Category: Geekery

  • Boost Your Blog: AI for Content, SEO & Accessibility!

    Boost Your Blog: AI for Content, SEO & Accessibility!

    In the ever-evolving world of digital content, standing out can be a daunting task. Yet, with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), bloggers now have a treasure trove of tools at their disposal to create captivating content, optimize their search engine performance, and ensure accessibility for all. Let’s explore how AI can elevate your blog, making it a beacon of excellence in the vast ocean of online content.

    Elevate Your Blog: AI’s Magic Touch for Content!

    Creating engaging and high-quality content is an art, and AI is the brush that can paint your blog with strokes of brilliance. AI writing assistants, like GPT-4, can help generate ideas, craft compelling headlines, and even produce full-length articles that resonate with your audience. These tools analyze massive datasets to understand what readers crave, ensuring your content is not only informative but also enthralling.

    Moreover, AI can assist in maintaining a consistent voice and style across your blog. Whether you’re writing a tech review or a travel diary, AI-powered tools can adapt to your unique tone, making your content feel cohesive and polished. They can also suggest improvements, highlight areas that need clarity, and correct grammatical errors, saving you precious time and effort.

    Interactive and multimedia content is another area where AI shines. From generating personalized quizzes to creating stunning visuals, AI can transform your static blog posts into dynamic experiences. By integrating AI-powered chatbots, you can also enhance user engagement, providing instant responses to reader queries and making your blog a lively, interactive platform.

    SEO & Accessibility: AI Tools to Skyrocket Your Success!

    Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical for making your blog discoverable, and AI tools can supercharge your efforts. AI-powered SEO tools analyze search patterns, keywords, and competitors to provide insights that can boost your rankings. These tools can suggest the best keywords to target, optimize meta descriptions, and even predict which topics will trend next, ensuring your content remains relevant and easily found by search engines.

    In addition to SEO, accessibility is a crucial aspect that often goes overlooked. AI can help make your blog more inclusive by providing tools that ensure your content is accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. AI-driven accessibility checkers can identify and rectify issues such as poor color contrast, missing alt text on images, and improper heading structures. This not only broadens your audience but also enhances user experience, making your blog a welcoming place for all readers.

    Voice search is another area where AI can make a significant impact. With more users relying on voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, optimizing your blog for voice search is becoming increasingly important. AI tools can help you tailor your content to the nuances of spoken language, ensuring that your blog is easily discoverable through voice queries. This opens up new avenues for traffic and engagement, propelling your blog to new heights.

    Embracing AI in your blogging journey can unlock endless possibilities, transforming your content creation process and maximizing your reach. From crafting compelling articles to optimizing for search engines and ensuring accessibility, AI tools offer a magical touch that can elevate your blog to new levels of success. So, why wait? Dive into the world of AI and watch your blog soar to new heights, delighting readers and dominating search results!

  • TV election debates create ‘plausible tarts’, warns historian

    Peter Hennessy said that he had “grave reservations” about the broadcasting of the leadership debates, which took place in Britain for the first time before the 2010 ­general election.

    Warning that they meant future leaders would be selected for being “plausible tarts” rather than simply “decent”, he said a culture of “celebritocracy” could blight politics.

    Lord Hennessy, a cross-bench peer, added that Clement Attlee, the post-war Labour prime minister, would never be elected today because his “considerable virtues” would be eclipsed by his “charisma and presence of a gerbil”.

    “The problem with the debates is that the structure of them, the nature of the celebrity in Britain in parts of the media these days, mean that to shine in leadership debates before a general election, you need the characteristics of a plausible tart,” he said.

    “Now, being a plausible tart is about 10 per cent of the requirement of being prime minister — no more. It’s not the most important bit.

    “My fear is that we’ll be stuck with these leadership elections and when parties choose leaders in the future, the plausible tart bit will play too powerfully in their choice of leader and therefore rule out the decent but non-tarty people.”

    “They’re only happy in their own company.

    Speaking of the perils of 24-hour news, Lord Hennessy also criticised the habit of parties to rush into responses and “collapse in tittishness” by posting reactions to everything on Twitter.

