Image via Wikipedia

If you’re like me, one of the first computer skills you were taught in school is how to use a word processor. We all mastered the art of formatting words for the printed page because we were still using computers in a paper-based world. As more business and education activities move online, we are spending ever more time writing in web-based text editors, where our ideas are being automatically encoded into divs, spans, ps and ems– a language that too few of us speak fluently enough to reset the margins or change the font size.

Still, the status quo is for people to write their documents in an offline word processor like MS Word, then copy and paste into the text editor of the web-based tools they use to collaborate. Though this sounds like an OK approach, I often see people wondering what all that weird MSOffice XML code that comes along is doing there. Worse, they save the word file and upload it, forcing others to download the file before they can see what it says.

I believe it’s time for students and mainstream users to compose documents using web design tools, not paper design tools. By using desktop writing tools like Blue Griffon or Scribefire, you can compose valid HTML documents using the same simple controls you’re used to seeing in your webmail, blog editor, or learning management system. If you pay attention, you will probably also learn the basic HTML concepts that help us create good looking, semantically valid documents for the open web. The controls on a web-based editor give you hints as to what’s happening in the code of a web page, and they allow you to go look at the code produced after you added blockquotes, an ordered list, or a heading 3 using the simple, intuitive buttons.

The WordPress Text Editor- Simple, Elegant, and a Great Learning Tool

Web Processors: Some Promising Tools

My favorite text editor to work in is the default WYSIWYG editor in WordPress– especially now that they have added the distraction-free writing interface called “fullscreen”. It is an uncluttered, minimalistic writing interface like WriteRoom or OmmWriter that allows you to focus on your work. The WordPress editor gives you as much or as little assistance as you need with formatting your document, but it also finds little ways to challenge you to expand your HTML coding skills. I find this nice balance between easy and challenging has kept me using (and growing with) this tool. The downside to this approach is that it’s really best if you have a WordPress site– it feels a little silly to fire up a website just so I can dash off a document to someone. [A note to devs: I would definitely pay a nominal fee to have the WordPress fullscreen editor in a standalone desktop app. Make it so.]

For offline writing, I am starting to really appreciate BlueGriffon, a free HTML5 authoring app along the lines of NVU or Kompozer. It can do sophisticated HTML5 and CSS3 formatting in a simple graphic interface that brings high quality, modern web design tools to the most technophobic. (OK not the MOST technophobic– more like newbies with a taste for mild adventure!) The tools in Blue Griffon go from underlining, bold, and italics to helping you work with div placement and styling without touching a line of code. This tool is truly the most user-friendly way I’ve found to make the difficult art of web design feel less threatening to non- coders.

Imagine all the hours of your life you’ve spent working in MS Word– if you had spent that much time in Blue Griffon while trying to bang out those last minute term papers, you would be a seasoned web designer before you finished high school! And that’s my point– the tools we are expecting people to use today support a 20th Century workplace, not the collaborative, computer literate populace needed today.

You will find links below to some other promising HTML editors for web-based writing. I’d be very interested in hearing your thoughts on

Romantic vs. Classical Worldviews in Writing for the Web

Image via Wikipedia

This all reminds me of Robert Pirsig‘s discussion of Romantic vs. Classical thinking in his towering work Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In discussing how different people approach maintaining their motorcycles, he touches on an interesting dichotomy in the way people look at the world. [excerpt] The “Romantic” is described thus:

The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings
rather than facts predominate. “Art” when it is opposed to “Science” is often romantic. It
does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic
conscience.

He contrasts this worldview with the “Classical” which he describes as:

The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws…which are themselves
underlying forms of thought and behavior….  Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic. The dirt, the grease, the mastery of underlying form required all give it such a negative romantic appeal… Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an esthetically free and natural style. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control. Its value is measured in terms of the skill with which this control is maintained.

He uses these distinctions to contrast himself from his friend. He, a classicist, takes pride in understanding what makes his motorcycle work and performing his own maintenance. His friend, a romantic, doesn’t care how it works– just as long as it works and he doesn’t have to get his hands dirty fixing it! As you might imagine, his friend’s approach is put to the test when his motorcycle starts to malfunction.

