what’s the deal with.. encouraging social sharing on your site?

September 18, 2008

Do you encourage your site visitors to AddThis or ShareThis? Facilitating content sharing is nothing new, and there are many services out there to help bloggers or site owners encourage the sharing of their content. In addition to the buttons mentioned above, there are also scripts such as mooSocialize, and there are numerous wordpress bookmarking [...]

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What features of social network sites are the most valuable for you?

July 29, 2008

Another question asked in the Q&A section of LinkedIn. My response: Disclaimer: I am assuming here you’re talking about a destination site like facebook or myspace, rather that a service like twitter. There are some rudimentary features that help contribute to the overall success of a social networking site. Obviously, #1 is the ease of [...]

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Spiders don’t use Screen Readers (SEO vs Web Accessibility)

July 25, 2008

How often have you been asked “so if we don’t use Flash, this will be searchable/accessible, right”? As though there is some new compound word describing a site whose content is easily available to all non-human user agents. Ah, we should be so lucky! While some coding practices aid in both SEO and web accessibility, [...]

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what’s the deal with… Web Accessibility and the ADA?

July 16, 2008

Until only a few years ago, I would have stated that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) had nothing to do with web accessibility. However, the landmark case against Target has altered the landscape.

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what’s the deal with… Web Accessibility and Section 508?

July 16, 2008

Anyone who has heard me speak about web accessibility knows that I typically call out two motivating factors behind accessibility: usability and regulatory compliance. Let’s face it, usability can be a hard sell. But if an organization is being tasked with meeting certain standards/guidelines/laws, there may be no choice. The trick, therefore, is knowing if [...]

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what’s the deal with… RSS and Feedburner

July 10, 2008

I like to hang out in the LinkedIn Q&A section, and recently someone asked about the relationship between RSS and Feedburner. This is a slightly lengthened version of my response: RSS refers to the format (more or less standard). Many, many services out there offer an RSS feed. That way you can syndicate your content: [...]

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what’s the deal with… personalization

July 10, 2008

Personalization is the idea of tailoring an experience to a specific individual. This is particularly prevalent in e-Commerce. There are a few ways to achieve this. The ATG e-Commerce platform uses ‘a scenario engine’ to provide personalized content. The engine uses a rules-based system, either based on user attributes or user behaviour. These can be [...]

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what’s the deal with… findability, searchability, indexability and accessibility?

July 1, 2008

As a front-end web developer, I often hear the terms “findable”, “searchable”, “indexable” and “accessible” thrown around interchangeably. For many, they mean that the content can be accessed by a non-human, be it a screen reader or a search engine spider. On some level this is true, but there are several significant differences that are [...]

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what’s the deal with… #hashtags on twitter?

June 25, 2008

I am starting a new section on my blog, called “what’s the deal with…”. Recently I’ve found a need to preface most of my discussions by setting expectations about semantics. Moving forward, I will be sharing some of my thoughts/opinions/insights on various buzzwords, trends or topics. Twitter is steadily gaining in popularity, despite its lack [...]

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what’s the deal with…Agile Software Development

June 20, 2008

I am starting a new section on my blog, called “what’s the deal with…”. Recently I’ve found a need to preface most of my discussions by setting expectations about semantics. Moving forward, I will be sharing some of my thoughts/opinions/insights on various buzzwords, trends or topics. When I worked at LexisNexis, I had the opportunity [...]

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