Why contractions are perfect for web writing

One rule I learned early on from my teachers is to never use contractions in writing. This was drilled into me during university as I wrote book reports and research papers. In fact, most formal writing abhors contractions. But there’s one place that loves contractions: web writing.

ASAC Conference Websites

because the University of Lethbridge Faculty of Management was hosting the ASAC 2006 conference, I was commissioned to do the website. www.uleth.ca/asac It’s nothing special really. It’s not very trend-setting or bleeding edge. For the ASAC conference websites, however, it brought things to a new level. Using server and cookie based technologies, I was able… Continue reading ASAC Conference Websites

MySQL character set for ISO-8859-1

Our web server’s character set is ISO-8859-1. This has caused some problems when persons input accented characters or other non-ASCII characters into our database. Well, actually the problems occurred when the information was parsed to a webpage. I’ve tried fixing this several times, but could not figure out how to set the character set on… Continue reading MySQL character set for ISO-8859-1

Names in forms

Is it better to create a name field that allows the users to type in their names anyway they want, or should the first and last names be separated into different fields for better data management?

Web Authoring Statistics

Here is an analysis by Google of over one billion web documents. It shows the most common class names, ids, elements, etc. Very interesting.