AntSaint

35 Source Code Editors

As a long-time fan of HomeSite (though on the Mac I currently dabble in Smultron), to me there's nothing better than source code-focused HTML and CSS editors. There's plenty more out there though, and the smashing folks at Smashing Magazine have put together a comprehensive list of some of the best:

Link: 35 Useful Source Code Editors Reviewed | Developer's Toolbox | Smashing Magazine.

"In the list below we present an overview of 35 established or rather unknown — but useful source code-editors; you’ll probably find “usual suspects” — your favourite editor or the editor you’ve once been working with. But you’ll also find some rather unknown alternatives which are definitely worth considering when choosing an optimal source code editor"

How to Build an Online Community

The folks at Flickr have a pretty sweet community going on, and the driving force behind it is a corporate ethos that knows to leave well enough alone. This hands-off approach is very interesting to me, in laying only the most basic ground rules and expectations, and letting everything else develop from there.

Link: A List Apart: Articles: Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow.

People don’t like being told what to do. We like to explore, change things around, and make a place our own. Hefty design challenges await the makers of websites where people feel free to engage; both with the system itself and with each other. Embrace the idea that people will warp and stretch your site in ways you can’t predict—they’ll surprise you with their creativity and make something wonderful with what you provide.

Portable/Backup Hard Drive Recommendations

Jodie and I are looking into getting an external drive for our home network — something we can put images and music on, that sort of thing, and free up hard drive space on our computers. Here are some recommendations and advice:

Link: Portable Hard Drive Recs | Ask Metafilter.

"I would like to get a 250GB portable hard drive to dump my RAW and PSD files and my music files into so as to free up space on my main computer hard drive"

Ask The Readers: Do You Handwrite HTML?

I hand-write HTML and CSS, but I'll concede that WYSIWYG editors have come a long way. However, I'll always maintain that you've got to know how to write CSS and HTML by hand, or at least understand what all the tags and properties mean, should you have to "look under the hood". Looks like a lot of developers and designers agree:

Link: Ask The Readers: Do You Handwrite HTML?.

"Most web page authoring software like Dreamweaver—or even blog publishing systems like Blogger or WordPress—all come with WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) mode, which formats web content without exposing the HTML and CSS behind it. But even in 2008, lots of web authors turn off WYSIWYG and just hand-code their own markup—even at the NY Times"

Are Your Images Appearing in Google Image Search?

Images are becoming more and more important in search, so site owners and marketers are getting savvier about making sure their images are showing up in Google Image Search:

Link: Check if Your Images Appear on Google Image Search.

"So if your images are not getting indexed, check your robots.txt file to make sure it is not blocking the access to them"

Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies

A fascinating series of tips eye-tracking study results came out last year. If you're involved with the design and user-friendliness of websites in any way, the conclusions have something to teach you.

Link: Virtual Hosting Blog � Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies.

One finding in particular was most interesting to me. Graphics and video are important elements to a site's design, but too often text gets poo-pooed. Just because it's a graphic, doesn't mean it's the attention-getter:

"Text attracts attention before graphics. Contrary to what you might think, the first thing users look at on a website isn’t the images. Most casual users will be coming to your site looking for information, not images, so make sure your website is designed so that the most important parts of your text are what is most prominent."

Email, Search & Social Media Roundup from Marketing Profs

Great email, search and social media roundup from Marketing Profs this week:

• Marketing Article: In Search, Bigger Is Not Better by – "business and professional users searching for work-related information on the Web will tell you, as a matter of online marketing fact, that bigger is definitely not better. They have experienced significant frustration in finding needed data through general search engines like Google and Yahoo"
• Marketing Article: How to Keep Up With Social Media: 'Think Liquid' Applied – "Change occurs dynamically in online communities as new applications develop. Though behavior has changed, relationships must be maintained. That means marketers must be flexible moving forward"
• Marketing Article: Email Appending Is More Than a Process – "Most marketers have email addresses for less than half their customers and prospects. If this is the case for your company, it might make sense to explore email appending"

How do you find/set up/whatever email hosting?

Email services? Email forwarding? Email hosting?
I don't even know quite what to call it. Lately I've been getting into more of the nitty-gritty with websites, but something I've never done is set up email. There's a wee project Jodie and I are working on, and we want to set up email addresses on their own domain. I've been trying to figure out what we can do, but frankly I have no idea.

• Do we want to just set up ouremail@ourdomain.com that forwards to our current personal email addresses? And what happens when we write back?
• Do we want to set up a proper email address, ouremail@ourdomain.com, that sends/receives as that, has its own storage, etc.?

I'm guessing that we want...

• IMAP access for desktop use of Mail or Thunderbird
• Use our own domain and have as many addresses as needed (not more than 5 for this domain, but we could also set up addresses for some other domains if we needed to)
• Have seen some info about use Gmail and Google Apps, but not seeing a clear advantage between using that and just going with a regular domain and email hosting solution?

Noob with slow learning curve needs email help
Here are some Lifehacker articles I've been reading to try to get some insight, but I'm still not yet really sure where to begin.

• Geek to Live: Future-proof your email address - Lifehacker
• Ask Lifehacker Readers: Great email hosting? - Lifehacker
• How To: Move your organization to Google Apps for Your Domain - Lifehacker
• Feature: Host Your Domain with Free Apps

If you have any advice, please leave a comment. Many thanks, and probably a beer, await you :-)

Bloggers don't need to post daily anymore

It's a breath of fresh air to know that posting daily is, well, passe. Quality over quantity - I'll take that action, and I bet you will too.

Link: Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog.

Daily posting shows that you are serious about blogging, generates traffic and drives reader loyalty, as readers come back daily to check your new posts. You cannot be successful if you do not go by the rule, right? RIGHT?

Wrong.

When I launched Antsaint in 2004, I was on-board with everyone else who was at least moderately serious about blogging: Post every day. Multiple times a day. At one point during those heady days I was posting 3-5 times a day on average, and one day I even posted about 10 times.

Gads, that was insane. For a while now I've been blogging less, and looking at how I can get more meat and meaning out of when I do blog. For example, I don't blog on weekends anymore. I don't feel the need. Some days during the week, I don't blog.

Getting more meaning out of what I do post, though, that's the challenge I'm grappling with. The original thinking behind this site was just logging up things I read and had an interest in, generally out of research I was doing. My thinking was that other people looking into the same thing would come here, find stuff useful, and go from there (and maybe leave a comment). By and large, that has worked. Antsaint was never actually about developing a big subscriber/regular reader base, but about working the long tail.

Now that's starting to shift. After about 3 years of blogging, I'm wanting to focus more. I want to provide more original content (in a better design too). Antsaint hasn't been getting daily updates for a while, and that's going to continue. Over time, it'll lead to a better site, and better content - and besides, who really wants to spend more time on the computer anyway?

Monday Web reading round-up: Faster Google & 2007's Best Web Designs

My favorite read from Monday is the first link. Sometimes people ask about this and that bit of code in a webpage, what it means for search engines and such, and this piece gives good, simple explanations:

• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Answering more popular picks: meta tags and web search
• Google Indexing Even Faster? - Search Engine Guide
• Monday Inspiration: Creative Workplaces | Design Showcase | Smashing Magazine
• Best Of CSS Design 2007 | Sideblog | Smashing Magazine