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Plasticine Art Showcase: Shape Your Imagination

March 17, 2010 in Featured weBlogs by admin

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Navigating the Middle of Your Post – Without Getting Lost

March 17, 2010 in Make money by admin

  • A Guest Post from Ali Hale from The Blogger’s Guide to Effective Writing.

    You know how to hook the reader at the start of a post. You know how to end on an strong note. But somewhere between that gripping first sentence and that finish-with-a-bang last sentence comes … the middle.

    I’ve just released an ebook, The Blogger’s Guide to Effective Writing, and while I found plenty of great advice about beginnings and endings of posts, I found surprisingly little about the middle. And yet, the middle of your post:

    • Is where most of the content lies – this isn’t an intriguing anecdote or a punchy call to action, it’s the meat of what you want to say.
    • Can easily lose the reader – have you ever started reading a post only to end up skimming within the first few paragraphs?
    • Often loses us as writers – have you ever begun writing only to get bogged down somewhere part way?

    The middle of your blog post doesn’t need to be a hard slog through an uncertain wilderness. You – and your readers – can get from start to end without getting lost along the way. Here’s how.

    1. Know Where You’re Going

    Firstly, you need to know what journey you’re on. Although some bloggers can pull off a rambling, digressive style, most of us can’t. Having a clear title or topic in mind (even if you revise it later) helps. Be clear – in your own mind, and in your post’s introduction – what ground you’re going to cover.

    Is your post going to be a step-by-step walkthrough of a particular topic?

    Is it a quick tip about some aspect of your field?

    Is it an update about your life, or about your blog?

    This is also a good time to start thinking about your call to action. You don’t just have to bring this in at the end – you can hint at it throughout. For example, if your post is aimed at selling your product, you might want to make it clear during the post that this is an introduction to a topic which you’ve written more about.

    2. Get Yourself a Map

    Some people like to travel without a map and to let their mood take them where it will. I’m not one of them. The last time my fiancé and I went on a journey without a map, we ended up wandering around near Lake Windermere (in England’s Lake District) for five hours…

    You don’t want that to happen with your post.

    With a blog post, having a map means creating a structure. I write a lot of blog posts for various sites, and I always have a template structure in my head: whether it’s a how-to post, a list post, or just a generic one. With this post, for instance, I wrote out all the subheadings at the start, to form a very simple template.

    Having some guidelines in place doesn’t mean that your journey is dull and uninteresting: you can still change your mind or take diversions. It does, though, mean you’re much more likely to finish!

    When I showed a draft version of my ebook to some reviewers, Dave Rowley commented that the bonus pack of templates alone would have been worth the price for him, because they provided a structure for getting him through the long middle of a post to the finished product:

    They clarified things for me and made the idea of writing blog posts a lot less daunting. I have a lot of half written blog posts, most of them are pretty good content, the difficulty I’ve been having is in organizing that content into readable posts that get the point across as clearly as possible.

    Just going through the templates, I started to see where I could address some of those problems. I’ve already started using them to shape some drafts and can see solid content shaping up nicely with much less effort.

    Having a map lets you know what type of journey you’re on. Are you writing a how-to post, a comprehensive guide to one area? Are you writing a list post, a whistle-stop tour of lots of points of interest? Or are you writing an essay-like post which helps the reader explore?

    3. Put Up Big Signposts

    When my fiancé and I got lost on our epic walk, we were very relieved to stumble out of the forest onto a road which had a sign pointing us to the nearest town!

    Your post has signposts too, which help break up the journey and which tell readers what’s coming next. These are your subheaders, which split your post into convenient sections. In very long posts, readers might choose to bookmark the whole thing and read one section at a time.

    Signposts also help you when you’re writing: if you list your subheaders before you start, you’ll know what you need to cover in each section – which helps ensure that you say enough and not too much.

    To make your subheaders into effective signposts, you need to:

    • Ensure that they make sense to someone skimming
    • Make them Google-friendly – use keywords (this helps readers find your post in the first place)
    • Use a large enough font to make them stand out. Some bloggers use bold type for subheaders – make sure you’re using header tags instead. Depending on your blog set-up, you’ll either want Header 2 or Header 3 tags
    • Make sure your signposts really do what they say! If the material under your subheading wanders far off topic, readers will be even more confused than they would’ve been without a signpost.

    4. Point Out Any Dangers

    Sometimes, you will want to go off on a tangent in the middle of a post – or mention something that may lose your readers.

