Wednesday, August 27, 2003

Different thoughts on PDF. PDF (Portable Document Format) is a method for publishing content in a way that protects the author's intellectual property and makes it easy and cheap to put the information on the Web. Unfortunately, many users complain that it makes their life miserable. Browser crashes, trouble linking, etc. I use PDF a lot, and try to minimize the misery by keeping documents small and relatively small file sizes. I disagree with Nielsen about a lot of user interface issues (and Jakob is a lot more forthcoming with criticisms than he is with solutions, plus he himself does not practice what he preaches -- his website is a nightmare, in my opinion). Whatever. The linked article proposes the use of Arbortext tools to publish in XML. It's worth thinking about. You're trading off lower publishing costs for ease of use. Not always an easy tradeoff to make, but here's the alternative. 12:16:25 PM

RSS Readers. The other half of RSS publication is a method to read the feed. This article from Abbe Normal (yes, you read that right) lists all of the current options. My favorite is Radio Userland, for publishing and for reading, but there are many other options. (Review of Radio Userland) 11:57:55 AM

RSS: A Primer for Publishers and Content Providers. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an easy and effective way to publish content to subscribers on the Web. It is far more effective as a marketing tool than email newsletters. This is a very useful introduction to the topic. 11:49:29 AM

Long-term stability of CD-Rs. If you are using CD-R media to document business records, you may want to consider what this thread has to tell you. The media are not stable, and the reliability of the "burn" depends on several factors, including media quality and drive speed. I keep anything I need for IRS purposes on magnetic media (big Zip disks) and on paper. CD-R gets used for records where long-term retention is not an issue (i.e., things that would get thrown out after three years no matter what medium they were on). 11:31:25 AM

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