Category: webworkPage 2 of 4

Tom’s Book of Days

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,…

How much of this page will you read?

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…

Writers’ websites

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…

Easy conversion of Word documents to html

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…

Hotlinking and its discontents

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…

Business blogs

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…

Selling chapters

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 need for editorial direction

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…

Avante-garde frustration

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…

A tiny annoyance

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…

An e-book from blog archives

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…

The Stumbleupon effect

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…

Policy statement

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…

Digital divide

I was talking with someone the other day about website statistics packages. The image above comes from Google Analytics. As you can see, Right Reading has yet to…

Vector Magic

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…

Extended Live Archives and WordPress 2.3

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…

Extended Live Archives | One year ago

ELA seems to be a pretty good WordPress plugin. I’ve never had an archives link on my blogs, because I don’t think it’s of much interest to most…

Color names

Chirag Mehta has made a little application that will return a color name if you enter a hex code. Take the html web palette for this site, for…

The word “read” kills clicks

Marketing Sherpa made an interesting study of clickthrough rates of words that people use to encourage readers to continue with an article after a break. The conventional wisdom…

A message from Mr. D.

Genesis

The NYT has made its archive of articles freely available, permitting some interesting searches. The first mention of the worldwide web, “a collection of computer networks that does…

BlogRush

A new service called BlogRush has launched, which promises to drive traffic to your blog. The service requires installing javascript code that loads a widget on your site….

Are books irrelevant?

Aaron Wall says books are irrelevant “for all but true enthusiasts, desperate people seeking a manifesto for life change, or those who read as an escape.” I don’t…

Labor Day

My sites are closed today for Labor Day (and besides, all except Frisco Vista are moving to a new server. Nothing should change for visitors, but it means…