Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Even babies like chunking

Johns Hopkins researchers have found that babies learn better with chunking -- grouped data. While that's news, it's not really so new. After all, web content experts have been advocating chunking of text for quite a while.

Breaking up text into bite-sized chunks in different ways makes it easier to quickly scan for information. No matter how good your content, you can improve it by separating the text into logical chunks -- chunking.

Some good ways to chunk and organize your text include:

  • Use heads and subheads
  • Use short, simple sentences
    See Write Simple or WebAim's "Writing Clearly and Simply"
  • Put key information first (inverted pyramid style)
  • Use short paragraphs (white space between chunked text)
  • Use lists (unordered or ordered) when possible
  • Use tables for tabular data

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

ScribeFire blog editor for FireFox users

ScribeFire is a blogging tool for FireFox users. Some of the ScribeFire features I like the best:

  • Categorize and tag your blog posts
  • Post an entry as a draft
  • Save works-in-progress as notes
  • Use FTP to upload files
  • Upload images
  • Set timestamps

I used ScribeFire to upload this as a draft post to the blog. Then I checked the code with the Blogger editor. Here's a couple things I learned:

  • ScribeFire surrounds all the text you add in ScribeFire with a DIV element and a link to the W3C Validator. OK, but a bit much and not something I needed to add. So I deleted the DIV and associated link.
  • ScribeFire uses no paragraph elements. Though that's the Blogger default too, I much prefer to use code for paragraphs and to use CSS as desired for the P element.
  • ScribeFire left extra spaces around a lot of text and did not pull lines together. This can cause problems in Blogger and needed code cleanup.

In short, the tool is quite handy, but you may want to do some code cleanup before posting to your blog. I'll use this due to its ease of use but will publish only as a draft. I'll do code cleanup in Blogger. That's annoying for such a potentially great tool.