Victor Solanoy

I’ve been trying to find a tool like Microsoft Live Writer that allows you to write blog entries without the web interface. I’ve finally found one – Ecto. While not a slick as Live Writer, it’s a good alternative when I’m on my Mac. You can find it at http://illumineX.com/mac/ecto/

I was trying to figure out an easy way of changing the onclick value of a click-able element in a project I’m working on and found this solution — so incredibly simple, and it works in Safari, FF and IE…

document.getElementById(‘clickable-element-id’).onclick = function() {functionname(parameterlist);};

Looking to find a visual way to traverse the JQuery documentation? Visit http://visualjquery.com/ for you visual thinkers…

Smashing Magazine has a top 10 for design patterns that should be normal practice for commerce sites. These include Lazy Registration, Progressive Disclosure, Forgiving Format and more. If you’re a UI designer and don’t know what these are, take a look at the article.

In a practical sense, these types of patterns allow visitors to your site to complete their shopping tasks and move on to purchasing – the key to success for visitors to painlessly make purchases increasing your number of successful purchases.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/23/10-ui-design-patterns-you-should-be-paying-attention-to/

It’s been a while since I’ve used the Flock browser. If you’re not already aware, it’s a “Web 2.0″ friendly browser that centralizes your online life into a single tool. It identifies various types of feeds, as well as integrates into some of the more common online applications like popular e-mail sites, as well as places like Facebook or your own blog.

Now that I’m getting back into a lot of the social networking stuff again, I find myself repeatedly going to Flock because of its integration into “the cloud”.

What’s really nice is its ability to aggregate a lot of information I care about into a single screen — “myworld”.

I’m finding that it beats staring at RSS feeds or jumping from site to site to keep up with all the “important” stuff

This is the headline on MSNBC… I think someone didn’t read the memo that was sent out… 10 years ago…

http://www.newsweek.com/id/166821

I’ve been noticing more and more that people who try to set-up a business on the web tend to fall into 3 categories:

• Savvy — they understand the potential that the web has to offer
• Indifferent — it’s just a means to an end
• Institutional — the web is a big scary thing and that only a select few are able to participate

What I’ve found is a safe approach is a combination of the three. There’s a bit of a ying and yang to the whole thing that requires that each of the 3 categories be recognized.

Being savvy about business on the web requires thinking beyond traditional boundaries of normal commerce. This includes being proactive in communicating both brand and product to potential customers.

Being indifferent typically results in a mediocre presence — in organizations that are indifferent, this is where brochure-ware tends to occur. There’s lots of information to present about great products, just too much of it ends up on web pages… unfortunately, most of it is simply traditional sales speak that most consumers are all too familiar with… in a bad way.

Photo by Alex Layzell

See the web as institutional tends to make people who are establishing a business on the web to be overly cautious, that every element of doing business on the web is available to a select few. The reality is that conducting business on the web can be done quite easily using existing sites like eBay if you don’t have a storefront, and/or PayPal.

While there are lots of services and businesses that are available for most people at a premium, a small business can easily get launched on the web with very little money and very little time. However, doing it right should be regarded as a task that will take time.

Setting up a business on the web will require recognizing how savvy you can be in marketing your goods, differentiating the business and the goods from the competition while recognizing that indifference leads to mediocrity. Seeing the web as an institution will prevent you from being creative — it’s not a scary place that should be feared. If the web were a sandbox, the various available services are the tools, tools that can either build a simple sand castle, or an incredible work of beauty.

This is more of a mental note for me that this page exists. I find it cool that Yahoo publishes this stuff…

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

I installed Google Chrome on both my work PC and my home PC to play around. It’s extremely high the the geek factor because it’s a multi-threaded app with “tab protection”, meaning each tab runs as a separate process on the PC, so if one tab were to crash, or to get bogged down because of say, javascript hanging, or other browser funkiness, you can continue on your merry way. No hiccups, not stalls, no killing processes in the task manager. More as I play around it with…

I’m experimenting with using Windows Live Writer to publish to my blog from my Vista notebook (yes, I have a PC). This is my first post. Interestingly enough, despite coming from Microsoft, it works with a variety of blogging services and installations.

In this case, I’m wrote this to publish to my personal installation of WordPress. Kinda cool.

The nice thing about it is I can write and delay publishing until I have a network connection. Yeah, I know, I could always write it in a text editor or MS Word or something. This is nice because it’s kind of light weight and does everything I might want to do!

What’s kind of nice is that it allows you to import photos and apply different types of treatments and effects. The image below has a photo border with a dropshadow, all compliments of Live Writer.

The cool part is that it supports multiple blogs! The only word of caution is to be certain that the correct blog is selected prior to publishing. I might be using this application more!

To learn more about it, visit the Windows Live Writer site.