This same distinction is alive and well among computer users today– most of us want to get into a tool and have everything “just work”. We don’t want to know anything about what’s going on under the hood, as long as we can drag and drop everything where we want it to appear. That was great in the desktop era where apps and the OS could protect you fom ever having to think about code. (Thanks Steve!) However, the web has some very rigid underlying rules for what works and what doesn’t, and I often see people suffering panic attacks because their romanticist attitude is coming in conflict with some real classical realities of the web. The worker of the 21st Century will be the one who can successfully unite an artistic viewpoint with the technical skills to bring it about, and there is no better way to learn that blend than coding for the web.

Your Thoughts?

I’m very curious to hear your reactions– do you think students need to learn HTML or do you think it is a dying art that will soon be done by machines? Do you think it’s possible to completely replace your Office suite with an HTML editor? Leave a comment and let us know!

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How do you do it?

1. Go download the Tilt plugin for Firefox.
2. Navigate to the website you want to screenshot
3. Pull down Firefox’s Tools menu and invoke Tilt
4. Position your website in the most awesome way possible
5. Shoot and edit your screenshot with your favorite screen capture software like Jing, Skitch, or good ol’ Grab in OSX
6. Drop that screenshot into your presentation, document, or whatever creative piece you’re working on!

It’s really that simple! I’d love to see what you do with this tool– please leave links to your 3D presentations in the comments!

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• Review: Firefox 5 Web browser (macworld.com)
• Firefox Joy…stick that is (geektyrant.com)
• The Most Important Parts of HTML5 (n01se.net)
• Firefox Gets A Massive Speed Boost; I’m Still Sticking With Chrome. (thechromesource.com)
• Firefox To Get Better Third Party Add-On Security (ghacks.net)

Amazon.com‘s AStore Affiliate program pays charities if you search Amazon via a referrer link. In the spirit of giving, here’s how you can replace your Amazon Firefox Search Bar button with the AStore search link of your favorite cause. Amazon will donate to them every time you buy something!

What you’ll need:
1) Firefox
2) The Add to Search Bar extension
3) A favorite charity that has already set up an AStore. I wasn’t able to find many online, but my two favorites that I know of are Heifer.org (an organization that gives helps people in developing nations find sustainable food sources) or  DanCarlin.com (producer of the incredibly excellent podcast HardCore History).

Procedure:
1) Install the Add to Search Bar extension and restart Firefox. This extension allows you to put your cursor in any search bar on your favorite web pages and add that search functionality to your Firefox search bar.
2) Go to your favorite charity’s AStore. Find their AStore search bar, right click in it, and select “Add to Search Bar”.

3) Use this search bar every time you search Amazon, and they will donate to your worthy cause each time you shop!

Everybody loves Firefox. Even with all the other fast, standards-compliant modern browsers out there (like Chrome, Safari, and Opera– sorry IE!) Firefox stands alone for its rich variety of extensions. If you’re using Firefox, you can be sure that “there’s an extension for that”. It’s tempting to fill up one’s browser with every tool that could make your web experience easier, faster, cooler, and more productive. The trade-off is that each extension you use makes Firefox a little more sluggish.

I’ve already discussed how to speed up your Firefox by using different browsers for different tasks, but I’m falling in love with a new tool that is quickly making many of my beloved extensions obsolete. Mozilla Ubiquity, the natural language command line in a browser, promises to streamline your productivity much like the legendary Quicksilver does for Mac.  Think of it as “One Extension to Rule them All”. Here’s how:

First, a quick overview of Ubiquity by Mozilla Labs’ Aza Raskin:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Replace your Search Bar

Ubiquity has allowed me to take the search bar completely out of my Firefox toolbar. Where I used to have a whole long list of search bars to flip through for every possible search I do often…

…I have been able to add all of these search engines to my Ubiquity so I can just invoke them with a keyword. I just start typing in Chordie.com‘s name, and my search plugin pops up.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!
I can add any search engine to my Ubiquity’s list of commands simply by clicking in the site’s search bar and invoking Ubiquity. It instantly gives me the option of creating a search command for that site. I give the command a name and I’m done!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Not only has this allowed me to get rid of my search bar (and all my search plugins) completely, but it also makes my Firefox extension “Add to Search Bar” (which basically does that task I just described) completely redundant.

