Technology As Innovator

Dear my readers,

I believe that by the time you came to my Lab, you had already read many other blogs.

Have you noticed that some blogs only display excerpts of their entries on the index page, and require you to click on “Read more…” to read the full post?

Tai Tran’s Lab saves you the additional clicks to reach full articles. Here, full entries are displayed so you don’t have to do the heavy job of clicking around for navigation.

However, if you click on a post’s title to go to the single page of the article, you will be able to:

1. View and add comments to the article
2. Have more options to add the article to social bookmarks sites, whereas only the most common options are available on the index page
3. Save the post as PDF file
4. Email the post to your friends
5. Print the post

The reason these options are not available on index page is because they will make it heavier for the page to load.

What do you think?

Please let me know your opinion of these services and where I should put these options so I can improve my site to match your needs. Furthermore, do you recommend any functionalities that are currently not supported here?

Thank you for going all along with me,

August 26, 2007

Tai Tran

Problem defined

“An idea pops up my mind”

OK! Imagine this. It’s a nice day, and you’re away from home and from your working cubicle. While talking to your friends, or seeing some billboard along the way, or just doing the routine exercise, an idea pops up your mind.

Do you want to note it down? Of course you do, for a million reasons. Ideas sell these days.

“I need a pen and paper”

So you’ll need a pen and a piece of paper. “Oh my, why can’t I find one!” you think.

“But wait, there’s a PC right here”

Sounds cool. Computers are around: airports, public places, internet café, libraries.etc., and you have just spotted one you can use. Typing the idea to a connected PC makes it easier to save, edit and send the information.

You turn on the machine, go to the address of your mailbox, and prepare to login. Wait a sec!

“Excuse me, anybody watching?”

You might want to turn around to see if anybody is behind your back peeping your user name and password. “Phew, no one.” you relieved.

I beg your attention. Are you sure there is no one?

“Of course there is no one beside me. Are you hallucinated?” you’re getting irritated.

For your sake, I am still sane. I wonder if you have heard of keyl.ogg.er. It is a program that monitors your activities on the computer: it tracks all websites you visit and applications you launch, records all keys you type in the text boxes. It sees your user name and password and snitch your account to some a guy usually known as ha.cker. Scary?

So you see, whether you log into your Gmail, MySpace account, Google Notebook, blog, music website, all your accounts are revealed.

Solution

I am here to tell you a tip on how to take notes securely without having to authenticate yourself to any login form, and in style too

If you have got a Blogger, or a WordPress blog, simply note down anything you want as a comment. You can always proceed with these drafts when you have returned to the safety of your well-protected PC.

If you haven’t got one, setting up a blog is easy: just go to blogger.com or wordpress.com for a free blog. Well, just that you need to do this before hand because they require you to open an confirmation email, which requires you to login your mailbox.

Why in style?

Ah, there are certainly other alternative ways to take notes online without authentication. For example, some forums allow Guest to post information.

However, a blog is more stylish than a forum, correct? Furthermore, posting comments to your own blog gives you full and more personalized control.

Not only you do it, you do it in style!

***

I want to hear you: What do you usually do when you need to take notes while sparing the peepers out?

Standard HTML

• Always use standard HTML. This helps when transferring content from one platform to another. XML exists to separate format from content, exploit it.
• Keep away from rich-text editors. They produce crap codes.
• When copying text from Microsoft Word, pay attention to the smart quotes. By default, Word automatically replaces “straight quotes” with a pair of “smart quotes”. The issue with smart quotes is that they are not displayed consistently through different web formats. To disable this feature in Word 2007: Menu \ Word Options \ Proofing \ AutoCorrect Options \ AutoFormat As You Type \ unselect the “”Straight quotes” with “smart quotes”" indicator.

Permalink

• If the permalink contains date, do not edit timestamp of posts or the URLs will break. If you have to change the date, keep the old article, write a new one and redirect from the old post to the newly written. Otherwise, if you can live without the date in your permalink, don’t use it.
• “Ending a page with .html helps improving Google PR” is possibly a myth or with their old algorithm.

Categories and Tags

• Try to put posts in only one category. Don’t make visitors feel that they always see the same posts in every category.
• Tagging can be a temptation, but the question is whether it’s worth the efforts to manage. It works perfectly when more than one person is tagging content. If it’s just single-blogger, it turns into a big cloud of decorative rather than helping visitors finding information.

Reading

• Make sure content is loaded before the sidebar. Visitors can read first before the whole page has been loaded.
• Breaking an entry into multiple pages may give you more traffic, at the price of visitors’ tiredness and frustration.