Although I’m a big fan of “plugin and forget about it”, I’m also a proponent of “less is more”, the fewer plugins the better. Why? Less updates and less possible conflicts between WordPress plugins. With that said I introduce to you a new way of manipulating WordPress to your advantage by creating a glossary without a WordPress plugin.

I recently created a glossary of recipes for a client and had quite a good time with it. This was actually a second glossary. The first was your typical alphabetical directory of terms created as posts and categorized in A-C, D-G, H-K, etc blocks. This recipes glossary, however, was categorized by courses such as breakfast, dinner, etc. Both types, alphabetical and categorical, require the same method which I will outline below.
[Read more →]

Like text messaging on a cell phone, video on the Internet should not replace common traditional modes of communication. Why? Because again, like text messaging, video serves a purpose but doesn’t and cannot tell the whole story. Especially on the web with bite sized bobs of information preceded or followed by ads.

Though a picture may say a thousand words, and video yet still ten thousand, sometimes you just want to read the bloody story and not have to update QuickTime or Flash plugin, or deal with video loading issues and/or errors. Like my hometown of NYC, the interweb should be thoughtfully convenient, not just “easy”.

I say, instead of reading an interesting headline on a news site like Yahoo News, MSN, NY Times or CNN, and clicking the title link to read a bit more about the story, but finding a video unstead, why not give us a choice.

More often than my patience allows, headlines, like movie previews these days, are misleading. So, I say at the very least, these news sites should just throw a summary of the video below or above the video. Or, if for advertising reasons these sites need the site visitors to watch the video – with prerolls and postrolls – they can put the entire story below with the usual inline ads.

Frankly, this last option, to me anyway, is more inline with what I would call “best practices” of social media/marketing. It gives site visitors options rather than assuming we want none. Were not all video junkies. And some of us who like watching videos on the Internet, don’t necessarily want to watch, but to read our news instead.

Though video killed the radio star, I believe there’s enough room for video and good old fashion plain text on this world wide interweb!