Which blogging software?

Among the free blogging sites, I recommend WordPress over Blogger.

Blogger gives you very simple capabilities: blog, post, tag, and archive posts and enable and manage comments. If you want something more complicated, you must go into your template and edit the code. There are no categories, so things tend to get chaotic. And if you customize your blog or change templates, all your improvements disappear.

Wordpress has more features that are useful for a larger blog. You don't have to use them until you need them but they are there. You can not only set tags but specify categories. You can set up a rotating blogroll instead of hand-coding it. There are simply a lot more options, which give you more flexibility.

Here's my test blog, created during a few minutes of the Blogging Skills session at the Science Blogging Conference.

Baby Name Voyager

This should appeal to teenagers! It has a large graphic component and easy interaction.

In February 2005, IBM researcher Martin Wattenberg created a Web-based visualization applet, the NameVoyager, to help call attention to his wife's first book, The Baby Name Wizard, a guide to American baby names. This effort to support his wife's project swept the Web and became a hot topic of conversation - for those searching for the perfect baby name and for others. Without any advertising, the applet drew more than 500,000 site visits in its first two weeks. It has been downloaded more than 900,000 times as of mid-April. Also in April, Google found more than 11,000 references to the NameVoyager.

It follows usability principles:

The NameVoyager follows Ben Shneiderman's mantra, "Overview first, zoom and filter, details on demand." When the applet starts, the viewer sees a set of horizontal layers representing all names in the database. It shows both sexes: red for girls and blue for boys. More popular names have a darker colour.

It's interactive: it reacts to every keystroke:

To filter the data, you can select Boys, Girls, or Both. If you type letters, the applet takes them as the beginning of a name; the applet will then show only names starting with those letters.

It may even help to predict future popularity.

Programmer humor: shooting yourself in the foot

This example illustrates the differences among programming languages. I found it at The Almighty Guru: "How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot Using Any Programming Language." (Hat tip to Web designer Debbie Campbell at {position:relative;}

Here's another version with more languages.

Here's another version: Shooting yourself in the foot.

Here's the Digg version.

Balloon animal evolution

I just can't resist this picture, which was photoshopped from squid eggs for a contest on Pharyngula.

I've misplaced info about the source. If you know, contact me so I can get proper permission or give credit.

Bwa-ha-ha!

Check out this sermonette on data safety.

Adobe Robo Help 7 and Captivate

Adobe RoboHelp 7 was released at about 7:00 a.m. yesterday. And today I'm taking a hands-on workshop on creating Multimedia user assistance files with RoboHelp 7 plus Captivate 3 to include short "movies" to illustrate the topics. Captivate enables you to capture a series of onscreen motions. It's neat!


UPDATE: Here's a link to a reviewer's guide to RoboHelp 7, in PDF

Best Web-based task manager

Cariboo Ponderer reports:

Remember the Milk has got all the best features modern web apps have to offer: email, tagging, advanced search, keyboard shortcuts and even offline access with Google Gears. Remember the Milk is a great way to consolidate your work, personal, school and family to-do's.

Also mentioned: managing invitations with evite.com and a new online event planning application from Microsoft.

HTML code validator

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) offers a page where you can enter a link to your published markup language (HTML or XHTML) and get a report on its errors. Rumour has it that the list of errors can be astonishingly long. But if you're brave enough, you can try it here: w3.validator.org.

So now I'm German?

Blogger has been getting weird lately. When I was travelling and linking to the Web via satellite, I could not sign on: I could reach the login page, but Blogger wouldn't display the login fields. That went on for days.

Occasionally it switches to a French keyboard and instead of angle brackets, slashes, or double quotes, gives me accented characters instead.

Lately, if I try to use the Insert Link button, the dialog box pops up and I can enter the link, but it doesn't "take" -- when click OK, the box closes but the link is not inserted.

And now it seems to think I need my instructions in German. What the hey?

Wikipedia tracks who's editing whom

Wikipedia's new Wikiscanner matches questionable edits to their sources: companies white-washing their images, news reporters insulting public figures; CIA staff revising the report of North Korea's nuclear program; the Vatican doing a little re-writing of its own.

Usability as a virtue

Vincent Flanders writes about the biggest recurring mistakes in Web design:

Mistake # 3. Mystical belief in the power of web standards, usability, and tableless CSS.

There is nothing wrong with Web Standards, Usability, and tableless CSS except they’re being touted by…guess who?…people who offer web design services specializing in…guess what?…Web Standards, Usability, and tableless CSS.

These are simply tools. Remember, nobody gets excited about the tools used to build a house ("Please tell me what brand of hammers you used!"). People get excited about how the house looks and performs.

Yes, Web Standards can make your site search engine friendlier, reduce bandwidth, etc. Usability is also very important but in an interview in 2004, usability guru Jared Spool puts everything in perspective:

I learned quickly that business executives didn’t care about usability testing or information design. Explaining the importance of these areas didn’t get us any more work. Instead, when we’re in front of executives, we quickly learned to talk about only five things:

1. How do we increase revenue?
2. How do we reduce expenses?
3. How do we bring in more customers?
4. How do we get more business out of each existing customer?
5. How do we increase shareholder value?

