October 2006

Tips for Publishing RSS feeds – Part 1

October 25, 2006

Over the past couple years, I’ve learned a lot about RSS feed publishing while running EvolvePoint. Since we operate on both ends of the feed spectrum (search and publishing), I’ve had the opportunity to examine many feeds and see what works and what doesn’t. I’m starting to have enough data to have a good feel for [...]

OpenOffice to the rescue

October 24, 2006

Speaking of writing, OpenOffice.org saved my butt today. A large Microsoft Word document I was working on ballooned to over 300M, making even the autosave feature take over 10 minutes (I’m not exaggerating). Finally, in frustration, I opened up the document in OpenOffice.org Writer, finished my editing, and then saved it back to Word. The new file [...]

Paul Graham on why writing is harder than programming

October 24, 2006

If it wasn’t obvious from one of my recent posts, I’m doing some writing.  And when I’m engaged in an activity I tend to read more on the subject for inspiration. As I was taking a break procrastinating by skimming my feed reader, I saw a new post by Paul Graham on why writing is harder [...]

The day after my story was Netscaped

October 15, 2006

I’m not sure if there is a coined term for Netscape like “slashdotted” or “digged” yet, but my recent post on the troubles I saw with Netscape was promoted to their home page Friday and I saw heavy traffic to my site. In an incredible turn of irony, my post criticizing Netscape’s practices made it to [...]

Improve your writing with readability statistics

October 14, 2006

I stumbled on a great tip this morning for improving your writing while reading a post on Michael Stelzner’s white paper blog. In the post, he refers to an analysis of an HP white paper by Eric Rosen. While an interesting before and after study of how to use better written language in a white paper, what [...]

The new Netscape is a joke

October 12, 2006

The morning of the shooting in Blacksburg, Virginia I wrote a post that I updated during the day briefly chronicling the events as they occurred and my personal perspective as a professional working in Blacksburg. It was not meant to be a major journalistic piece, just a blog post from a citizen. Just for the heck of [...]

Online polls with PollDaddy

October 6, 2006

Richard MacManus of Read/WriteWeb writes that PollDaddy has launched into public beta. I’ve seen so many of these apps that I’ve largely ignored them. I figured if and when I had a need for a poll, I’d go check them all out. PollDaddy looked simple enough to get started though that I finally tried creating a [...]

Project Time Tracking Tools

October 4, 2006

Om Malik has a post on project time tracking over at the Web Worker Daily blog. His post is only a question to the readers regarding what they use for time tracking their various projects, but the comments are filled with great suggestions including: Web: FreshBooks (http://www.freshbooks.com/) Basecamp (http://www.basecamphq.com/) Tick (http://www.tickspot.com) SlimTimer (http://www.slimtimer.com) Harvest (http://www.getharvest.com) [...]