, but they’re not usually a major part of the entry. The links themselves are the content.

Cons

The drawback of this type of entry is that there simply isn’t much “meat” in it. Your list of links might not provide anything new for folks who spend much of their time on the Web — as many blog readers do. Links you find today may have been found by others who listed them yesterday or last week or last year. I’ve often read link lists and found links I’m already familiar with — and that’s saying a lot because I don’t spend a lot of time on the Web. Still, to many blog visitors, old news is better than no news. If you’re one of the few sources of links for some of your visitors, they’re likely to find a lot of value in the links you share.

Note

A side note here: I create my daily link list as I visit Web sites and blogs by using the Daily Blog Posting feature of Del.icio.us and a Del.icio.us bookmarklet. This system is extremely easy to use, although formatting is preset and limited. As I find interesting sites, articles, or pages, I use the bookmarklet to add them to my Del.icio.us Bookmarks. At the end of the day, the Daily Blog Posting feature automatically compiles all the bookmarks I added that day and turns them into a links list and posts it to my WordPress-based blog. The result is the Links posts you can find in the This just in… topic on my site. Oddly enough, this is the only reason I use Del.icio.us. (I maintain my bookmarks list in Firefox, synchronized automatically on all my computers using Foxmark Bookmark Syncrhonizer.) You can access this Del.icio.us feature for yourself. Log into your Del.icio.us account and, from your settings page, click Daily Blog Posting. You can find instructions for using this feature in “How to back up del.icio.us bookmarks on your blog” and elsewhere on the Web.

Analysis of Web Content

From the very beginning, blogs have included analysis or commentary about other content on the Web. A Web site or another blog would publish an article about something — anything! — and a blogger would quote it, link to it, and write up some commentary. There’s still a huge amount of that going on today — in fact, I’d bet that 80% or more of blog entries fall into this type of entry.

This is, in effect, one step beyond a simple link with a summary sentence or two. An entry like this includes a link to and quote from someone else’s original material, but analyzes it and offers the blogger’s take on it. Fox News does an article on President Bush’s most recent speech and a blogger picks out a choice quote or two and tear it to shreds. (Or, as the case may be, praises the reporter for his insightful commentary.) Microsoft issues a press release about the latest Windows security problem and fix and a blogger quotes a summary paragraph and explains how the problem may or may not affect most users. People magazine does a story about celebrities adopting African orphans and a blogger quotes the piece and explains why she thinks they should be adopting American orphans. Or, in a recent example from my site, I discover an online Internet connection speed testing utility, link to it and quote the introduction for its use, and explain why I think it’s a good tool. Get the idea?

When you create entries like this, there’s a certain amount of value added: your commentary. The value, of course, depends on your expertise (do you know what you’re talking about?), your thoughts about the topic (are your thoughts positive, negative, or critically useful in any way?), and your writing skills (can you communicate your thoughts in a way that’s clear, concise, or at least entertaining?). The goal is to consistently create entries that your audience finds interesting. But be warned! If you disappoint your audience one too many times, they won’t keep checking in for the latest.

Pros

The main benefit of this kind of entry is that it’s relatively quick and easy to create. Can be timely (if based on current events) or long-lasting (if based on information that’s useful for a good, long while). The commentary helps readers make conclusions based on an “expert” opinion, so it’s valuable to them and they’ll come back for more.

Cons

There’s a lot of this stuff out there. If your commentary is the same old thing that can be found on other blogs, there may be no reason for visitors to come to your blog. It’s hard to set your blog apart from the others with this type of entry unless your good at it and your commentary is worth reading. And timely content has a limited “shelf life,” thus requiring that you constantly add new content — several entries a day! — to keep readers coming back for more.

Full-length Articles

Full-length articles are just that: original articles that cover a specific topic. Although they may quote and reference other Web sources, most of the information and conclusions are yours. These are the articles that most readers are looking for. When you link to and/or quote other writers’ original articles on your site, all you’re doing is sending readers to those sites or blogs. But when you create original material on your blog, other bloggers will send readers to you. And that’s the goal, isn’t it?

Full-length articles are what can set your blog apart from others. These articles represent your thoughts and ideas, your opinions and viewpoints. They can provide instructions for completing tasks (as many of my articles do here for various computer software programs), provide news and opinion about current events locally or worldwide, or tell a story about the weird thing that happened to you on your last day off. A full-length article can be all original material or can combine bits and pieces of other material, drawn together solely to provide background information or strengthen your viewpoint. (One of my favorite opinion pieces is by John Aabbott, who occasionally writes for wickenburg-az.com; in “Just Say No to Wal-Mart in Wickenburg“, he argues about why Wickenburg should not have a Wal-Mart, using lots of quotes and online references to make his point.)