    “The cumulative power of celebritocracy and soundbitery means that it’s an ever narrower spectrum in which you operate,” he said.

    “Clement Attlee wouldn’t get through any selection process now because his answers would be monosyllabic.

    “He was a man of considerable virtue but it would be unimaginable today, because he had all the charisma and presence of a gerbil. It’s inconceivable now. If there was such a character around, he or she wouldn’t make it.”

    via Ways With Words 2013: TV election debates create ‘plausible tarts’, warns historian – Telegraph.

  • UXBrighton

    Cennydd and James discuss the experience of writing a UX book, from the proposal and the money to the workflow and personal sacrifice involved. They talk about what publishers are looking for from potential authors, how to make a strong business case for your title, and how to come to terms with the alien practices of print publishing.

    Cennydd and James will discuss the experience of writing a UX book, from the proposal and the money to the workflow and personal sacrifice involved. They’ll talk about what publishers are looking for from potential authors, how to make a strong business case for your title, and how to come to terms with the alien practices of print publishing.

  • HTML5 Video Available on the Web – October Update

    • 54% of web video is now available for playback in HTML5. Double in 5 months.
    • Flash remains the dominant player within desktop environments.
    • Mobile is driving HTML5 video adoption. HTML5 compatible (H.264 mostly) video is the most common format for mobiles (inc. iPhone, iPad and Android).
    • Publishers & platforms now offer iframe embeds, allowing them to switch players dynamically, depending on the access device.

    via HTML5 Video Available on the Web – October Update.

  • 7 tips to organize your CSS

    Working often with CSS for my own website or for my job makes me trying always to be organized and that made me thinking about a thing. What is the best way to organize my CSS file(s)? With this article I will try to present you a short guide about CSS organizing.

    via 7 tips to organize your CSS – Red Team Design.

  • The Complete WordPress-as-a-CMS Guide: Benefits, Tips, Common Questions and Inspiration

    The WordPress platform offers a simple user interface when it comes to other content management systems. After logging into WP you’ll arrive at the dashboard. The WordPress dashboard allows you to change many elements of your website without having to know a line of code. You can change/edit images, pages, posts, content and a variety of other features fairly quickly. Check out the logged in WP dashboard below:

    (WordPress dashboard)

    User Friendly:

    WordPress is extremely user friendly. Other content management systems boast about their endless list of features, but more often than not, they are extremely complicated to use. WordPress however, is easy to adapt to without any needed support. To add a new post to your blog/website you’ll need to create a new post, customize the URL, upload/edit content and “update” the page, which will push it live on your site. Check out this process below:

    (WordPress Dashboard – Editing & Posting Content)

    via The Complete WordPress-as-a-CMS Guide: Benefits, Tips, Common Questions and Inspiration | Inspired Magazine.

  • Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)

    Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period. You benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your relational database instance via a single API call. In addition, Amazon RDS allows you to easily deploy your database instance across multiple Availability Zones to achieve enhanced availability and reliability for critical production deployments. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no up-front investments required, and you pay only for the resources you use.

    via Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

  • Git for the lazy – Spheriki

    Git is a distributed version control system. No, you dont need to know what that means to use this guide. Think of it as a time machine: Subversion or CVS without the cruft.If you make a lot of changes, but decided you made a mistake, this will save your butt.This guide is for people who want to jump to any point in time with their project/game/whatever, and want something to use for themselves.

    via Git for the lazy – Spheriki.

  • Jonathan Ive on the design of the iPhone 4

    “Those three black splits are co-molded in, and then the band goes through more processes,” Ive points out. “So it's assembled first, the band, and then the final machining and grinding are performed, so the tolerances are extraordinary…. Whatever people's feelings are about the actual design of the product is of course subjective. But objectively I can say that the manufacturing tolerances are phenomenal. And we determined this, we designed it from the very beginning to meet those goals.”

    via Core77 speaks with Jonathan Ive on the design of the iPhone 4: Material Matters – Core77.

  • Magento Absolute Theme New Grid Layout

    Due to the odd row class kicking in after x number of columns, the $_columnsCount number needs to be set to the total or row count: