One of my customers who is a writer krahesnest.com asked me if I knew of any tools to help a writer organize their work. She knew that I am a big open source fan and thought that I could help her find something that would be an effective tool for a writer.
I found LyX it’s a very productive way to write books, articles, reports, slideshows, and other long documents. Word processors are optimized for easy use by untrained people. They excel at that.
LyX is a content authoring tool, LyX is NOT a word processor, and shouldn’t be used as such. It’s overkill for a 5 page school paper. It makes fine tuning of pages very difficult, which is not what you want on a flyer or short paper. LyX is not as user friendly as a word processor.
LyX is not easy because it is used to do difficult things, like lay out entire books in a consistent manner. LyX is a great tool which is free and open source.
This looks really cool. Google is releasing a beta version of Friend Connect, a service designed to let Web publishers add social networking features to their sites.
You will be able to add social features to your site without any programming ability. They will provide you with some short snippets of copy and paste code.
I have been trying to sign up for the preview release for several days now with no luck. I’m thinking that its so busy that they can’t keep up with the requests already. There are some example sites for you to see how it works.
I’ll keep trying and let you know what happens.
I have a customer called Chamber Musicians. I set them up a blog and at first the postings were pretty often. The other day I mentioned to them that their last post was a bit old. They asked me if it would be better to take the blog down.
This presents an interesting dilemma which I have not thought about before.
Is there a point where posting too little will hurt your site in either your visitors eyes or the search engines?
The simple answer is I don’t know. There are no hard and fast rules about what kinds of things that you post to your blog or how often the posts should be. Just the fact that it is your blog means it can be anything that you want and if you host it on your site you don’t ever have to post.
I know that when I visit a new blog I am much more interested in the actual content rather than the date it was posted, but I do usually have a look at the date. I’m not sure how many other visitors actually do care or even look at the date.
If you are thinking that the success of your blog depends on how many comments that you get from your visitors I would say that’s not true. Just having more content on your site helps in many ways, including giving your visitors who don’t know you a better idea of what you’re about. Having visitors comment is a bonus. It almost always helps, but I don’t believe that not having them hurts your site.
It may actually be better to have some content on your blog even though it is a bit old rather than taking the whole thing down. I do think that if you are willing to write something occasionally it is probably better to give that a try before giving up completely. You might also want to think of it as a bulletin board for your site rather than a diary.
It is also a good place to post pictures of your events. You could even video them and embed YouTube videos of your performances or events in the blog. In that case you could make a separate category for those and visitors could easily search for and subscribe to just those postings.
Please let me know what you think.
JWChat - Jabber Web Chat
This looks very interesting. An easy way to add web based chat or conferencing to your site. The demo is very easy to use and the install seems pretty straightforward.
Because it web based none of your users need to install anything on their own computers. It’s free and open source so if you are thinking of adding advanced instant messaging and groupchat functionality to your website you have nothing to lose by
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Legendary Aircraft.
Another site that looks just like what it about. It’s clean looking and easy to read and you have to know that it’s about old airplanes even if you couldn’t read the words. This site also has a very nice photo gallery.
A couple of small things that I don’t like, I have said before that if you are going to have a copyright date on your pages you need to keep it current or just get rid of the date. Also I don’t like having a navigation link to the current page. There should be a way to let visitors know what page that they are on.
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Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
AARP has some very cool free games on their site. In honor of Mothers Day and moms everywhere they have Mahjongg: Mom Jongg. It’s just like online Mah Jongg with Mom in mind.
Happy Mothers Day!
I replied to a Craigslist ad the other day for someone looking to update their website. They replied that they wanted several things:
- google ads
- mailing list where people can sign up for promotions, news etc
- take questions from people and compile into a newsletter to be sent out
- do surveys
- do podcasts
- sell ebooks
When I saw that they were using WordPress for their site I realized that everything that they wanted and much, much more was readily available as a WordPress plug-in. If you haven’t been there before I would like to invite you to
I heard from someone the other day who said that they specialized in “Creativity and Uniqueness” in their website design. I went to see what sites that they had done and to me they all looked the same. The sites were all done in Dreamweaver or something like that. None of the sites validated and they were all made in tables with JavaScript navigation for rollovers, black backgrounds, lots of straight lines and no shadows.
They all had some sort of Flash slideshow or YouTube video embedded, but creative and unique? I don’t think so.
I’ve seen quite a bit of this lately where graphic designers discover Dreamweaver, KompoZer, or even FrontPage and decide that they are “Website Designers” as well. Some graphic designers do web design very well and are concerned about usability and web standards as well as graphics, but if what I’ve seen lately is any indication most don’t.
The sites that I saw did all have graphics that were very well done. I think that graphics were by far their strong suit, but you can’t take a site design from 1999 add a slideshow or video and call it “Creative and Unique”.
After I put up my new site design last week there was one glitch that was driving me nuts. In Internet Explorer only, the menu border displayed fine on my site, but in my blog the menu was missing most of the top border. The site looked fine in Firefox and others, but in IE there was whitespace where there should have been border.
I Googled the problem many different ways and I found lots of people with IE borders “issues”, but no solution that helped until I tried “border doesn’t display in ie” and got to page 5. The post on hellorobot.org called “IE’s Disappearing, Reappearing, Broken Borders” was a lifesaver.
Apparently the problem is that Microsoft, even though they give it lip service, doesn’t care about standards (I know, you’re probably shocked). They have their own attribute called “layout” which was hiding part of my border. I had never even heard of such a thing before, but it is explained in another post mentioned called “On having layout“. Apparently there are several elements that have layout by themselves along with some different combination of elements that add it as well.
It turns out that there is a simple solution of adding “zoom:1″ to my CSS for that element that fixes the problem, but since zoom is not a valid CSS property, the CSS for my blog will not validate. I think I would rather have it look and work well in all browsers rather than having it validate, but why should I have to choose? Microsoft and IE, WOW!
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Quinns Rocks Bed And Breakfast.
This site looks like a paradise. If I ever get to Australia I am going to seek out Quinns Rocks. It’s a small site, but in a very few pages it gets across everything that they need to. A beautiful and relaxing vacation place.
The site looks like a beautiful sea and has curves and shadows to give it some depth. The navigation is clear and easy to find and use.
More…
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