Pros

The full-length articles you write can only be found in one place: on your blog. If you write something useful and/or interesting, other bloggers may send readers to your blog, helping to increase your blog’s readership. Articles can help establish you as knowledgeable about a topic — perhaps even an expert.

Cons

Not everyone is cut out to write full-length articles of value to readers. You need a well thought-out topic, the ability to organize your thoughts, writing skills, and, most of all, time. (I don’t know anyone who can knock off a 1500-word article in 30 minutes.) Your topic must appeal to your blog’s readers — or the readers you want to attract. Sure, you might be able to write 2,000 words about that weird thing that happened to you on your last day off from work, but do people really want to read it? Do they care? There’s a lot of dull stuff out there (and I’ll admit, in this blog, too) that simply won’t get read.

Developing a Strategy

It’s up to you to develop a strategy for your blog. My advice is to mix these three types of blog entries as time allows. That’s what I do and I’ve had relatively good success.

If you have a good technique for creating link lists, you should add links to your list each time you visit other sites/blogs and find content of interest to your readers. This is quick and easy to to do and has some value to your site’s visitors.

When time allows, take the links the next step by including some useful commentary about the sites or articles you link to. This makes your entries more valuable to readers.

If you can consistently come up with informative and interesting full-length articles for your blog, by all means, write them! If your blogging software supports scheduled entries, you might want to use a trick I use: write several articles in a day — or a long article broken down into logical segments — and schedule them to be published over several days or weeks. This ensures a steady stream of good, fresh content for readers rather than bunching articles up on the days you have time to write them. Multi-part articles also give readers a reason to come back for more.

Of course, your strategy will depend on your blog and your blogging style. What works best for you? Use the comments link to share your thoughts with the rest of us.

Excel 2003 VQS Correction of the Day

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Another very minor correction to my Excel 2003 VQS for Windows book.

As I continue to revise the book for Excel 2007 on Windows Vista, I continue to find tiny errors in the existing book.

Today’s error is on page 118, in the caption for Figure 38. The caption states that gridlines have been turned off for the illustration. In reality, they have not. But I do explain how to turn gridlines off in Chapter 15.

A Closer Look at Word 2004′s Status Bar

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There’s a lot of information there.

Word 2004 (and other versions of Word, for that matter) packs a lot of information into the status bar at the bottom of the document window. Here’s an example of what it looks like:

Word's Status Bar

What appears depends on the view of the document, its contents, and the features you have enabled or disabled. Here’s a quick rundown of what to expect and how to take advantage of this information:

  • Page is the page number of the page currently displayed. If you’re viewing the document in Normal view or are viewing multiple pages at once, it’s the page where the insertion point is blinking or text is selected. The number that appears corresponds to the page numbering of the document. For example, if you indicated to Word that the first page is 17 and you’re looking at the second page of the document, Page will display 18.
  • Sec is the section number currently displayed. This will be 1 unless you inserted section breaks in your document. Like Page, if you’re looking at multiple sections, it displays section number for the blinking insertion point or beginning of selected text.
  • number/number is the current page number and the total number of pages in the document. This is based on the physical count of pages — not special page numbering you may have assigned.
  • At is the distance between the top of the page and the blinking insertion point. If the insertion point is not in the window, no value is displayed.
  • Ln is the insertion point’s line number, measured from the top of the page. If the insertion point is not in the window, no value is displayed.
  • Col is the number of characters from the left margin to the insertion point. If the insertion point is not in the window, no value is displayed.
  • The Word Count dialognumber/number is the word count statistics for the document. The Live Word Count feature must be turned on for this to display. (Choose Word > Preferences, click View, turn on the check box for Live Word Count.) The first value is the position of the insertion point as measured in words from the beginning of the document. If multiple words are selected, that value is the number of words selected. The second value is the total number of words in the document. If you click these values, the Word Count dialog appears, displaying the number of pages, words, characters (no spaces), characters (with spaces), paragraphs, and lines in the document.
  • Spelling Contextual MenuSpelling and Grammar Checking status is an icon that indicates the status of the spelling and grammar checker. During a check, the icon is animated. If no errors are found, a check mark appears. If an error is found, an X appears; you can click the icon to select the first unknown word with a contextual menu you can use to correct, ignore, or learn it.
  • REC is the macro recorder status. Click REC to display the Record Macro dialog and turn the macro recorder on or off. When the recorder is on, a green bullet appears next to REC.
  • TRK is the track changes feature status. Click TRK to display the Reviewing toolbar and turn the track changes feature on or off. When changes are being tracked, a green bullet appears next to REC.
  • EXT is the extend selection mode status. Click EXT to turn the mode on or off. When selection mode is on, a green bullet appears next to EXT and using various keyboard keys extends the selection of text in the document. (I don’t use this feature and would love to hear from people who do. Use the Comments link to share your insight on this feature.)
  • OVR is the overtype mode status. Click OVR to turn the mode on or off. When overtype mode is on, a green bullet appears next to OVR and the insertion cursor turns into an overtype cursor, automatically overwriting everything to the right as you type.
  • File version status is an icon that indicates the document includes more than one version. It only appears if the document has multiple versions. Clicking the icon displays the Versions dialog so you can choose the version you want to display onscreen. You can create multiple versions of a Word document by choosing File > Versions.