Replace Social Sharing Extensions with Ubiquity + Bookmarklets

Social media and social bookmarking have made it easy to share whatever we are reading with our groups of followers. If you’re like me, you send different types of links to different communities. At one point, I had an Firefox extension for Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Digg. Then I discovered bookmarklets. Bookmarklets are just like your browser’s bookmarks, except they contain bits of javascript that perform snazzy functions. You can submit pages, shorten links, tweet, download YouTube videos, and a whole lot more.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Ubiquity allows you to make any of these bookmarklets into a command. Just add the bookmarklet to your toolbar, then invoke Ubiquity. It’ll quickly offer you the choice to “Create Bookmarklet Command”, at which point you just give the command a name and you’ve got it!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

How does Ubiquity help you streamline your workflow? Discuss in the comments!

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Image via Wikipedia

Everyone loves Firefox because there are so many great user-created Add-Ons that make your web browser into much, much more. Add-ons allow you to customize your browser to make tasks easier. This extra performance comes at a slight cost; the more add-ons you pile on, the more sluggishly your (formerly fast) browser becomes. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a few different copies of Firefox– each optimized for your various tasks? Sadly, you can only run one instance of Firefox at a time. Or at least– one instance of Firefox NAMED “Firefox”. Over the years, some enterprising upstarts have taken the Firefox codebase and built new browsers on top of it.

Flock browser is geared for Web 2.0 addicts. It automatically logs into your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Gmail– the list is enormous and ever-growing. Suffice it to say that if there ever was a browser meant for fun (not work), Flock is it.

Another Firefox-powered browser, Wyzo, is optimized for the rabid BitTorrent downloader. It has BitTorrent built in, along with an enhanced download manager, CoolIris, and some other nice updates to the original Firefox recipe.

While each browser has its own intended strengths out of the box, you can also outfit each one with the Firefox add-ons that help you get all your tasks done quickly and easily. What I’ve done is just one way to approach this, but it shows you what can be done.

Firefox

Firefox itself has become my work browser. I have to manage my (Google Apps for your Domain) email, calendars, school blog sites, to-dos, and plan lesson presentations (which for me, involves scanning through lots of photos online so I can illustrate what I want to say). My Firefox is optimized for this task with a few plugins which support these tasks:

• Xoopit for Gmail– shows you a list of all of the files, photos, videos, and attachments in your Gmail, visually
• Greasemonkey– enables me to run Better Gmail 2, Better GCal, and Better GReader from the geniuses at Lifehacker
• CoolIris- an incredible addition to any browser that allows you to see photos in a beautiful 3D interface
• XMarks- to sync my bookmarks and stored passwords between browsers and computers
• Zemanta- offers suggestions for license-safe media to add into emails and blog posts, great for SEO on blogs
• Google Gears- so I can access all these online services even when I’m offline
• ScribeFire– a blogging client inside your web browser. Perfect for dragging, dropping, commenting, and publishing from the window you work in. Also helps with SEO and works with all major blogging services

On a final note, another great reason to have several different browser is that logging into a Google service as one user basically dominates your whole browser. When I log into Firefox with my work Google Apps account, it gets very confused and buggy when I try to use my personal Gmail for online services. Better to have one browser for work, and one for play. Speaking of play…

Flock

Flock has become the official browser of my personal life. I love its sidebar which gives me at-a-glance views of my Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube peeps while I browse. I log in with my own personal Gmail and Yahoo email accounts so I can access Flickr, Blogger, YouTube, and GoogleEverything easily. It’s the browser I turn on when I want to do my own thing.

• Xoopit for Gmail– especially good here for scanning through videos, photos, and files people have sent me– serves as a photo album
• Feedly- A beautiful new front-end redesign for Google Reader that allows you to catch up on all your RSS news while easily sharing it with your peeps
• Greasemonkey– I love Facebook Fixer, AutoPoke, and Remove All Facebook Ads
• Mozilla Ubiquity: This gives me access to my Ping.fm status updater, rememberthemilk tasks, and any bookmarklet that I can dream up with a quick key combination
• CoolIris- an incredible addition to any browser that allows you to see video and photos in a beautiful 3D interface– here it’s a great way to scan through YouTube in a very pleasing interface
• XMarks- to sync my bookmarks and stored passwords between browsers and computers

Wyzo

I just added Wyzo to become my dedicated web design/ developer browser. Not necessarily because of anything inherent in Wyzo’s makeup, just because I needed another iteration of Firefox to fill up with all the great tools people have developed to make Firefox an awesome WYSIWYG code editor. This way, I can open up Wyzo the way someone else might open DreamWeaver.

