Author Archive for Tim

Austin Rated Bloggingest City

Published by Tim on October 26, 2007 in General. 1 Comment

We just got news (via Wired News) that a Scarborough Research study is naming our own Austin the bloggingest city in the nation, based on the percentage of residents who read or write blogs. (Photo: Flickr DanHerron)

Austin topped the stats with 15% of adults reading or writing blogs, edging out Portland, OR (14%), and the San Francisco Bay Area (San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose at 13%).

With that in mind, here’s a shout out to some of the great Austin blogs that are part of our network:

Another couple of honorable mentions to the Austinist, That Other Paper and do512 as great local blog-ish community resources.

We know we’re not mentioning all the great Austin blogs — note the ones we missed in our comments!

Writing for the Web: Readers Scan

Published by Tim on October 19, 2007 in Blog Writing. 0 Comments

We know that you, gentle blogger, already know how to write for the Web. (You do have a blog?)

Today’s post looks a little closer at why Web writing is different from those other kinds.

Flicker Flicker

First, consider the computer screen. Reading on a computer screen is a much harsher experience than reading on paper.

Why?

Your computer screen refreshes 72 times per second. Your large human brain sees this flashing as a “page” of info, but your brainyness has tricked you out of realizing that you might as well be looking into a strobe light. Hello headache!

Moreover, the computer screen is also relatively low-resolution, at 72 dots per square inch: fuzzy.

Paper, on the other hand, does not flash. Paper uses reflected light bouncing off the dark words, which makes for a calmer experience (I’m waiting for the BlogBurst Research Labs to get back to me on the science here…), and print on paper has a much higher resolution — 300 dots per square inch: crisp.

Which is why you can read “War and Peace” on paper, but sometimes it’s hard to get to the bottom of a Perez Hilton post. (One reason.)

Readers Scan

The flicker flicker syndrome is why Web readers don’t read word by word, they scan. Studies have even been done. (Here’s an interesting post from useit.com on how readers scan Web pages.)

That’s why many successful blogs:

  • keep it brief and focused
  • use short sections with clear titles and other clearly scannable levels of information
  • keep long dense documents deeper in the site and link to them from the blog
  • use words that anyone can understand

…Except When They Don’t

Now that I’ve beaten you over the head with the importance of brevity and scannability, here’s the bus-sized caveat: Unless your audience likes it some other way.

Some topics invite incredibly long boring dense posts about the finer details of a random topic. One of my faves, The Becker-Posner Blog can spin 2,000 words on Globalization and Inequality, and that’s great because their audience is full of dorks like me who like reading things like that.

But in general: scannable; short; snappy.

Keep Funky Characters Out Of Your Blog

Published by Tim on October 18, 2007 in Troubleshooting. 0 Comments

Did you ever write a brilliant blog post, hit “Publish” and then recoil in horror because maybe the word don’t came out looking like don’t ? Or little square boxes appeared blended among your carefully chosen words?

These are what we (the royal we) call funky characters.

Sly & the Family StoneFunky characters are great in B-movies and in the band Sly & the Family Stone (photo from Wikipedia), but funky characters do NOT belong in your blog.
But where, you ask, do they come from? And how, you persist, do you rid them from your life? Here is my 30-second lesson on all of the above.

The Why & The Fix

Nine times out of ten, funky characters are caused by pasting text you’ve written in a Microsoft Word document into your blog’s entry form. Word is a smart program — so smart that it likes to get tricky and include lots of hidden formatting information, which confuses your blog.

(A related problem: you paste an entry from Word and it comes out in a different font and size than you expect. The fix is the same.)

There are two key steps to the fix. First, in Microsoft Word turn off “smart quotes.” These are Word’s way of making quotation marks and apostrophes fancy (also known as curly quotes), but you don’t want fancy. You want to get the funk out.

How to turn off smart quotes:

Second, remember how Word hides all kinds of formatting information? All your blog needs is plain text. The best way to convert Word text to plain text is to cut it from Word and paste it into a plain text editor before then pasting it into your blog. There are lots of good free plain text editors, including Notepad ++ for Windows and TextWrangler for the Mac.