    To minimize the risk of a reader twisting a metaphorical ankle and dropping out altogether, signal any potential dangers before you reach them. Just as road signs warn about difficult stretches of road, you can alert readers to difficulties that they might be about to have.

    This could mean:

    • Warning readers that the next bit of your post is quite specialized or technical, and that they can skip it. This reassures readers that the section after that is going to be comprehensible again!
    • Explaining that you’re about to go on a digression – this could mean putting a section in brackets or italics, or just saying something like “slight digression here” or “tangent coming up”
    • Pointing readers towards a blog post which explains something more fully – for example, if you’re touching on a topic you’ve covered extensively in the past, you might write, “To read more on this, check out my post…” or “If you’re not sure what RSS means, you can find out about it here.”

    Here’s an example of making sure that a digression is clearly signaled and doesn’t confuse readers: the section in italics starts “Sidebar” and isn’t on the main topic of the post:

    Proactive actions aren’t nearly this structured. Often times, we don’t know what it is we’re creating, let alone what effect it’ll have on the world. Nothing about being a creative is a sure bet except the consequences of not doing your thing. (Sidebar: I’ve worked with people who were physically, emotionally, and mentally sick because they weren’t doing the creative thing that would make them come alive; the fix wasn’t therapy, medication, exercise, or vacations – the fix was them doing their thing, and the rest started to fall in place.) (Charlie Gilkey, How to Lose An Hour’s Creative Mojo in Two Minutes, Productive Flourishing)

    5. Make the Route Interesting

    Would you last long on a walk which involved nothing but a long, grey, empty stretch of road? Probably not – unless you’re walking purely for exercise’s sake, you want some variation in the scenery.

    Most of your readers are not reading your blog because they just want information. They want at least some level of entertainment and interest. Long, dreary blocks of grey text are offputting – however gripping your introduction is.

    Making the route interesting means adding some visual elements to your post. This includes:
    
Formatting
    You can do a lot to spice up a post without having to do more than press a few buttons in Wordpress. Try using:

    • Lists, which are easier to take in than long sentences split with commas or semi-colons
    • Bold text to draw the reader’s eye to key points in your post
    • Blockquotes to offer interest in the form of a different voice (someone else’s words) and an inset piece of text
    • Italic text to emphasize a key word and suggest tone of voice
    • Subheadings, and nested subheadings where appropriate – just like I’ve done in this section with the smaller headings “Formatting” and “Images”

    Images

    A lot of bloggers just use images to catch attention at the start of a post. Getting graphical can vastly improve the middle of your post, too. Don’t use pictures just for the sake of it, but try:

    • Screenshots to enhance a technical how-to
    • Using images in keeping with the brand and voice of your blog
    • Graphics to visually show statistics or figures which you’re using in the post
    • Adding product images for a review post or a recommendation within a post

    The middle of your post can easily form 80% of the content. However great your gripping introduction, readers will never reach that killer of an ending unless you get them safely through the middle first. Are your middles up to scratch – or are they losing readers?

    Ali Hale has just launched “The Blogger’s Guide to Effective Writing” – normally priced at $29, ProBlogger readers can get a $5 discount by entering the code “ProBlogger”

    Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

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    Navigating the Middle of Your Post – Without Getting Lost

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by admin

Entering The Wonderful World of Geo Location

March 17, 2010 in Featured weBlogs by admin


  • Smashing-magazine-advertisement in Entering The Wonderful World of Geo Location
    in Entering The Wonderful World of Geo Location  in Entering The Wonderful World of Geo Location  in Entering The Wonderful World of Geo Location

    I thought I could not be out-geeked. With a background in radio, and having dabbled in the demo scene on the Commodore 64 and hung out on BBSes and IRC for a long time and all the other things normal kids don’t quite get, I thought I was safe in this area.

    Then I went to my first WhereCamp, an unconference dealing with geographical issues and how they relate to the world of Web development. Even my A-Levels in Astronomy did not help me there. I was out-geeked by the people who drive and tweak the things that we now consider normal about geo-location on the Web.

    Pulling out your phone, find your location and getting directions to the nearest bar is easy, but a lot of work has gone into making that possible. The good news is that because of that effort, mere geo-mortals like you and me can now create geographically aware products using a few lines of code. So, let’s give the geo-community a big hand.

    [By the way, did you know there is a brand new Smashing Wordpress Book? Push WordPress past its limits!]

