Technology As Innovator

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.

1. Bold: Alt+SHIFT+b
2. Italics: Alt+SHIFT+i
3. Link: Alt+SHIFT+a
4. Align Left: Alt+SHIFT+f
5. Align Center: Alt+SHIFT+c
6. Align Right: Alt+SHIFT+r
7. Blockquote: Alt+SHIFT+q
8. Code: Alt+SHIFT+c
9. Read More: Alt+SHIFT+t
10. Unordered List (ul): Alt+SHIFT+u
11. Ordered List (ol): Alt+SHIFT+o
12. List Item (li): Alt+SHIFT+l
13. Advanced Editor: Alt+SHIFT+v
14. Publish the Post: Alt+SHIFT+p
15. ins: Alt+SHIFT+s
16. del: Alt+SHIFT+d
17. Unquote/outdent: Alt+SHIFT+w
18. Undo: Alt+SHIFT+u
19. Redo: Alt+SHIFT+y
20. Edit HTML: Alt+SHIFT+e

The idea behind dontclick.it is superb: navigating without a single click. The website is made of pure flash and navigation is done with mouse hovers. Moreover, it alerts users how deeply the mental habit of clicking is implanted to our mind.

There have been many good reviews and praises for the project.

I found the site from StumbleUpon. I was attracted at first, and I didn’t miss clicking. However, the more I explored the site, the more burden I felt on my wrist. The project owner’s intention is to educate people how to swiftly manipulate the mouse motion and I suspect that the action of holding and moving the mouse precisely causes RSI more quickly than clicks.

My own preference of web navigation is that every control stays at its own place so it doesn’t waste my time and doesn’t make me more prone to RSI by moving the mouse to chase the jumping those little buggies.

Of course, it is still a great project and an inspiration for many web innovators. But personally I would prefer an interface that provides a lot of hot keys that come with outstanding indicators and requires minimal use of the mouse.