Other icons may appear at the far right end of the status bar when Word is saving a document with the background save feature or printing a document in the background.

As you can see, the status bar is more than just a collection of numbers and icons at the bottom of a Word document window. It can provide useful information and give you easy access to Word features.

Useful HTML Tricks for Bloggers

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Formatting can help draw readers in and keep them reading.

Amit Agarwal has written a nice little article that provides a few quick and easy-to-use HTML coding tricks that you can use in your blog posts to make them more visually appealing. After all, no one wants to big, fat, unbroken paragraphs of text.

From Useful HTML Tricks for Bloggers on :

Though knowledge of HTML or CSS is not essential to writing a blog, it is always nice to have some basic idea of these languages to make your blog posts stand-out – after all, readers have such short attention spans and we, as bloggers, desperately want them to read our content.

This is the new HTML thing I learned today. I can now put text in a box and have text wrap around it. It’ll be a nice effect for making points in an article.

My favorite tip? Putting text in a box and having other text wrap around it.

Although I’m no stranger to HTML and CSS, I’m no expert, either. I learn from getting the basics in articles like this one, then experimenting on my own to fine-tune the effect. For example, Amit’s article displays a fixed width/height box with borders on top and bottom only. My box here is a true box (borders on all sides) that’s just tall enough to fit the text I want to put into it.

I’ll have to do an article about this effect in the future. Stay tuned.

Six Improvements For Your Blog

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From lifehack.org

Interested in a few basic blog improvements? Chris Brogan’s article should give you some ideas.

From Six Improvements to Your Blog on lifehack.org:

I’ve done a lot of blog surfing lately, in search of new (best) blogs. What I found often, however, was that there are things people could do to improve the relationship and interaction value of their blogs, which would in turn build a better bridge between blogs and their readers.

Chris’s six tips are extremely basic, with advice that includes formatting posts to make them more legible and making it easy for readers to contact you. I don’t agree with everything said — for example, the contact advice doesn’t work for me and I don’t see anything wrong with captchas if they prevent comment spam — but it’s a good look at some things you may be able to do to improve your blog overall.

Does anyone have any other tips they might want to share with readers? Use the Comments link here.

How to Resolve Startup Issues and Perform Disk Maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck

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Another technical note from Apple Support.

Over the past 18 years I’ve been using a Mac — is it that long already? — I’ve had more than one experience when my Mac just wouldn’t start. On two occasions, it was due to a hard disk gone bad — every computer user’s nightmare (are you backing up your important stuff?). On other occasions, it was screwed up but repairable directory files and permissions.

Your Mac comes with tools to help you resolve startup issues. And, in most cases, they really do work. But an important part of keeping your computer running reliably is maintenance — that means running diagnostic/repairs software on it regularly.

From Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck on Apple Support:

If your computer won’t start up normally, you may need to use a disk repair utility to fix the issue. Mac OS X includes two utilities for this…Disk Utility and fsck. You can also use these even when your computer starts just fine but you want to check the disk for possible file system issues.

The article includes step-by-step instructions for using these two Apple-provided utilities to keep your computer running smoothly.

How to Publish a Video Podcast with WordPress

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Article on Informit.com

My latest article for Informit.com has finally been published there.

From the introduction to “Publish a Video Podcast with WordPress“:

Maria Langer’s helicopter jaunts are too spectacular to be described with mere words; adding video podcasts to her web site would give visitors a taste of the thrill they’d be buying when they signed up for a trip. In this article, Maria takes us on a tour of the software that made it all possible.

I didn’t write that. But I think it’s funny, so I figured I’d quote it.

If you’re interested in using WordPress to publish a video podcast, read the article. Due to copyright agreements with Informit.com, I can’t reproduce it here. But I may turn it into a podcast episode one day soon. Stay tuned.