    Why Geo Matters

    First of all, why is it important to consider physical location on this planet (at this moment) when we develop Web products? There are a few answers to this.

    The first answer is mobility. The days of people sitting in front of desktop machines at home are over. Sales of mobile devices, laptops and netbooks have overtaken those of bulky stationary computers in the last few years. The power of processors now allows us to use smaller, more mobile hardware to perform the same tasks. So, if people use their hardware on the go, we should bring our systems to them. Which brings us to the second—very important—point: relevance.

    Giving the user content that is relevant to the physical space they are in at the moment makes a lot of sense. We are creatures of habit. While we love the reach of the Internet, we also want to be able to find things in our local area easily: people to meet, cafes to frequent, interesting buildings and museums to learn about. The advertising industry—especially of the adult and dating variety—realized this years ago. I am sure you have come across one of the following before:

    Adultpersonals in Entering The Wonderful World of Geo Location

    I am sure these ads are more successful than the ones that show only user names. That the photos and names are the same for every location doesn’t seem to be a problem (but yes, I noticed it). So how does it all work?

    Getting The User’s Location Via IP

    Every computer on a network has a number that identifies it: its IP address. The Internet is nothing but a massive network, and your IP number is assigned to you by the service provider that you have used to connect to that network. Because the numbers that service providers assign change from one geographical location to the next (much like telephone numbers), you can make quite a good estimate of where your visitors are from.

    To find out where a certain phone number is from, you use a phone book. To find out where an IP is from, you can use the Maxmind GeoIP database. Maxmind also provides a JavaScript solution that you can use on websites:

    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://j.maxmind.com/app/geoip.js"></script>
<script>
  var info = document.getElementById('info');
  var lat = geoip_latitude();
  var lon = geoip_longitude();
  var city = geoip_city();
  var out = '<h3>Information from your IP</h3>'+
            '<ul>'+
            '<li>Latitude: ' + lat + '</li>'+
            '<li>Longitude: ' + lon + '</li>'+
            '<li>City: ' + city + '</li>'+
            '<li>Region: ' + geoip_region() + '</li>'+
            '<li>Region Name: ' + geoip_region_name() + '</li>'+
            '<li>Postal Code: ' + geoip_postal_code() + '</li>'+
            '<li>Country Code: ' + geoip_country_code() + '</li>'+
            '<li>Country Name: ' + geoip_country_name() + '</li>'+
            '</ul>'
  info.innerHTML = out;
</script>

    Geolocation in Entering The Wonderful World of Geo Location

    This gives you some information on the user (try it out for yourself). The challenge, though, is relevance. Your IP location is the location of the IP that your provider has assigned to you. Depending on your provider, this could be quite a ways off (in my case, I live in London, but my provider used to show me as living in Rochester). Another problem is if you work for a company that uses a VPN. At Yahoo, for example, I have to connect to the VPN to read my company email, and I have to choose a location to connect to:

    Vpn in Entering The Wonderful World of Geo Location

    So, for a solution like the one highlighted above, I would show up as being in a totally different part of the world (which might be useful for watching Internet TV in the UK while I am in the US). IP geo-location, then, is an approximation, not a dead-on science.

    Getting The User’s Location Via The W3C Geo API

    Guessing geographical location via IP is possible, but it can also be pretty creepy. Being able to take advantage of your location is useful, but security-conscious users and people who are generally suspicious of the Internet are not happy with the idea of their movements being monitored by a computer. This makes sense: if I can monitor your whereabouts day and night, I would know where and when to rob your house without you being there.

    There are a lot of solutions to the challenge of having good-quality geo-location and maintaining privacy. Google Gears has a geo-location service; Plazes helps you store your location; and Yahoo’s Fire Eagle is probably the most polished way to securely maintain your location on the Web.

    The problem with all of these services is that they require the user to either install a plug-in or visit a Web service to update their location. This is not fun; browsers should do the work for you.

    We now have a W3C recommendation for a geo-location API that allows browsers to request the geographical location of the user. This makes it less creepy, and you get real data back.

    Firefox 3.5 and above supports the W3C geo-location API. So does Safari on the iPhone if you run OS 3.0 or above. If you use the API, the browser will ask the user whether they want to share their location with your website.

