Choose Your Bicycle!

1. Write for a reason

Be clear about your reason for writing before you start. This will help you to actually convey your points to the reader.

Jonathan Cohen, freelance writer, says that  writing must fulfill its purpose, whether that is to inform, entertain or sell.

2. Be concise

Jakob Nielsen is still correct: Web readers DO scan pages rather than read them. Omit unnecessary words and structure your article or post to make it easy for readers to find what they are after.

“Readers expect relevant content online. If they don’t find it quickly, they’ll leave.”  - Kathy Henning

3. Consider your audience

Talk to you readers, not at them. Jakob Neilsen’s maxim that readers hate marketese is certainly still relevant today, yet marketese is rife.

In any article or web page, you are selling something: it may be an idea, a product or a service. You need to pitch whatever it is in words that are meaningful to your audience. Think clearly about the key selling points and present them simply. It’s always important to assume the visitor doesn’t have any prior knowledge, but don’t ever talk down to your readers. Be truthful.

I know how hard this is. We had some issues with our copywriting for CybaSumo.com, and I ended up having to revise the main bullet points in preparation for the alpha launch. I had limited space as a result of the design: each bullet point needed to be a maximum of 35 - 41 characters (depending on the characters used). I can’t tell you how many hours I spent trying to summarise our offering in a meaningful and convincing way. To be frank, it’s very important to know all about your business or ideas before you start (that’s a bit of a business tip first - build your website around your unique selling proposition, it makes your copywriting a lot easier, hahaha).

In my experience it is definitely true that readers do not tolerate unclear text.

My friend Jonathan Cohen, was telling me this week about the importance of “knifing the baby” (ouch, and he did warn me I wouldn’t enjoy the phrase!) when it comes to your online writing. Be your own worst critic.

4. Stay alive - write often.

These days, the Web is alive with sites that are regularly updated. A List Apart’s Mark Bernstein quotes Dan Chan as calling this the Living Web. To be part of it, you should write often. Remember that a living site is only as good as today’s update.

Your writing does not need to be long - write little, but write often. And consistency is the key: once you have a pattern, your readers will appreciate you sticking to it.

5. Be accurate

Before finalising your work, check its accuracy. Readers are looking for credible information, so feed them that and you will find you become authoritative in your field.

References
The Seven Qualities of Highly Successful Web Writing

10 Tips on Writing the Living Web

Five Keys to good web writing

I’ve known how to use the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) for some years now. I don’t mind it, it’s quite fun to see your thoughts materialise into a graphical representation through the keyboard. I wouldn’t say writing web pages is one of my favourite activities, though, and this is because I care rather more for function than I do for form. This needs a little explaining…

photo © Lukasz Jernas for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike

The purpose of HTML is to describe the structure of a document, and it has some capabilities for controlling the form or presentation of that structure. In this way, HTML shares it’s pedigree with other markup languages such PDF, XML implementations, TeX in the marking up of manuscripts with printers’ instructions.

The formal standard for HTML is now based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which is the more rigorous document form. This standard, XHTML, requires that documents be well-formed, with tags correctly nested and closed. This means that XHTML documents can be processed using XML tools rather than a custom HTML parser.

As I mentioned above, HTML has the functionality to influence both document structure and presentation. This can get pretty messy and hard to maintain. Programmers generally like modularity - the separation of concerns - to improve maintainability and reduce duplication of effort. In the case of web applications, it is considered good design practice to separate the data and business rules from the presentation of the data and from the handling of user input (see Model-View-Controller from Wikipedia).

For simple (static) web pages, using Cascading Style Sheets is the best way to separate presentation code from business code, and this is quite sufficient. For more complicated applications using scripting languages such as PHP, template systems (engines) and development frameworks provide a means to separate application code from presentation code. Some examples are Smarty and Zend.

During the last week, I updated my business website, web-ready.com.au. Because I’m not such a fan of design, I found a free CSS based HTML template from Free-CSS.com and ported it to WordPress so I could use it as a WordPress theme.

