blogging Archives - Page 13 of 24

Useful links: free books, data visualization, creating

6 free online books about web accessibility listed by Jitendra should be helpful to educators and students. Jitendra’s blog is brand new and looks promising so far.

How a Science Journalist Created a Data Visualization to Show the Magnitude of the Haiti Earthquake at ReadWriteHack shows an image with impact that is clear in its purpose instantly. Maybe some of the people who are so busy making the infographics I complained about should try out data visualization instead.

Creating Without Ulterior Motives at Skelliewag seems profound to me. Yes, I read Copyblogger and ProBlogger and all those guys who talk about making big money with a blog, but it never touches me, never moves me to try. What Skellie said is the reason, my reason, for blogging.

My favorite bloggers who hardly ever blog

I have blogs in my feed reader that I look to hopefully every week, although new posts don’t appear from the blogs in question very often. But, when a new post does appear, it was worth waiting for. Who are these quiet folks, so seldom heard from?

Cindy’s Take on Tech is by Cindy Royal, who called out Wired Magazine this year.
danah boyd: apophenia is always insightful
Stubbornella is so smart half the time I don’t even know what she’s talking about when she does talk
Thoughts from Eric are welcome anytime
24 Ways goodness comes but once a year, but it’s worth the wait
A Blog Not Limited is rare but worthy

There are also some blogs I read just because the writers are so amazingly good at writing. They don’t have anything to do with web tech or education. These great writers include

Mountain Poet a new blog by Storyteller Granny Sue
Be Gay About It which has some of the best writing I’ve read anywhere about anything
Random Short Stories which use my writing prompts from First 50 Words in totally creative ways.

How good link text makes you a better blogger

I’m going to tell you a little story and then I’m going to give you a quiz.

A few days ago, I posted a guest article by Lior called Increase your SEO Knowledge in 2011: Must Read Blogs. Lior sent me the post pasted into an email. I use Microsoft Entourage (a Mac mail program that is part of Office) for my email. In Entourage, the links Lior sent all looked like this:

This was a guest post written by Lior who is a marketing advisor to iAdvize, a live chat support software <http://www.iadvize.com/> company.

I changed all the links when I was formatting the article for the blog post. I changed the links to the various blogs Lior recommended to h3 headings with links to the blogs. And I changed the last line of the article, with the guest author credit and link, to read:

This guest post was written by Lior who is a marketing advisor to iAdvize, a live chat support software company.

I didn’t give it much thought, I just made the site name the link as I had done with the blogs Lior recommended. Big oops.

Shortly after that, I heard from Lior, who didn’t like what I had done with the link in the author credit line. Then it got a little crazy, because every time Lior sent the “correction” to me, Entourage showed it exactly like the example above, with no clickable link text and a URL in brackets. Finally, Lior sent me a PNG, showing exactly how it should be.

How did Lior want it? Like this.

This was a guest post written by Lior who is a marketing advisor to iAdvize, a live chat support software company.

Okay, thanks to the PNG image, (with no help from Entourage) I finally got it.

The Quiz!

Now the quiz. Why was it so important to Lior to have live chat support software be the link and not the name iAdvize or not a URL in brackets with no link text?

I’m going to suggest three answers, any of which you may have thought of, and which may have been the reasoning behind Lior’s patient attempts to get me to do it a certain way.

Being an accessibility person, my first suggested answer is about accessibility. The link text live chat support software is the most descriptive about what to expect when the link is clicked. AT devices can be set to skip from link to link, reading only the link text until the user finds the link to click. Think about how much more information Lior’s choice of link text gives a user than either iAdvize or a URL to iadvize.com. A link like iAdvize could be to all sorts of advice sites from financial advice to party planning. The words Lior chose tell the user exactly where a click will take them.

click here

As an accessibility aside, it’s not helpful when every link says click here. Nothing descriptive at all about that link text. In some situations, it can be a compelling call to action, but it needs a title attribute (plus alt text if it’s an image) that provide more descriptive information about the link destination.

Back to the quiz. Another possible answer involves search engine optimization. Search engines take a close look at link text. Good link text adds to your search engine ranking. It provides indexable information about where a link is going. That’s important to you in terms of links to posts on your own site. Links to your own internal pages or articles help the search engines find what’s on your site, and the text used for internal links makes a difference in how the information is understood.

Guest posters want credit, because it helps bring traffic and quality links to their own sites. Lior took time and effort to write the guest post and wanted to make it count with incoming link text that would improve search engine rank. Anyone needing chat support software will search on chat support software, and not on a word like iadvize. It can’t hurt to have incoming links with the words chat support software floating around the web when someone asks a search engine where to find chat support software.

Finally, there’s the usability answer. Good link text also improves usability. Clarity in link text removes confusion or ambiguity and makes the site more useful.

What else?

Was your quiz answer the same as any of mine? Or did you think of something else? How else could you answer my question?