    Geowarning in Entering The Wonderful World of Geo Location

    Once the user allows you to get their location, you get much more detailed latitude and longitude values. Using the API is very easy:

    // if the browser supports the w3c geo api
if(navigator.geolocation){
  // get the current position
  navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(

  // if this was successful, get the latitude and longitude
  function(position){
    var lat = position.coords.latitude;
    var lon = position.coords.longitude;
  },
  // if there was an error
  function(error){
    alert('ouch');
  });
}

    Compare the IP and W3C solutions side by side. As you can see, there can be quite a difference in measuring the visitor’s location. The extent of the difference is shown in the following demo:

    Difference in Entering The Wonderful World of Geo Location

    Converting Latitude And Longitude Back Into A Name

    Having more information is nice, but we have lost the name of the city and all the other nice data that came with the Maxmind database. Because the location has changed, we cannot just grab that old data; we have to find a way to convert latitude and longitude coordinates into a name. This process is called “reverse geo-coding,” and several services on the Web allow you to do it. Probably the most well-known is the geo-names Web service, but it has a few issues. For starters, the results are very US-centric.

    One freely available but lesser-known reverse geo-coder that works worldwide comes from a surprising source: Flickr. The flickr.places.findByLatLon service returns a location from a latitude and longitude coordinates. You can try it out in the app explorer, but by far the easiest way to use it is by using the Yahoo Query Language (or YQL). YQL deserves its own article, but let’s just say that, instead of having to authenticate with the Flickr API and read the docs, reverse geo-coding becomes as easy as this:

    select * from flickr.places where lat=37.416115 and lon=-122.0245671

    Using the YQL Web service, you can get the result back as XML or JSON. So, to use the service in JavaScript, all you need is the following:

    <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
 function getPlaceFromFlickr(lat,lon,callback){
   // the YQL statement
   var yql = 'select * from flickr.places where lat='+lat+' and lon='+lon;

   // assembling the YQL webservice API
   var url = 'http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q='+
              encodeURIComponent(yql)+'&format=json&diagnostics='+
              'false&callback='+callback;

   // create a new script node and add it to the document
   var s = document.createElement('script');
   s.setAttribute('src',url);
   document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(s);
 };

 // callback in case there is a place found
 function output(o){
   if(typeof(o.query.results.places.place) != 'undefined'){
     alert(o.query.results.places.place.name);
   }
 }

 // call the function with my current lat/lon
 getPlaceFromFlickr(37.416115,-122.02456,'output');
</script>

    Combine that with the other services, and we get a more detailed result and can put a name to the coordinates:

    Reversegeocode in Entering The Wonderful World of Geo Location

    The Trouble With Latitude And Longitude

    While latitude and longitude coordinates are a good way to describe a location on Earth, it is also ambiguous. The coordinates could represent either the centre of a city or a point of interest (such as a museum or a pub) in that spot.

    WOEID to the Rescue

    To work around the problem, Yahoo and Flickr (and soon will Twitter) support another way to pinpoint a location. The Where On Earth Identifier (or WOEID) is a more granular way to describe locations on Earth. Because Flickr supports it, we can easily get get photos from a particular area:

    select * from flickr.photos.search where woe_id in (
  select place.woeid from flickr.places where lat=37.416115 and lon=-122.02456
)

    Using this and a few lines of JavaScript, showing geo-located photos is pretty easy:

    Geolocated-photos in Entering The Wonderful World of Geo Location

    This has also been wrapped in a simple-to-use YQL solution. The following code will display 10 photos of Paris:

    <script>
  function photos(o){
    var container = document.getElementById('photos');
    container.innerHTML = o.results;
  }
</script>
<script src="http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=
select%20*%20from%20flickr.photolist%20where%20location%3D%22paris%2Cfr
%22%20and%20text%3D%22%22%20and%20amount%3D10&format=xml&
env=store%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltableswithkeys&callback=photos">

    You can also play with this in the YQL console.

    Why Not Search For The Location’s Name?

    The main question about implementations such as the one above is why couldn’t we just do a search on Flickr for the city, instead of doing all the complex geo-lookups? The reason is false positives. Take Paris, for example: if you want to show photos of Paris on a travel website, you don’t want Paris Hilton to show up in there. Same goes for Jack London. You may also want to show photos of London, England, not London, Ontario. Geographic data is full of these kinds of gotchas, and the term for finding the right one is “disambiguation.” See the Wikipedia article on “Victoria” to see just how many geographical contexts this term can have.