For the first task for module 3, I took the basic design of my new website and extracted the HTML code from the top part of the page. I then added my business logo into a new div and surrounded it with a link back to my website. The page still uses the style sheet I created for my main site. I used the Linux nano editor on my Debian server to create and edit the HTML file.

I did go through Joe’s tutorial, but thought I might look for some other resources that use the more recent HTML standards and provide a good introduction to CSS as well. I like W3Schools, and tend to use it as my main resource, but I found Dave Raggett’s Guide to be a great introduction to HTML, and it provides links to an advanced tutorial and a CSS tutorial as well.

Generally, I would say that I prefer blogging to writing a page in HTML simply because it is more efficient. The WordPress platform has a decent WYSIWYG editor which saves a good deal of time, although I do regularly use the HTML editor as well. I actually prefer programming websites using PHP and MySQL over both blogging and using HTML: I love the sense of achievement when programming logic proves correct: that’s a buzz for me and will probably always be so.

Usenet is absolutely new to me. I had to do a bit of reading before I found out how to even well, use Usenet Newsgroups. My ISP has a handy page on Usenet. I’m reproducing the helpful Newsgroup Terminology section below:

Newsgroup Terminology
Article A message posted to a newsgroup.
Binaries Files containing something other than text, primarily pictures and sounds, posted to a newsgroup.
Flame Derogatory comments communicated in a posting to a newsgroup.
Flame War When a discussion degenerates into nothing but a series of personal attacks, or flames (see above).
Lurk To read a newsgroup without ever making yourself known by posting.
Message An individual posting to a newsgroup (also called an “article”).
Moderated Group A newsgroup where submissions first go to an individual called a moderator, who must approve an item before it is posted to the group.

I found a news group on my favourite author, C.S. Lewis. To be frank, it doesn’t seem overly interesting, but I’m lurking there for a bit anyway.

The more I delve into the history of the Internet, the more I understand that “social networking” is hardly new: it’s simply recently that it has been “monetized”. It’s quite a shame in some ways, but such is tha nature of the world’s current materialism: it spills over into every nook of our culture. The most terrible symptom of our age is forgetfulness: the rampant disregard for how we got to where we are in the incessant rush for greater riches - sensory or material. It’s quite refreshing to be part of something a little simpler by way of a humble little newsgroup, although these are by no means immune to spam!

My newsgroup post:

I have to say, I think mailing lists are very cool. In the last couple of weeks, I set up the Mailman mailing list server and integrated it into my Postfix/Dovecot mail server and I’ve had some fun playing around with it from a technical point of view. I was rather pleased with myself for working out how to integrate it without resorting to a “cookbook” howto online.

I love them because they deliver messages straight to my inbox. It’s actually a very natural way for me to interact online, via email, and I enjoy the way various lists have their own culture and netiquette and even established rule sets. I know that this is true of discussion boards and forums as well, which is great.

Mailing lists follow a distributed networking model, but are flexible enough to be used in various ways. I’ve been on a mailing list used as an instruction delivery channel for SEO training: communication was primarily one way, but there was a great opportunity to hear specific input from other students along with the teacher’s response. The list worked very well because the rules for communicating were very clear and the tutor enforced them skilfully.

Plenty of mailing lists are purely one way communication: people subscribe to such lists in order to receive information about a product, service or event. These aren’t terribly interesting, to be frank: just an efficient means of communication.

I believe a great potential for community development exists with mailing lists. I often look for answers to questions and find them in mailing list archives that have been indexed by Google. They appear to be a great way to ask for and to give assistance to people with similar interests. At least, this occurs in an environment that suits me: from the privacy of my inbox.

I like the fact that lists can be moderated and that subscribers can choose to receive emails to the list straight away or in digest mode. I signed up to the Internet Studies Yahoo Group mailing list, and I receive the messages for that in digest form, which allows me to efficiently allocate time each day to reviewing messages and making posts.