Web Teacher finally went mobile

I feel like I need to apologize for taking so long to add a mobile friendly plugin to this site. Years ago, I created a print style sheet for the site, but I never made a stylesheet for handheld media.

Now there’s a plugin that does it for me. I recently installed the WPtouch plugin for WordPress. This easy-to-use plugin restyles your site into a mobile friendly appearance for iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm and BlackBerry Torch.

The thing I especially love about WPtouch is that there is an option at the end of the page for folks viewing the mobile version to see the standard version instead. So users can pick whichever way they want to see the site.

It’s a great plugin.

It’s free.

If you’re not using it with your WordPress blog, I suggest you check it out.

Increase Your SEO Knowledge in 2011: Must Read Blogs

For almost as long as there have been blogs, there have been blogs about finding ways to rank higher in the search engines and get more traffic.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been a popular topic for bloggers for some time and though countless have tried, few have risen to the top to create truly useful and long-lasting SEO blogs.

For those interested in SEO, whether they are newcomers or veterans, following these blogs is critical for staying on top of the latest news and trends in the industry. However, choosing which blogs to follow can be a daunting challenge, especially for a newcomer, as there are dozens, if not hundreds, to choose from.

But while there are countless good SEO blogs, here are five solid ones to start with, blogs that should be in your reader if they aren’t already and blogs that are at the heart of the SEO industry.

SEOmoz

Probably the best known and the most-respected SEO blog, its inclusion on this list goes almost without saying. Most of SEOmoz’s postings deal with practical, how-to type of articles focused on achieving specific goals in the field. However, there is also a smattering of news and reviews as well. Most of the content is targeted at beginner and moderately-experienced SEOs but there is plenty of content even for the most experienced in the field.

SEOBook

A community and SEO training site, SEOBook also has a great, free blog with up-to-date information on changes at Google and the SEO landscape. Staying focused on news, SEOBook provides a very front lines view of what is happening with SEO and how changes at Google are affecting websites.

Graywolf’s SEO Blog

Highly opinionated and always interesting, Michael Gray’s blog focuses on basic how tos and guides for novice SEOs. The blog also has a large number of reviews, including everything from rank tracking tools to themes, and a few guest posts as well. Though some of the information may be a bit basic for experienced SEOs, the sites reviews alone make it worth following and there are always new tips and tricks to learn.

TopRank

For seven years TopRank has been providing SEO and information with an aim at the slightly more advanced SEO crowd. With articles and content aimed at those already experienced with marketing but needing help with SEO, TopRank focuses not just on getting the higher ranking possible in the search engines, but how to integrate SEO activities with other marketing efforts.

Small Business Search Marketing

As the name indicates, Small Business Search Marketing is an SEO blog aimed entirely at small businesses, often focusing on search opportunities such as Google Places that most sites don’t bother with. The site is aimed at businesses that want to market online but do so on a tight budget, focusing on practical ways for business to reach customers through the search engines.

The beautiful thing about the new year is that it’s a chance to see where we are and look back over the past 12 months. It’s also a chance to get caught up and, possibly, a little bit ahead.

All in all though, these blogs are just the tip of the SEO blogging iceberg with dozens of other great sites that didn’t make the list. Still, these are the sites that led the way for SEO blogging in 2010 and, most likely, will be the ones to lead it onward in 2011, meaning if you aren’t following them now, you definitely need to start.

If you don’t want to start 2011 off behind the competition, these are the blogs to read and the ones that can make sure you’re in first place come 2012.

This was a guest post written by Lior who is a marketing advisor to iAdvize, a live chat support software company.

How I Use Tumblr to Help with Writing

You can do many things with Tumblr, but I use it for something very specific. When I’m researching a topic and want to gather up a set of links over a period of several days or weeks about that topic, I save the link on Tumblr. When I’m ready to put the information together in some other form, I go to my Tumblr page and quickly find it all.

For quite some time, I’ve been researching the topic of HTML5 and accessibility. I thought I’d share the list of resources I’ve amassed on this topic at Tumblr. Here are Virginia’s HTML5 and accessibility resources.

All this studying and collecting on the topic of HTML5 and accessibility is going to be put to use soon in a workshop at AccessU West 2011. Hope to see you there.

Useful Links: 20 things, HTML5, lessons learned, 7 sins

20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web is an interactive web app built in HTML5. It looks like a children’s book. And it’s slick. Great for a class reading assignment.

Using HTML5’s New Semantic Tags Today. Terrific article by Emily Lewis at Script Junkie.

Blogging to Support Policy Goals: MomsRising Shares Lessons Learned. How one organization ran a social media campaign with a specific goal in mind. What worked and what could be done better.

Using the 7 Deadly Sins in Higher Ed Web Marketing at .eduGuru is a take-off on an article at Smashing Magazine, but this one is aimed at high ed.