    Turning Text Into Geo-Data

    Finding a visitor’s geographic location is all well and good, but it doesn’t mean much if you can’t link it to information for that area. This is where it gets tricky. For Flickr (and soon Twitter), this is easy, because both services are able to attach geographical locations to the content you put in them. This is not so for most of the information on the Web, though, and this is when we resort to clever algorithms, machine-learning, pattern-matching and all the other think-tank stuff that computers and the scientists in front of them do.

    Say you want to identify the geographical locations that a particular text or Web page talks about. Yahoo offers a service for that called Placemaker, and it is pretty easy to use. You need to get a developer key and send this as appid, send a text as documentContent, define the type of the text as documentType and define the type of data you want back as outputType. All of this needs to be sent as a POST to http://wherein.yahooapis.com/v1/document:

    <form action="http://wherein.yahooapis.com/v1/document" method="post">
  <textarea id="text" name="documentContent">Hi there, I am Chris.
    I live in London, I am currently in Sunnyvale and will soon be in
    Atlanta and Las Vegas.</textarea>
  <div><input type="submit" name="sub" value="get locations"></div>
  <input type="hidden" name="appid" value="{YOUR_APP_ID}">
  <input type="hidden" name="documentType" value="text/plain">
  <input type="hidden" name="outputType" value="xml">
</form>

    You can try this out yourself. Using PHP to call the API instead of a simple form, you can even format the output nicely. See it in action here:

    Placemaker-results in Entering The Wonderful World of Geo Location

    While developers who have played around with Web services won’t find Placemaker hard to use, the service can be daunting for the average developer. That is why I built GeoMaker some time ago. GeoMaker allows you to enter a text or URL, select the locations you want to include in the final outcome, and get the locations either as a map to copy and paste or as micro-formats.

    Geomaker in Entering The Wonderful World of Geo Location

    However, because there is also a YQL solution for using PlaceMaker in JavaScript, we can do the same with a few lines of client-side code to enhance an HTML document. Check out the following example:

    Textandmap in Entering The Wonderful World of Geo Location

    To use this, you need three things: a text with geographical locations in them in an element with an ID, a Google Maps API key (which you can get here) and the following few lines of code:

    <script src="http://github.com/codepo8/geotoys/raw/master/addmap.js"></script>
<script>
addmap.config.mapkey = 'COPY YOUR API KEY HERE';
addmap.analyse('content');
</script>

    This makes it incredibly easy to give your visitors a sense of what part of the world a text is related to.

    Adding Maps To Your Documents

    Online maps have been around for a while now (and Google Maps was instrumental in the rise of AJAX), and many providers out there allow you to add maps to your documents. Google is probably the leader, but Yahoo also has maps, as does Microsoft and many more. There is even a fully open map service called Open Street Maps, which has been instrumental in the recent rescue efforts in Haiti.

    If you want interactive maps, probably the easiest thing to use is Mapstraction, which is a JavaScript library that does away with the discrepancies between the various map providers and gives you a single interface for all of them. 24ways published a good introduction to it three years ago.

    Probably the simplest way to show a map that supports markers and paths in your document without having to dive into JavaScript is the Google static maps API. It creates maps as images, and all you need to do is provide the map information in the src URI of the image. For example, in the script example above, this would be:

    http://maps.google.com/maps/api/staticmap?
sensor=false
&size=200x200
&maptype=roadmap
&key=YOUR_MAP_KEY
&markers=color:blue|label:1|37.4447,-122.161
&markers=color:blue|label:2|37.3385,-121.886
&markers=color:blue|label:3|37.3716,-122.038
&markers=color:blue|label:4|37.7792,-122.42

    You can define the size and type of the map. If all you provide is the location of markers, the API will automatically find the right zoom level and area to ensure that all markers are visible. Google’s website even offers a detailed tool to create static maps, including markers and paths.

    Geo Is A Space To Watch

    I hope this has given you some insight into all of the things you can do to bring the earth to your product and to put your product on the map. Geo-location and geo-aware services are already huge, and they’ll be even more important this year. There will be more services—some mobile providers are ready to roll out new hardware and software—and now you can be a part of it.

    What the geo-world needs now is a designer’s eye, and this is where you can help the geo-geeks create apps that matter, that look great and that make a difference in our visitors’ lives. For inspiration, check out Mapumental, which allows you to pinpoint a place to live in London, or see how Google Earth and some 3-D Objects allow you to race a milk truck on real map data.

    (al)

    © Christian Heilmann for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | 57 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
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by admin

Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: March 2010

March 11, 2010 in Featured weBlogs by admin

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