Tech – Page 6 – Tech, writing, and tech writing

Screenshotting

A quick roundup of how to screenshot on various devices.

iOS: Power button and Home button – image goes to your Camera Roll album.
Android (4.0 and up): Power button and Volume Down button – image goes to the Screenshot album of the Gallery app.
Mac: Cmd–Shift–4, then drag the crosshairs that appear to section of a rectangular area of your screen – image goes to your desktop.
Windows: Ctrl–Alt–Print Screen to grab the active window, or Print Screen to grab the whole desktop – image goes to your clipboard, so open a graphics program, or Word, or mail, or … and paste it in.

Improving Webpage Readability in Safari on iOS

I don’t know how I’ve managed to miss this trick up to now, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to change my life. If you read web pages on an iOS device, it may change yours too.

If you’re looking at a webpage in the Safari browser on iOS and you see a little icon to the left of the URL field, you can click the icon to strip out all extraneous information on the page leaving only the text (automatically bumped up to a more readable size) and the images associated with the main page story. See the example below.

Note: You can achieve the same results on a MacOS device by clicking the Reader button to the right of the URL field.

Book Review: Learn to Program with Scratch by Majed Marji; No Starch Press

My latest selection for review from the O’Reilly Review Program is Learn to Program with Scratch by Majed Marji.

I picked this because my eldest has started to mess around with Scratch and I didn’t really know anything about it myself, so I wanted to get up to speed to be able to answer his questions.

The introduction says the book is targetted at readers from middle school and up: Wikipedia tells me that in the US this is age 11/12. It would definitely be beyond my 8yo to read this himself, and despite the kid-friendly looking cover, I found it challenging myself in places, despite being no spring chicken! 🙂

Things I liked:

As promised on the cover, it’s visual. There are lots of illustrations to help you identify GUI elements and to get an idea of what you’re aiming to achieve through the use of certain functions and tools.
It includes lots of short examples – “if you use these blocks, then this will happen, for example…”.
It includes “Try it out” sections suggesting how you might tweak the current task/project to get a different result, giving scope to experiment and learn more.
There are problems at the end of each chapter, so you can check you’ve really absorbed and undestood what was covered.
Lots of example files are available to download, so you can save yourself some work on initial setup and get straight to the trying things out if you prefer.

Things I didn’t like:

I found the longer examples/projects difficult to follow at times – possibly because they were mainly described in a series of paragraphs, rather than neat numbered steps or highlighted bullet points. This may be entirely down to my personal learning style, though, so your mileage may vary. It’s also possible that since I worked from the ebook edition rather than print, any formatting restraints imposed by that medium may have affected readability.
Sometimes, you’re told which palette certain blocks come from, other times you aren’t. I guess it’s a “first mention” thing, but since a number of the palettes are similarly coloured, and my memory isn’t what it once was, I could’ve done with a bit more help in the later examples.
I wasn’t keen on labelled images where you had to follow the trail from (1) to (2) to (3) to understand what was happening. Again, this one can probably be put down to learning style preferences.

There is useful information in there, but I think I’d’ve been happier using this book as a reference/refresher or source of ideas if I’d already learned the basics elsewhere – I didn’t find it ideal as my introduction to Scratch.

You can find out more about the book and order it direct from O’Reilly here.

Book Review: WordPress: The Missing Manual by Mathew MacDonald; O’Reilly Media

I’ve just finished reading WordPress: The Missing Manual by Mathew MacDonald, obtained via the O’Reilly Blogger Review Program, and it’s everything I hoped it might be and more.

I’ve had a self-hosted WordPress site for almost 4 years now: it was easy to set up, and is easy to manage as a blogging platform, but while reviewing this book I’ve begun to realise that I’m only really only scratching the surface of its capabilities.

The book kicks off with a clear explanation of what WordPress is and how it works – a key strength being the separation of content from style (theme). It looks at the pros and cons of self-hosting versus using wordpress.com, and explains the difference between different types of WordPress accounts, and the capabilities of different user roles. An appendix covers the process of migrating content from wordpress.com to a self-hosted site if you change your mind down the line.

While the focus is primarily on its strength as a blogging platform, there’s good in-depth discussion in later chapters of how to use it to present other content, such as business information, product catalogs, etc., and it’s full of links to examples of WordPress-powered sites in the wild, plus sites where you can locate WordPress-related resources such as free and paid-for plugins, page rank checking.

It covers a wide range of topics: different ways to use a WordPress site, why blog, best practices in writing effective content, search engine optimisation (SEO), how to promote your site, how to customise your site with plugins and widgets and by hacking themes, templates and styles. For comercially-minded folks, there’s discussion around how people monetize their blogs and how ecommerce can be integrated into the platform.

Where there are multiple ways of achieving the same thing, a number of the options are covered, generally with some indication of why one solution might suit your situation better than another.

There are some nifty practical tips and tricks that make a big difference too, such as clicking a little button I’d never really noticed before to maximise your editing space when composing posts online, or setting up third party edits to edit offline and publish automatically when you’re done. I discovered I’d been using categories where I should’ve been using tags, so used the tip on filtering for posts with a particular category/tag and applying bulk actions to rectify that!

All in all, I loved this book. It has something for users of all types and levels.

You can find out more about the book and order it direct from O’Reilly here.

Parcel Motel

I’ve been using Parcel Motel since shortly after they started operating and am a big fan. If you’ve been wondering what the story is with their big green lockers – typically located at petrol stations or shopping centres, so they’re handy enough to pull in beside – here’s a quick overview. Continue reading “Parcel Motel”