In the past, I’ve been a member of a number of strong online discussion board communities. The most enjoyable was the Puppy Linux community, where I spent many hours with other enthusiasts learning and teaching. I was also a member of the Poetry Free For All, PFFA, which is a poetry workshop. Sadly, I don’t much time these days for either poetry or hacking, so I haven’t participated for ages.

For me, the greatest advantage of mailing lists is convenience: the messages come to you, and you are in control of how you receive those messages. The online discussion board requires a login and manually checking for new messages (even if these are highlighted for you by the software). In some cases, you can set your preferences to receive an email message when someone replies to a post of yours, so there are some conveniences.

Discussion boards are more centralised: people have to go to the host website in order to participate, making them like meeting places.

In my experience, mailing lists are great for one-way communication, teaching applications and for communities that operate through asking questions and giving answers. Discussion boards are more personal, with links to profiles and so on, but they can be quite cumbersome. These are great for people with a general commom interest and where subclassification of topics can facilitate stronger community subsections.

I’m jumping into it now…

Email Tasks

1. What information about a user’s email, the origin of the message and the path it took can be gleaned from an email message?

To start with, here is a quick overview of the email transmission process:

sender -> MUA -> MTA -> (routing) -> MTA -> MDA -> {filtering} -> MUA -> receiver

where:

• MUA = Mail User Agent or email client such as Outlook, Thunderbird,  or M2;
• MTA = Mail Transfer Agent - a server program responsible for forwarding (or delivering local) mail; and
• MDA = Mail Delivery Agent -  a server program responsible for delivering mail to the recipient.

One can discover plenty of information about the genesis of an email from looking at the email header. Generally, email clients will display the contents of the more user-important headers by default, usually the From, To, Cc, Subject, Date, and Reply-To (if it exists) headers. This gives one the basic information needed to quickly evaluate (triage, even) the mail message. Basically, an email client will display these headers to tell you:

• The email address of the person the email is from (the From header). Note that the sender of the email may be different to the address the email is from: in this case a Sender header is used (eg, in the case of assistants who send emails out for their bosses or in systems like GMail that permit the configuration of supplementary accounts to send email via the mail account);
• The email address of the recipient (the To header);
• Other recipients of the email, people it has been “carbon-copied” to (the Cc header);
• The subject of the email (the Subject header);
• The time and date the email was sent (the Date header); and
• The address to be used in replying to the email (the Reply-To header).

There are, however, usually more headers that provide information about the email’s journey. These can be viewed, but the method for viewing headers will differ with each email client (the MUA). I use Opera’s integrated mail client, M2, and to view a message’s headers, one selects the message, right-clicks and selects ‘View all headers and message’ from the menu that is presented.

The additional headers shown here are added by the MTAs along the way. I’ll explain the headers in the above screenshot: for a more comprehensive treatment, I recommend Expita.com’s exposition.

• Return-Path: the way back to the sender;
• Delivered-To: the recipient of the email;
• Received: Traces the last routing step. There may be a number of these headers per email;
• X-Spam-Score and X-Spam-Status: record the results of spam filter deliberations. Headers beginning with the X- prefix are custom headers, but these two are fairly conventional and are used for client-side spam filtering;
• Message-ID: unique ID for the E-mail; the first MTA creates this;
• User-Agent: The MUA that created the email;
• MIME-Version:Info for MIME capable MUAs;
• Content-Type: encoding information;
• Content-Transfer-Encoding: encoding information;
• Importance: Message importance

Thus, an English description of my example email’s genesis and journey runs as follows:

The email with subject “test” was sent from “Amanda Singh”, email address amanda@web-ready.com.au, to mandy@free.web-ready.biz using SquirrelMail version 1.4.9 (an web interface) on Sun, 06 Jul 2008 18:59:42 (+1000 GMT). The email was sent with normal importance and a priority of 3, and used MIME version 1, with text content of character set iso-8859-1 and 8-bit encoding.

The email was typed by a user at IP address 124.168.218.203, an authenticated user, namely mandy@free.web-ready.biz, of the SquirrelMail web interface, and was received by the MTA at lewis.web-ready.com.au. The message was given the ID of 55810.124.168.218.203.1215334782.squirrel@lewis.web-ready.com.au by the first MTA.

The email is routed from lewis.web-ready.com.au (localhost, in this case) by the Postfix MTA at lewis.web-ready.com.au and is given the Extended Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (ESMTP) ID of A85FE18419. It is received for mandy@free.web-ready.biz.

The email is then passed off to amavisd-new, a filtering interface program, on port 10024,  with ESMTP id
rrSiPnFoAJCd for mandy@free.web-ready.biz. amavisd-new hands the mail off to ClamAV, a virus scanner, and SpamAssassin, a spam filter, for a number of tests, which it passes (see the X-Spam-Status header’s value is No, with a listing of the various tests).

Since all is well, amavisd-new sends the mail back to the Postfix MTA at lewis.web-ready.com.au (this time on port 10025, although that is not mentioned), and the mail is delivered to mandy@free.web-ready.biz.

The return path for the email is amanda@web-ready.com.au.

That’s it, folks. I’m sorry now that I picked this example, as it is atypical in a number of ways and I should probably explain what I did at the highest level to give that some context.

I logged into my mandy@free.web-ready.biz account via the SquirrelMail web interface. I chose my amanda@web-ready.com.au identity from within Squirrelmail, and sent the test email to mandy@free.web-ready.biz, to which it was delivered. This is why the email was only ever routed to lewis.web-ready.com.au - that’s my mail server. I then accessed the email using IMAP with my Opera M2 client, from which I viewed the headers and took the screenshot above.

2. In what cases would you find it useful to use the Cc, Bcc and Reply All functions of email?

I try to use these functions judiciously: it’s awful when people clog your inbox by including you unnecessarily in email correspondence.

For the Cc function, I use it to provide information to parties who need to know it, but who do not necessarily need to respond to me. It’s an FYI function. For example, if I requested an update or provided key information to the developer on a project, I might Cc in the project owners so that they were aware of what was happening.

For the Bcc function, I would use this to provide information to a third party to the main conversation, or sometimes when I wished to copy myself in at my private address without others knowing what that was. To be frank, I always feel a little guilty using Bcc - it feels a little sneaky, but it can actually be useful. For example, if I had a customer enquiry that I wished to respond to with information that would be useful for the project owner to know about, but where I wished to keep the project owner’s email address secret from the customer, I would use the Bcc function.

Reply Alls are similar to Ccs: they should definitely be used judiciously and only where the information is directly relevant to all in the list. It’s often a better choice to use the Reply All function to get all addresses into the To and Cc fields, then cull those addresses of people who wouldn’t want or need to receive the email.

3. In what ways can you ensure that an attachment you send will be easily opened by the receiver?

Firstly, I find that it is a good idea to include the main points from an attachment in the body of the email for the receiver’s easy reference.  I like to add a phrase like (for more information, please see attachment X), or something along those lines. In this way, the importance and context of the attachment is established, and the key information is easily at hand and can be searched for by the recipient using their mail client.

Secondly, it’s a good idea to ask the recipient before hand what types of attachment they can read. In practice, most people have the facilities to read Microsoft Office format documents, at least up to the XP version, and PDF files, but where there is uncertainty, a text file is best. If an attachment must be sent, you can assist your recipient by perhaps including links to free online conversion tools or free “reader” software, eg Zoho.com.

Lastly, one should ask for confirmation  that the attachment was readable, either in the initial email or in a follow up.

4. What sorts of filters do you have set up and why?

I primarily set up my filters according to projects and activities. This allows me to keep all information about a project in one place. It also assists me to prioritise my correspondence and plan my responses. For large, long term projects, I then filter by sender, which is necessary for sub-classification as I am sometimes receiving over 50 emails a day.

In most cases, I create a folder to house messages that are filtered for a particular sender or group of senders corresponding to a particular activity.

