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Blogs » Archive for July 1st, 2008
How To Engineer Your Way To The Front Page Of Digg
The ability that digg has to move massive amounts of traffic to one site has many marketers, site owners, and entrepreneurs salivating at the very prospect of producing something that the digg crowd will, err, dig. So much so, in fact, that it is possible to engineer your way to the front page of digg.com.
4 Easy Ways To Spruce Up Your HTML Markup
In the last issue of the Tech Times, I mentioned I was hard at work with the team here on a new front page design for sitepoint.com. While most of our time has been split between tweaking the CSS styles and crafting the PHP code that will generate the page, any major redesign brings with it the opportunity to improve the HTML code at the heart of your site.
Of course, any newly-written HTML code these days should validate. But there’s more to good HTML code than validation. Validation is the bare minimum you should be doing to assure the quality of your code.
This issue, I’d like to take a look at four simple things you can do to make sure your HTML has that nice, new markup smell.
Take Care Of Your Heading Structure
This is something I’ve banged on about in the Tech Times before. The headings in your document (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) should form a consistent hierarchy: one or more <h1> sections each containing <h2> sections, which in turn may contain <h3>s. Resist the urge to skip heading levels (e.g. placing a <h5> after a <h1>) to indicate levels of “importance” in your content.
The easiest way to …
Why Multitasking is a Waste of Time
You often hear people extolling the virtues of multitasking: you get more done, It’s the way of the future.
Balls.
Multitasking is great if you want to fill your time doing a lots of things not very well, over a long period of time. Sure you can: flicking between checking your email, Twittering, writing a report, trying a new web app and chatting on Facebook. Are you busy? Probably. Are you productive? Probably not.
As I see it, there are two key problems here:
- Doing non essential tasks
Due to procrastination and self-distraction you are putting off certain tasks, by doing everything else but, the task you are supposed to be doing. - Task switching
The other often overlooked issue is that of task switching — moving between one task and another. This is the issue I want to draw your attention to in this post.
Task switching
Your conscious mind effectively works like a single thread processor. We do things best in a linear fashion. One thing followed by another. Multitasking is like trying to make yourself a multithread processor. Unfortunately, evolution hasn’t caught up yet, so you are stuck with your good old fashioned single thread brain. Sure you can sort of do multitasking, but …
Why The 10 Commandments Of Web Design Are Complete Baloney
I read this morning in the SitePoint Industry News forum that BusinessWeek had compiled what is being referred to as The 10 Commandments of Web Design.
The experts who contributed to this list include widely read authors and speakers like Dan Cederholm, Dave Shea, Khoi Vinh and Jeffrey Zeldman. Here it is:
1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash.
2. Thou shalt not hide content.
3. Thou shalt not clutter.
4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections.
5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels.
6. Thou shalt worship at the altar of typography.
7. Thou shalt create immersive experiences.
8. Thou shalt be social.
9. Thou shalt embrace proven technologies.
10. Thou shalt make content king.
On the surface, this advice seems reasonably innocuous. However, dig deeper and you’ll see that it all falls apart. Allow me to explain …
Before I launch into why I think this list is baloney, allow me a couple of minutes to don my flame suit. It’s a little dusty since I used it last. Oh, and don’t forget to grab a pinch of salt from the kitchen on your way through — you might need it.
OK, here …
