Category Archives: Writing

A New Blog and Published Articles

First of all, I want to mention a new project that I’m very excited about. For a while now I’ve wanted to create a separate blog, and the focus of that blog would be solely around the experience oddities that baffle us all in SharePoint. Here is a description from the “about” page:

SharePoint is an amazing tool that has almost endless possibilities, but it has some rough edges. Ask any SharePoint consultant, and they can easily go on at length about things in SharePoint that baffle them. This blog is about those baffling moments. The difference between good applications and great applications are details, and SharePoint is such a massive application (really it’s a platform which has a default interface and features) that many details get lost or are forgotten. This blog is about the interactions, information architectures, usability issues, and other experience decisions that I and the community find problematic with the application.

I will be accepting entries to the blog, and all that is outlined on the page linked above. Please let me know your thoughts, and if you are so inclined you can subscribe.

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Recent Articles

I recently did two articles for other SharePoint blogs. The first was for the Microsoft end-user blog Get the Point. I was contacted by them a couple of years ago, and I wrote some articles but lost touch with them. I decided to get back to contributing. I am really proud of the article, and I think it is an exhaustive look at the out-of-the-box functionality provided by the enterprise keywords column.

Demystifying the Enterprise Keywords Column

The second article was actually a sizable project I worked on with MVP Michal Pisarek, and it is posted on Nothing But SharePoint. The thrust of the article is to expose others to the analysis process necessary to craft successful SharePoint solutions. For the article we focused on search, but it is certainly a process that can apply to other areas of SharePoint implementations.

By far the best part of the entire process was getting to know Michal better and working with him. If you haven’t read his work, or interacted with him I suggest you do. It’s refreshing to work with someone with such a similar outlook on the technology and consulting.

Let’s Make Search Not Suck

A Quote On Typography

Every once in a while I see a quote on something that nails it. Jon Tangerine wrote recently on The Paragraph in Web Typography & Design, and he said a quote worth sharing and contemplating on. The only thing I did was fix two spelling errors.

“Good typography makes the canvas fit the meaning of the text, not the other way around. It paints pictures with form that enrich the meaning of the words with colour, texture and movement. It is illusive, subtle, and ambient. It’s the shirt that engages from a distance. The closer you get to it the better it seems, but it takes a moment of reflection to even realize why.”

Brilliant!

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WordPress Plugins for Writers

Wait, aren’t all WordPress users writers? Well, not exactly. A lot of people use the WordPress platform to talk about their pets, family, or odd Star Trek fetish (which is fine); but there are users of WordPress who subject themselves the rigors of professional writing. This post really is for those wanting to improve their blog’s typography.

When I started my first blog I found that the more serious I took it and the more involved my posts got that I needed more functionality. I wanted my blog to look and act less like a blog and more like an online print journal. It was this desire that started my look for WordPress plugins that could address the desires I had, and these are the best.

WP-Footnotes

The first thing I needed was a way to cite sources and make additional commentary in my writings, and footnotes are the perfect way to do that (even though they technically are endnotes, but the plugin does paginate). WP-Footnotes is an incredible plugin to accomplish this effectively. It has a lot of options, and it’s incredibly easy to use. You simply choose what the marking for the footnoted is (by default it’s double parenthesis), and when your post is rendered to the client it creates all the links for you.

A recent version has a smooth scrolling option that I do not like however. I instead plugged in another smooth scrolling script, and it turned out much better.

JavaScript Pull-Quotes

One of the things I like most about print publications are attractive pull-quotes, and with the JavaScript Pull-Quotes plugin you can achieve nice pull-quotes. It also has many options including different styles to choose for quote. You can even have it automatically cycle between quoting to the left and right! This is the best way to improve an article aesthetically.

Table of Contents Generator

One of the things I enjoy about Wikipedia is how it can give you a quick glance at the article’s content through a table of contents. Generating this functionality in your WordPress posts happen through the Table of Contents Generator WordPress Plugin.

It has no need to use special markup like the ones above, because it automatically scans the headings in the posts and creates a table of contents. The plugin will also recognize top-level and sub-headings. It is a great reminder to use headings in your posts which drastically improves the semantic value of your content.

In Series WordPress Plugin

Often times when writing about a topic in-depth it’s advisable to break it up for the reader. The way to do this before would be to create a page announcing the series and provide links to all the articles in the series. Well no more! The In Series WordPress Plugin makes this task seamless. The plugin adds an option to add it to a series, and the plugin generates the necessary connections between the content. It’s great, because it requires no hacking of your template–it works right out of the box!

Even though I personally haven’t got to give this plugin a go, I’m excited to really make use of this one. Writing series is a great way to present lengthy content on the web, and this plugin takes all of the work out of doing so (besides the writing of course).

WP-Typogrify

The last deals specifically with improving all the little things in typography that we traditionally miss but make a difference. This is a port from the original Python script for WordPress, and it carries the name WP-Typogrify. This does things such as inserting inline styles to adjust the CSS around all-caps, ampersands, and does important little things such as turning double hyphens into em-dashes and much more.

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Siolon

Musings on SharePoint, User Experience, and More