5. How have you organised the folder structure of your email and why?

I like to keep the inbox itself pretty empty, reserving it for personal emails. All work and study-related emails go straight into folders via my filtering system described above. An organised inbox is an organised mind.

I use Opera’s client so that my inbox is extremely handy. I use my web browser and my email client pretty much all day: with my setup, I can easily see when a new email comes in and who it is from instantly, without having to switch windows or even browser tabs.

Resources:

• Expita.com’s exposition
• NineByNine.org - Registration of mail header fields

I’ve managed to get quite behind in NET11, that’s certainly true. But don’t think I’ve been doing nothing! In reading the module 2 readings and pondering the various concepts involved with email and other forms of online communication, I managed to get sidetracked. Let me explain: I attempted to sign up for a SecondLife account one fine evening. Being an essentially practical person, this was a huge step for me. I generally consider anything so rich as being a distraction to my usually business-like communications. To be frank, I don’t generally use the Internet to communicate with friends (with one major exception: I regularly email my best friend throughout the day, but only during business hours, and we are fairly like-minded in our communication preferences), but use email, Yahoo, MSN and Skype daily to chat with clients and contractors. SecondLife is utterly superfluous to my needs. I had to overcome the cringe factor to even attempt a sign up. And I did, but to no avail. SecondLife’s server was apparently picking up the nervous vibes I was emanating, and refused to process my beautifully complete registration form. Seriously, I am guiltless. Anyway, I had a scout around the site, and stumbled across the Orientation Station training region, which promises to welcome me to the Metaverse. Now, that term Metaverse appealed to me instantly: beyond this universe, perhaps, an abstracted existence? I began thinking about Possible Worlds and wondered - as I suppose most do - at the possibilities a second life in a created world might entail. Naturally, I googled the term, and found Wikipedia’s explanation that the Metaverse is a virtual world in which humans interact through their avatars: a construct in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel, Snow Crash. Wow, this is exceedingly interesting stuff, kinda Matrix-y, definitely something to think about. So while I sought a copy of the book, I found another of Stephenson’s books and got stuck into that instead. This was just the first distraction. I began to think about avatars: what they are now, and how they might develop into the future. I found mEgo.com, a new personal profile tool provider that really starts to put flesh on the bones of the avatar concept. And it’s portable. Portability is a growing issue these days. Currently, Facebook and MySpace are independently popular, but their use raises questions about the openness of data and online interactions. Say you have a profile on MySpace and one on Facebook (and maybe another on Orkut, or Xanga, or Friendster….): you have to maintain these profiles and sets of friends separately. Your left hand doesn’t know what your right is doing, so to speak. mEgo.com is only one of a bunch of tools springing up to make information more portable between social networks: I actually think mEgo.com is a bit more of an evolution. My thinking is that the people are likely to be drawn to tools that help consolidate a person’s online life. Frankly, it’s a pain to have an identity for every situation (although there are obviously certain advantages to this, too!). Nevertheless, my expectation is that people will gravitate towards tools and systems that allow their currently disparate activities and identities to converge: this will simplify communications and make the Internet as a system so much more powerful and useful to each individual. Hey, we’re starting to think of motorbikes here! So, I expect systems like OpenID to eventually flourish despite the many corporate barriers.  It may take some doing, I’ll grant you. I tried to return my thoughts to email, and was successful. But my earlier ruminations haunted me and I recalled an article from The Economist about email being the basis of an evolution of social networking.  An email-based social networking system would have the advantage of being open and within the user’s control. Tools would be available to assist rather than to impose and shape, interactions. It may not be a business, but when we consider the history of the Internet, why should it be? So much of the good things we take for granted are in existence because of the collaborative efforts of enthusiasts and visionaries across the globe.

I thought about how such a system could work. I developed a system design and am currently working on building a prototype. If anyone is interested in this project, I’d love to hear from you: I’m no designer, not a great writer, not an accomplished developer, so any help is appreciated.