Tutorial Blog

On the side, I write for a few blogs, one of which is AppCraver, an Apple iPhone applications review site. With each review I do, I get smarter about which apps are truly useful to people like you and me. Here’s what’s been on my iPhone lately:

Bringing in the reads and feeds

The best news app I’ve come across is Mobile News Network. It’s AP news that you can configure in a variety of ways: top news, local news, sports, business, politics and on and on. The interface is super clean. News—whether as text, images or video—comes down surprisingly fast over Wi-Fi. You also get it all in one shot, so you can read it offline.  Mobile News Network is ad-supported, but it’s free.

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I mention Google so often that many people must think I’m getting paid by the company. Just for the record, they don’t pay me. I just can’t help myself–Google is always doing cool things.

Recently, Google said it is now able to use optical character recognition to index scanned documents stored as Adobe PDFs. Previously, the company rarely scanned docs because it couldn’t be sure of the search results. According to Google’s blog:

While we’ve indexed documents saved as PDFs for some time now, scanned documents are a lot more difficult for a computer to read. Scanning is the reverse of printing. Printing turns digital words into text on paper, while scanning makes a digital picture of the physical paper (and text) so you can store and view it on a computer.

To take a test drive of this new-new thing, click on this search query–Steady Success in a Volatile World–and you’ll see an excerpt of the PDF doc in the search results followed by the View as HTML link.

Convert scanned PDFs to text

Tech site Digital Inspiration has an angle on this new feature worth mentioning:

If you have scanned PDF files on your hard drive but lack OCR software, you can still convert them into recognizable text, DI says.

Create a folder on your Website (say, your site is abc.com) and upload all your PDFs to the same folder. Then, create a public Web page that links to all the PDFs. Wait for the Google searchbots to spider your stuff. After that’s done, type site:abc.com/pdf filetype:pdf to see your PDFs as HTML.

Lifehacker adds this twist to converting PDFs to HTML:

You can use Google’s Webmaster Tools to reign in what gets scanned and indexed on your site, although you should assume anything you put online can be found by those looking for it.

Can you tell what’s wrong with Lifehacker’s sentence above? Read “21 Words That Sound Alike but Mean Different Things.” What wrong in this picture?

Photo by Sidelong

Dozens of Web sites offer royalty- and copyright-free photographs and other images. I can’t imagine having to buy stock photos and art these days, although I have many times before. I use stock.xchng and Big Stock Photo often. The photos are generic, one-size-fits-all but they get the job done with no money up or down.

Lately, I’ve been using photos posted on Flickr Creative Commons. There’s an astounding variety of photos to choose from–many of them are quite good and hardly generic. The photos are free to use although there are a conditions. I’ll let Flickr explain them: Read the rest of this entry »

When clients ask me if they should write a blog, I always respond: “Heck yeah.” I’m all about quality content and the more keywords you can get into your pages the better off you’ll be, at least I think so. Blogging is just another way to feed searchbots.

After reading Josh Bernoff’s “Time to Rethink Your Corporate Blogging Ideas,” report, I’ll be more inclined to reply “That depends,” the next time the question comes up.  Bernoff is an analyst at Forrester Research, a technology-industry market researcher. The firm recently conducted a survey to gauge the opinions of customers and consumers who read corporate blogs. I guess it’s not surprising that less than one-fifth of people who read corporate blogs trust them.

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With an ever growing number of browsers to make your code compatible with and higher demands placed on web designers and developers there is a requirement for more powerful tools to create and maintain your code. This tutorial will cover a number of methods and resources to help aid you in the escalating demands of your web projects.

Many Developers and designers have their own personal favorite browser for developing and managing their websites. This tutorial will focus on  the use of Firefox. This is not to say other browsers put you at a disadvantage, but the addons and enhancements are all supported by Firefox. Read the rest of this entry »

Visitors to your Web site won’t read much of your content word-for-word. They’ll scan the text, cherry picking what to read. They’re in a hurry, easily distracted and have limited attention spans. If they don’t see right away what they’re looking for, they’ll bail out.

You can look it up. Go to the Poynter Institute’s or Jakob Nielsen’s site. Those guys have done lots of studies on how people read on line.

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If you are a free lance web designer or developer you will know just how difficult it can be to earn a dime in the world of web design. I have learned a lot of lessons, most of them the hard way. Being great at web design and being great with clients, are two very different requirements. By setting yourself these basic rules, and sticking to them you will save yourself becoming victim to a number of pitfalls. That’s why I have put together this guide to help maximize your projects success. Read the rest of this entry »

My first writing job was for a small small publishing company that published magazines for consumer electronics and major appliance retailers. Writing for trade magazines is not as glamorous as writing for consumer magazines but the pay is a heck of a lot better.

It was one of those places where the writers did the work of two times as many people. We pounded copy like crazed monkeys including nights and Saturdays when deadlines were on top of us. I wrote my ass off and I learned a lot, thanks to my working for a particularly skillful editor. I also learned to write quickly.

I’ve been banging out copy since and not a day goes by that I’m satisfied with my work. I know I can always do better. It’s a disease.

I’m sorry to be so long winded. I’ve already violated one of rules I learned about writing and that is get to the point quickly. I’m in a reflective mood. If you want to go read someone else’s blog, I’ll understand.

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