• Firebug: huge tool for seeing the code behind websites, editing the XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and debugging
• Web Developer ToolBar: seems similar to Firebug but with TONS of features. It’s new to me– will learn more.
• ScribeFire– a blogging client inside your web browser. Perfect for dragging, dropping, commenting, and publishing from the window you work in. Also helps with SEO and works with all major blogging services
• ColorZilla- a little dropper tool that allows you to pick up a color and see its hex code.
• FireFTP- Free FTP in your browser. Goodbye, Dreamweaver!
• Zemanta- offers suggestions for license-safe media to add into emails and blog posts, great for SEO on blogs

So this is just one geek’s idea about how to transform the various flavors of Firefox into useful tools for your many web browsing needs. As more and more of our computing moves from the desktop onto the interwebs, we will need to have different tools to suit the different tasks we do online. Another way to do this is to create Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) with Fluid or Prism– creating little “single use” apps that do one thing really well. But that’s a lesson for another day.

STEP 1

Choose a VOIP (voice over internet) application. Skype is a good choice because they have a desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Many other VOIP services I can think of (Jajah, Gizmo) work in a browser, so I don’t know how well they will work. You will see why in a minute.

STEP 2

Open the Preferences panel in Firefox. Go to the Applications tab.

STEP 3

Search for “callto”

STEP 4

Choose Skype (or your favorite VOIP app) to handle all callto links.

Voila! You’re done! Now telephone numbers on the sites you surf will automatically become callto links!

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Has this ever happened to you?

<<<<<<<RING! RING!>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Me: Hello?
Dad: Hi Ted. There’s a problem with the computer. All my programs disappeared.
Me: What do you mean they disappeared?
Dad: I don’t know– they’re just gone. No Firefox, no iPhoto, all gone.
Me: Can you see the dock?
Dad: What’s that?
Me: Never mind. Just go to the Finder.
Dad: What’s the Finder?

At this point, he wants me to fix this situation, even though he doesn’t have the language to accurately tell me what’s going on. This fundamental paradox is the whole basis for the humor in all those funny tech support transcripts that people forward all over the net.

When you are put in this position, you now have two good tools to get you out of it. Yuuguu.com allows you to share your desktop with any email, IM, or Skype contact you have so you can SHOW THEM visually where to go to fix their computer. You can even voice or text chat while you do it. The best part is that they don’t have to download or install anything to be able to see your screencasts. You just send them a link and they can see it in a web browser.

If you want to go even farther to helping out old Dad, you can actually take control of his computer, seeing his desktop on your screen. Chicken of the VNC is a great open source program that allows you to VNC (Virtual Network Computing) into their computer.

Of course, he needs to give you his IP address for you to do this (“My IP what?”), so you better get started with YuuGuu to show him how to find it!

VNC is also a great technology to allow you to log into other computers you might have around the house. I have an old Linux laptop that I use to store and stream my music files. With VNC, I can log into that computer remotely and manage the files there.

The coolest use of VNC, though, is controlling a computer from an iPhone, essentially making it a multitouch remote control. I use Jaadu VNC to control my Macbook from across the room– much to the shock and awe of my students!

Zemanta is a Firefox plugin that scans your blog posts for keywords, then suggests links, images, and tags to complement your blog. It’s super easy and free. Check it out!

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Post to your blog without ever leaving Firefox

ScribeFire, an extension of Firefox ®, can pop up right in front of the pages you’re browsing, allowing you to drag photos, video, and text right into a blog post, then comment and post. I love it because I can post to multiple blogs from this one window and it quickly and easily handles all the formatting for me.

Part of the Google Toolbar extension (for Firefox and IE) is a great little button called “Send this” which allows you to send anything you find in your web travels to your Blogger blog (or to your friends via email or text message).

Again, this makes it incredibly easy to make sure that those great
sites don’t get away, and that your audience can see them in an easy-to-read format.