Posting Summary for August 2009

The problem with journals or blogs is that the older entries start to drop off the end and you can’t enumerate them all in the column index because otherwise it would go on for pages and pages, and there is a basic design rule of Web sites that a ‘page’ should not be longer than about four screen scrolls.

I have limited my column index to the last 200 posts, but even then the number of pages goes way past two screen scrolls. In fact just checking it then I was alarmed to find it goes for 11 screen scrolls even with just the last 200 listed; and that is on my 1680x1050 screen. It will be ‘worse’ for people with 768y screens (which would only get three quarters as much per screen), or 1024y screens.

As it happens almost nobody seems to follow the four screen scrolls rule much any more. Just checking the Huffingtonpost site (here) it goes for 10 screen scrolls on my screen. The designers at Digg (here) have done it almost right with 2.5 screen scrolls. Ditto for Reddit (here). The New York Times (here) are also pretty good with four and bit scrolls which is the same for The National Geographic site (here).

But the bottom line is that stuff has to drop off the end sooner or later.

So my plan is to post a summary of each of the months that have fallen off the end of my “Last 200” index. This way there is a quick summary that can be used to check into postings that are out of screen scroll range—so to speak. The idea is that these summaries will be as brief as possible but give readers some idea of what earlier posting were about.

I have also included a column labelled “TRI” and this stands for “Today’s Relativity Index”. This is a rating between 1 and 5 where a 1 means that the posting is probably of very little, if any, interest ‘today’, and a 5 indicates that the interest level is probably as relevant ‘today’ as it was when the item was posted.

So, to start things off, here is my Posting Summary for August 2009.

Title & Link	What’s it about	Date & Excerpt	RIT
It All Goes Down to the Sea: The Plastic Vortex	The huge build-up of garbage, especially plastic bottles and other plastic products, out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.	30/8/2009 … a huge unintentional suspended garbage dump of things that float, mostly plastics, that have concentrated in a particular part of the Pacific Ocean after 40 plus years of being washed down to the sea.	5
Using the ‘em dash’ and other Dashes	According to the Chicago Style manual the em dash (—) is the third most incorrectly used piece of grammatical syntax in common writing. This posting points out the key difference between the three types of dashes and give a very brief rundown on where and how to use them.	25/8/2009 So many writers use a hyphen or standard dash (en dash) where an em dash was supposed to be used.	5
I Am Liking Windows 7	Back in August 2009 Windows 7 was still very new. This posting is about my experiences at that time with Windows 7.	24/8/2009 Even the RC1 release feels smooth and fast. Presumably the final release will be marginally better as the very last of any debugging or forensics collection code will have been removed.	2
Blog Authoring with Word 12/2007	Using Word 2007 for authoring blog postings.	23/8/2009 Word is not a perfect solution. Take tables for example. Although they are quick and easy to include, as you can see from the following, they do not always format as expected …	1
WRX Evo 4 Decal	I did a bit of playing around with Photoshop Elements using a picture of the WRX Evo 4 deacal on my son’s car.	21/8/2009 This picture was cropped down to just the decal part, brightened by setting the levels (or setting the "black and whites" as some people refer to it), and then I used the PhotoShop Elements magic wand to select the WRX and fill it in with a bright blue …	2
TWiT	TWiT (This Week in Tech) was, and still is, one of my “must visit” Web sites. Although I don’t listen to as many of the TWiT podcasts and videocasts that I used to I still listen to at least one a week.	21/8/2009 I find that with listening to the various TWiT podcasts, the ones that I prefer, I get little hints and tips of things that are extremely useful for both my work (I am an IT Consultant) and my personal computing enjoyment. I can then go and research them further as required if needed.	3
Getting Into Digital Photography	Some notes reflecting on my path into digital photography starting with my first camera, an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic II.	20/8/2009 I am a mad keen photographer and have been since I was about 12 when I was given a Kodak Box Brownie camera …	3

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