Tag: Reader

RANT! emails again – 1 of 2

RANT! emails again – 1 of 2

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It is time to rant about email again. Yes, I know that email is the greatest thing of the Internet. It has become the “killer app” that has truly driven corporate America to provide computers to all of its white collar work force. More than Word or Excel, email has become essential to today’s workforce. For this reason, we need to chastise those that screw it up.

EMAIL IS ESSENTIAL SO DON’T SPEND TIME TRYING TO MAKE IT PRETTY!

Putting tables and graphs in an email is bad. You should use the rule of thumb that the reader is going to look at it in a pure text view (like on a phone). Don’t use bullets – use dashes instead or an asterisk (*) instead.

If you must have a highly formatted document, put it into an attachment also so that it can be viewed with another program with the formatting. I suggest you simply save the email as HTML to your desktop before you send it and that attach that resulting file. This allows the reader to open the document in a browser to see the formatting.

Here is some related reading for you to enjoy:
RANT! Incomplete emails
Become a Master of E-Mail Etiquette
Email Etiquettes to use

More on this topic later!

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RANT! Bloggers: Use Less with More

RANT! Bloggers: Use Less with More

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I read a lot of blogs. I enjoy getting thoughts on a variety of subjects that only the blogging community can give me. I encourage more people to create and run a blog, it is quite enjoyable and most people have something worthwhile to write.

A fairly common technique in the blogging community is to reduce the length of the post with the MORE command (check out this link for information and background). However, in my opinion, the MORE command doesn’t work correctly for most blogging platforms, especially WordPress out of the box. The blogger must also use the equivalent of the Less plug-in for a better experience.

The MORE command out of the box will open a page that has the rest of the blog post and will place the top of the page to be exactly the next line after the MORE command. The problem is that there will be a several second delay in generating this page and then the user will not be sure that the top of the line is exactly where they want to be. They will then have to scroll up a few lines to read the last few sentences and then continue reading.

Also, the MORE command assumes that you actually read to the last line, the user may have actually clicked on the continue button without finishing the last few words. This is way to presumptuous – software and authors should not presume that they know what I want to do. You aren’t that smart!!

When reading a typical website, when you hit the Page Down button, you will scroll down a full page but the next page down will show the last few lines of the previous page. This allows you to quickly find out where you are and continue reading. It eliminates the issue of wondering “Did I miss anything” causing the reader to scroll up a few lines and waste time.

The solution is to add the Less plug-in or modify your code to not go to top of page.

I have implemented Less on this site and so it is easy for you to see how this experience should work. Just go to my main index page.

Bloggers: IMPLEMENT A “LESS” TYPE PLUGIN IF YOU USE “MORE”

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

Did you know that you can have these articles emailed to you? Click on the Email link in the upper right corner Subscribe section, fill out the details, and you are set. No one will see your email address and you won’t get more spam by doing this.

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