Major trend information finding complexity.
Some time ago I wrote the text below to a friend regarding tools (Firefox Extensions) for research and writing. I figured it would make a decent blog post as well, so here it is.
It goes something like this:
Firstly, it is all mainly Firefox related.
1. YubNub: Replace the default Google search for your address bar that does not look as URL’s, to instead use Yubnub. Instructions can be found over at (one of my fave sites) LifeHacker.
No modern computer should be without Firefox, it is even being installed by default on our machines at work by our IT team, and hey, it is free for anyone and everyone to download, so if you haven’t already, you should. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux.
There are a few things you can install to improve Firefox a bit though, and no one within a web design/development agency or similar work place, should be without the following three tools, if nothing else because it will make your life a LOT easier if your end product is web based in the slightest.
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an event initiated by Suw Charman-Anderson, and at the point of writing this, AdaLovelaceDay have 1776 bloggers who have signed up to blog, today, about women excelling in technology in whatever form we choose.
As this is a general topic that crop up on most conferences (where are the girls?) combined with the fact I have worked with so many great and awesome female developers, I figured I should contribute as well, by highlighting that there indeed are many great girls out there who rarely get into the limelight or steal the honour from the boys. In fact, I even struggle to think of any of the tech girls I have worked with who also bang their own drum, or who have a technology/development related web site of their own, or even blog about technology!
Blimey, found this in my list of drafts, guess I didn’t finish it because I started it between dishes during Xmas Day and family weren’t too impressed with me typing away on computer.
Anyways, just wanted to highlight that the guys behind the W3C validator (still) need support. Without the HTML validator (and the CSS validator etc) the landscape of what today is “semantic HTML” would have been infinitely different, and regardless of your thoughts on W3C being fast/slow moving or if you like/dislike how they decide things, the validator(s) have been there all along, for you, me and us all to use. They have created assurance where there wasn’t any, they have been a support when you needed them and they have been nagging you and forcing you to up your game when it comes to your code. If you work with front-end code in the slightest they have played a major part in how your work has been shaped.
How to write a blog post
The whole is greater than the sum of the parts
I have recently been setting up several different self-hosted Wordpress blogs, covering many different topic matters. All those blogs are being maintained and content edited by people who are not me, and I have noticed that several of those the content editors do not have much experience in writing for online audiences. That is ok. No one has experience until they’ve done it.
However, there are a couple of quick wins one can do for the articles per se, to make them easier to read and more entertaining for the reader, and I shall, completely non-scientifically, go through a few things I appreciate with other blogs out there. This also means this will turn into a blog post about blog posts, a thing I said a few years ago I would never do (because there are enough of them out there already), but I shall make this one exception to that rule in an attempt to be kind to colleagues and friends.
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