A good launch needs a pre-flight checklist.

Launchlist.net covers the basics, with room to customise for your web project.

(via Coudal Partners)

I’m probably responsible for more than my fair share of this email traffic. The job titles I’ve held tend to attract quite a bit of unsolicited mail from outside the University, and a large proportion of our internal business is done in writing. Plus I belong to several email discussion lists.

Recently I’ve been playing with Xobni, a plugin for Microsoft Outlook. It’s fast to download, easy to install and simple to use.

xobni sets itself up as a pane/menu on the right-hand side of your Outlook window. As you read and act upon emails, Xobni provides information about your various contacts — name and phone number, what time of day they’re likely to respond to your messages, when you last contacted them, documents you’ve shared with each other… It also offers super-fast searching of your emails — much faster than Outlook’s built-in search.

While I’m not a big fan of the GTD/personal productivity cult, I can see some advantages to using Xobni. Mostly, the benefit is that it speeds up routine Outlook tasks like finding contacts and documents. Less wasted time = less low-level stress.

(Xobni is “inbox” spelled backwards)

More information: Xobni web site

Another such tool is Wordle.net, which can automagically make an even more aesthetically pleasing cloud of your wise and witty wordage. Here’s my del.icio.us collection of bookmarks, as seen by Wordle (click to see a larger version):

Simple Tags plugin for WordPress

Created by Amaury Balmer, the Simple Tags plugin works with the latest version of WordPress blogging software.

Once installed, the plugin:

• allows you to add tags to your blog entries, while you are still in the write/edit interface
• makes suggestions based on matching your previous tags with the text of the article you’re writing
• automagically generates a tag cloud for your web pages
• provides advanced editing and management of your tags list (much easier than messing around with the default WordPress categories, although these too have their place in your site’s information architecture)
• does an assortment of other nifty stuff

The plugin’s interfaces and documentation are written by a French-speaker who is reasonably articulate in English (far more than I am in French!! “Je ne parle pas Francais” is a terribly handy phrase, assuming one is not lying ;-).

This means the documentation and interfaces for the plugin can be slightly baffling if you’re not familiar with the kind of functionality on offer or if you’re unwilling to experiment with settings until you hit upon the right one.

It’s worth persisting, though: once you have it set up, the plugin works nicely and can enhance users’ experience of your web site.

More information: Amaury Balmer’s Simple Tags page

Hat-tip to Chris Norton’s recommendation, which convinced me to give this plugin a whirl.

Web Developer add-on for Firefox

Since its early days, I have preferred Firefox over Internet Explorer as my default web browser. Firefox was faster to launch, it downloaded pages more quickly and reliably, it used tabs instead of multiple windows to load more than one web page at a time, and it rarely crashed.

Firefox has one more advantage over IE: an ever-growing selection of ‘bonus extras’ that provide additional functionality. I’ve been slow to adopt these plugins and extensions, preferring to keep my Firefox setup as simple as possible. However, there are a few that have rapidly become indispensable.

The Web Developer add-on is one such extension. This toolbar helps you to analyse a web page from several perspectives: designer, coder, programmer, content editor, end-user.

When you want to know how a web page is constructed, try using this toolbar to turn stylesheets on and off, switch between tables and no-tables layouts, disable or enable javascript, highlight particular markup tags and content types.

The toolbar checks for cookies and lets you fiddle around with forms. At the click of a menu item, the Web Developer toolbar will produce a report on the web page’s coding quality (“amivalidornot?”). It will even download the source code, ready for editing.

The toolbar can assess a web page against an accessibility checklist, using CynthiaSays or another automated checking tool. I prefer the Wave, and it’s easy enough to change the Web Developer add-on’s options to use this instead. Of course, an automated process won’t always pick up accessibility problems: Patrick H Lauke’s article at WebAIM.org explains how to use the Web Developer toolbar to supplement the automated results.

Once installed in your browser, the Web Developer add-on should update automatically whenever there’s a new version available.

More information:

• Chris Pederick’s Web Developer add-on for Firefox
• Download the Firefox web browser

Excel macro: Clean This Chart

A macro for Microsoft Excel, available free from Juice Analytics.

The macro creates an extra option in Excel’s “Format” menu.

When activated, the macro converts Excel’s default grey ugliness into brightly colored, clean charts, almost Tuftean in their loveliness.

More information: Juice Analytics

SnagIt

A lightweight, easy-to-use application that takes snapshots of what’s displayed on your computer screen.

Great for writing web site reviews, manuals and technical documentation for software systems, reports and proposals for design jobs.

Forget those old Command+Shift+3 (Mac) and CTRL+PrtSc (Windows) keyboard shortcuts that include everything currently visible on your monitor. With SnagIt you can specify which subsection of the screen you want to grab — just a few pixels, a dialogue box, a whole window…

SnagIt saves images into JPG, GIF, PDF and other common file formats. You can crop the picture, highlight specific areas, draw arrows and shapes, add text and do other basic image-editing tasks in SnagIt.

More information: SnagIt from Techsmith

Adobe Acrobat Professional

Free and shareware “print as PDF” apps can do only so much. For professional-looking documentation, invest in professional-grade software.

With Acrobat Pro you can produce PDFs with customised metadata, proper bookmarks, working hyperlinks, a customised ‘opening view’, and several other accessibility and usability features.

Acrobat Pro lets you create forms that accept inputs, combine several PDFs into a single file and easily compress the file size for better storage and transfer (eg via email).

Acrobat Pro integrates neatly with many desktop applications, adding its own buttons to the standard toolbars, so that you don’t have to go through a tedious print setup in order to create a PDF.

More information: Adobe Acrobat applications