Web Worker Daily |
| 5 Most Popular Posts on WebWorkerDaily This Week Posted: 27 Mar 2009 03:00 PM PDT Written by Simon Mackie. Just in case you missed any of them, here are the five most popular posts on WebWorkerDaily this week: Step-by-step instructions on how to use Gmail Tasks as a Getting Things Done (GTD) system. Sam explains why your home wi-fi network needs a regular cycled reboot. New web worker? Aliza gives you the lowdown on the apps you need. Darrell looks at some of the new productivity enhancements available in Gmail Labs. You don’t necessarily need to spend money on hiring a virtual assistant (VA) to get some of the productivity benefits they can provide.        |
| Thanks to Our WebWorkerDaily Sponsors! Posted: 27 Mar 2009 02:00 PM PDT Written by Edit Staff. We’d like to say thanks to this month’s WebWorkerDaily sponsors:
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| TextFlow Gets In-Browser Collaboration Posted: 27 Mar 2009 12:00 PM PDT Written by Darrell Etherington.
I liked the original version of TextFlow, but it ended up not being very useful precisely because no one I wanted to work with was particularly interested in having AIR installed on their machines. Not that they were actively against it, either, just that they didn’t feel it was worth the bother for just this app (obviously I’m not talking about TweetDeck or Twhirl users here!). Now they can edit documents directly in their browser via a private link, so they don’t need to mess about with AIR to help out with the collaboration.
All you have to do to share your document from within the AIR app is add members to your group in the “Share” sidebar, and then click “Share” whenever you make changes that you’d like distributed to all parties. Anyone on your list receives a unique URL that will load up a TextFlow editor instance right in their web browser. It has all the same features as the document editor of the AIR app, but your collaborators won’t need to download anything and can get to work or see your revisions right away. Even if you took a pass on TextFlow the first time around, it might be worth another look now that it’s largely platform independent. And it’s still free for the Personal edition, though a Professional license will cost you $99. Have you tried TextFlow? What did you think?      |
| Opera Still Cooking With CSS3 On the Way Posted: 27 Mar 2009 09:00 AM PDT Written by Aliza Sherman.
Web designers have long been using CSS to customize font size, style, family, backgrounds and layouts across a site. CSS3 brings a much more powerful feature set to those designers, including: Text shadows, borders, shaped borders, boxes with shadows. No longer will you have to fancy up fonts as graphics files and embed them. Also, because of the detailed specifications for shaping a border, gone are the days of struggling with rounded corners. You can set the radius for each corner and voila!
CSS3 also offers transitions for dynamic effects such as changing the size, color or positioning of text by hovering your cursor over it. Move over Flash and JavaScript effects: CSS3 has got these animation-like features covered. The current version of Opera already supports parts of CSS3, while support in Opera 10 will be even greater. Opera 10 beta should be available in the next few months. Lie also showed me an e-book designed entirely using CSS3. The CSS took care if all of the intricate printing layout details, like pagination, that would normally be handled by something like Adobe InDesign. Fascinating. Opera, Mozilla and Safari will all fully support CSS3 in the future; indeed, they have all had partial support for the standard for a while now. The lone party pooper is IE, of course. Lie is hoping web developers will rally together to ignore IE in their development strategies and, “free yourself from the IE prison.” A noble cause, but probably not realistic just yet. Personally, I haven’t used IE for eons (especially as a Mac user). However, many of my clients are still adamant that IE is their visitors’ most popular browser. Check out this live video demo of CSS3 by Lie at SXSW:
What are your thoughts on CSS3? And how likely do you think it is that we’ll be able to banish IE from our web design work in the future?      |
| Posted: 27 Mar 2009 07:00 AM PDT Written by Pamela Poole.
A new app called FairShare, developed by Attributor, offers a free and easy way to find out. It takes just a couple of minutes to register a site with FairShare, and you can add multiple sites and blogs once you’ve registered the first one. You start by entering your feed address. A window appears, showing the various types of Creative Commons licenses available. (If you have a static site with no feed, click the Help link and you’ll find out what to do in the Getting Started section.) I’d been meaning to add a Creative Commons license image to my blogs, and signing up for FairShare helped me get that off my to-do list. Once you’ve registered your site, FairShare searches 35 billion web pages to see if your content appears on other sites. You can choose to receive this info through a feed reader. For each page containing your work, FairShare will show you how the reuse compares to your license conditions and point you to a page where you can see more details. In this case, FairShare caught me red handed; I’d cross-posted some content from one of my blogs onto another site of mine. Unfortunately, another of my posts contains Obama’s entire inauguration speech, with my comments throughout. So FairShare is now telling me every time portions of that text appear. I wonder how many years that will continue! I’d like to be able to tell the app not to look for copies of that particular post. I asked FairShare about this, and they are, in fact, working on a feature that will let you exclude posts that reuse common speeches or articles. Fortunately, the app already ignores content you have in blockquotes. FairShare has another excellent feature on the way: a license that will allow you to share ad revenue when your content is being used elsewhere. Hopefully this will help keep content “borrowers” honest while also benefiting the content creators. FairShare is similar to other plagiarism-monitoring tools, like Copyscape, but the ability to specify the license your content uses and subscribe to the results through a feed reader make it easier to use. The Internet is still a wild frontier (and some of us like it that way). However, these days, many of us are concerned about managing our online identities, and the web makes it awfully easy for others to find and use content that they didn’t create. So it can be comforting to have tools that allow us to monitor, and have some control over, our own online presence. What do you use for monitoring how your content is being used?      |
A while back I 
While at SXSW, I had the opportunity to meet one of the web’s founding fathers, Håkon Wium Lie. He’s the creator of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and a CERN alum, along with Tim Berners-Lee. He's also the CTO of 
Web fonts. Yes, you can now specify the font you want to use in CSS3, and the browser will auto-download it if it’s not already installed. No longer are you at the mercy of the fonts your users have installed.
I write a lot, and a lot of what I write is online. I publish photos, too. This stuff is my intellectual property, even though I’m OK with other people using it as long as they credit me. Depending on your field and your personal interests, you may also have quite a lot of creative content online. Do you know who’s using it and how it’s being used?
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