Notice that the words ‘design’, ‘usability’, or ‘navigation’ never appear in these questions. We found, early on, that the less we talked about usability or design, the bigger our projects got. Today, I’m writing a proposal for a $470,000 project where the word ‘usability’ isn’t mentioned once in the proposal.

When we work with teams, we teach them to follow the money and look for the pain. Somewhere in [the] organization, someone is feeling pain because they aren’t getting the answers they want to one of the questions above.

Media Convert provides free online file conversion

If you're trying, and failing, to open a file from one program in another program, try the Web site Media Convert. Karen Weiner Campbell describes converting a document written in Open Office 2.1 running under Windows to run on a Macintosh system running OS 9.2.

I was able to solve the problem once I found Media Convert, which took my OO doc and translated it into a format the Mac could read. The site is notable for several reasons. For one, it’s well designed - straightforward, clear and easy to use. For another, it obviates the need to download new software, which makes using it both safer and quicker. Best of all, the file formats it works with run the gamut from text to movies, images and sound (including ringtones, if that’s your thing).

Hat tip to Knowledge Work.

Put those fingers to work!

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are planning to replace nonsense words in the "are you a human?" keystroke test with short segments of digitally scanned text to be verified.

Luis Von Ahn is working with the Internet Archive, which runs several book-scanning projects, to use CAPTCHAs for this instead. Internet Archive scans 12,000 books a month and sends von Ahn hundreds of thousands of files that are images that the computer doesn't recognize. Those files are downloaded onto von Ahn's server and split up into single words that can be used as CAPTCHAs at sites all over the Internet.

If enough users decipher the CAPTCHAs in the same way, the computer will recognize that as the correct answer.

"If we can correct these books so that they are really in good shape, then you can go and use these books in other type devices more easily" such as handheld computers or in programs for reading to the blind, said Brewster Kahle, co-founder of the Internet Archive.

LibraryThing's random book covers

I have the "random books from your library" widget in the blog sidebar. The idea is to pull up some books from a virtual bookshelf on LibraryThing. The covers come, I believe, from Amazon.com. Some are photographs that I've taken of my own books, but I've uploaded more than 500 to Amazon, so I'm not surprised to see my covers from Amazon. Or perhaps they come directly from LibraryThing as user-supplied covers. At any rate, sometimes a book comes up with the wrong cover, and I don't know where it's coming from.

Go ask Alice

From Brian C. Gray at Information Overload, here's a quick note, "Girls ask Alice for programming skills."

Alice is an open source program to create 3D computer animations. Due to its ease of use, it is being used to target future programmers, especially minorities and woman that make up the smaller percentages of the field.

Use a hyperlinked document as a lab book

Hop on over to Bioinformatics Zen, where Mike has posted a neat idea: he uses a hypertext document as a lab notebook, so that he can include pictures and computer-generated results at the click of a mouse.

Usability for Content Management Systems

James Robertson of Step Two Designs has just published a new article titled "Eleven usability principles for CMS products":

* minimise the number of options
* be robust and error-proof
* provide task-based interfaces
* hide implementation details
* meet core usability guidelines
* match authors' mental models
* support both frequent and infrequent users
* provide efficient user interfaces
* provide help and instructions
* minimise training required
* support self-sufficiency

"Dinosaurs Make an Impression"

Speaking of Kevin Padian, as I just did in the "Macroevolution primer," here's a tidbit from the past.

The cover article for Nature (May, 1999) describes how StudioTools^TM computer modelling and design software from Alias|wavefront is used to analyze dinosaur tracks and to explain a mysterious, apparent "spur" mark in each track, sometimes supposed to be from a "reversed hallux" or backward-facing toe.

At that time I was at Alias|wavefront helping to document a new version of StudioTools^TM. I attended a talk by the author, Kevin Padian. He described how used the software was used to model a mud surface and a dinosaur's foot, then trace its motion in three dimensions, discovering that the "spur" was an artifact of how the foot entered the mud. I'm pretty sure that our resident scientist, Bill Buxton, found the research opportunity and donated a copy of the software.

See also "How Dinosaurs Walked the Walk."

Related book: It's ten years old, but the Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs, edited by Philip J. Currie* and Kevin Padian,** still looks very interesting.

*Curator of Dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta
**Professor of Integrative Biology and Curator of Lower Vertebrates in the Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley

SDL acquires Tridion

SDL, mainly a translation company with some content management, and Tridion, a Content Management company, have agreed that SDL will buy Tridion for 69 million Euros, subject to the approval of SDL's shareholders. Tridion's expertise in XML-based content management should actually fit nicely into keeping the translated bits organized. SDL supplies the translation workflow and expertise.

Flickr photos in Google maps

The Science Library Pad has an article about connecting your own photos in Flickr to Google maps, by using GeoRSS.