blog.rightreading.com

DoFollow: it was a noble experiment. But it brought me a lot of thin or spam comments that benefited no one. I spent a fair amount of time either deleting these or agonizing about whether they had a shred of content and should be spared.
To recap, quickly, for anyone who needs a recap: When comments [...]

A little self-promotion here, tinged with a bit of nostalgia for the early days of the web. Blog.rightreading.com readers might not have chanced upon my Book of Days, over at the html wing of this site. This site’s origins go back to December 1994 when we launched the website of Mercury House, the book publishing [...]

According to Jacob Nielsen, in a post of nearly 500 words, such as this one, readers can be expected to spend an average of about 45 seconds on the page, an amount of time in which they might read some 187 words, or less than three-eighths of the content.
In a study called “Not Quite the [...]

A website called Books Written By is documenting authors’ sites on the web. It has assembled screenshots of many writers’ websites; the screenshots link to the sites themselves (although it takes a couple of clicks to get there from the main page).
It’s a good idea, nicely executed. While some of the authors represented are not [...]

Say you need to do a quick web page from a Word document. I know Word claims to have a “save as html” function, but it produces hideous code. The easy way? Get a gmail account, attach the Word document to an e-mail, and send it to yourself.
Then just select “view as html” and save.
.
Conceivably [...]

Hot Linking: Process by which one links to an image stored on one site yet it appears on one or more other sites. If done without permission, this is considered unethical since one is using bandwidth they [sic] are not paying for. – 2020 Systems Internet Glossary
Al Filreis is Kelly Professor of English, Faculty [...]

Awareness of blogging has by now reached even the ignorant upper management stratum of most organizations. Unfortunately, an awareness of how to do it has lagged behind the awareness of its existence, at least in the publishing world.
Take a look at publishers’ blogs –David Godine’s, for example, or Chronicle Books’. While these blogs sometimes [...]

So the digital age brings us full circle, back to the serial publishing of the Victorian era. Random House has announced that it will test selling books by the chapter online.
I’m old school enough to prefer a physical book, but certainly there are plenty of indications that readers will commit to an online series if [...]

Web 2.0 experiments with open content are showing the value of moderated forums. Democracy is great, but chaos isn’t necessarily so hot.
Once upon a time tech types used to track stories on Digg.com. When a post got promoted to Digg’s front page it would bring your site a huge amount of traffic. The web [...]

The British Library is hosting what might very well be a great exhibition on Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900–1937. They are supporting the exhibition with a fairly extensive website. It includes a detailed chronology (as a pdf) and even a curator’s blog (although based on my [...]

I’ve replaced my html photography page with a simple, casual photoblog.

I’m not sure exactly why, since most of my photos that I put online go on Flickr. Still, I’ll probably post a photo here every week or two.
This site, BTW, started as an adjunct to the Mercury House site that first went up in December [...]

I sometimes visit a popular literary blog where the posts alternate between rambling discourses and cryptic links. I generally prefer the links, except that the author uses the service known as tinyurl for many of them.
Tinyurl was originally intended as a way of doing things like shortening links in e-mails, since some people can’t deal [...]

One of the most impressive things about Google is its staying power. The life cycle of online ventures is usually pretty short. Digg, for example, is no longer as compelling as it once was, despite its inflated offering price.
Then there’s Technorati. Its ascension into the heights of the blogosphere was the result of its being [...]

Jeff Barry has completed an interesting project of culling his blog archives to produce a free e-book, called Buenos Aires, City of Faded Elegance. He explains:
Whenever I come across a new blog I read the latest postings and, if I like those, I add the site to my news reader. I always intend to go [...]

Recently I launched a new blog on Asian art and culture, called 7junipers.com. It’s a long-term project, and I have done virtually no promotion or link building for it yet. But I did photoblog a couple of images from the site for stumbleupon. You can see the resulting spikes in traffic on this chart (courtesy [...]

It has become necessary for me to articulate policies that will be posted on my blogs.
Outright spam is straightforward to deal with, but here and elsewhere I am increasingly receiving marginal, opportunistic comments that, while they may appear to contribute faintly, are mainly intended to benefit the commenter through their links and anchor text. I [...]

I was talking with Howard Junker the other day about website statistics packages. The image above comes from Google Analytics (which is available for Blogger sites such as Howard’s ZYZZYVA Speaks). As you can see, Right Reading has yet to develop a big presence in the markets of Belarus, Greenland, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Oman, and [...]

It’s premature to announce this but I’m impatient so I’ll go ahead and do it anyway. The empire is expanding with another website/blog. It’s www.7junipers.com, and it will be my place for comment on Asian art and culture.
The title alludes to the seven junipers of Zhidao Guan, a Taoist temple in the city of Changshu [...]

VectorMagic is an “online tool for precision vectorization.” In other words, it is an autotracer that converts pixel-based images (photos, screen captures, etc.) to vectors, which can then be scaled without loss of quality. You upload an original image and download the vectorized result. This would be a big time-saver if you wanted to manipulate [...]

The Extended Live Archives plug-in for WordPress that I mentioned in a previous post is not compatible with WP 2.3, because the WP file structure was changed to accommodate its new tags feature. Fortunately, there is a fix.
Conceivably Related PostsExtended Live Archives | One year agoELA seems to be a pretty good WordPress plugin. I’ve [...]