Mark McSpadden

I was doing more normal feed scan on Tuesday, when I came across an article by Robbie Wright titled Making RSS Easy. Little did I know it would steal half of my week.

What Robbie and the world didn’t know is that at my day job I’ve been hacking away at a community site for bankers that is all about making industry specific information easier to find and use. With that in mind I started hacking away trying to aggregate FI feeds. The results are as follows:

• Six compiled FI feeds
• A splash page for Banktastic complete with Google Analytics
• A mailing list for the Banktastic Beta Launch
• A deadline for Banktastic Beta

The moral of the story: Don’t read Robbie’s blog :)

Open Source CU just gave me some props for the little disclaimer I’ve been using at the bottom of my emails. Since a mention on OSCU usually brings in some people, I thought I’d explain and expand a little for anyone that’s interested.

First, the disclaimer that appears just under my name on both my personal and professional emails:

Did I just sound like a jerk? If I came across as a little short, it may be due to the fact that I am currently experimenting with different disciplines of email writing. I am currently limiting all my emails to 3 sentences or less. Sound interesting? Read more at http://three.sentenc.es and help cut down on email clutter.

Where did I start?

A few months back I read Bit Literacy by Mark Hurst and made a personal commitment to write shorter emails. The problem was that I didn’t really share that commitment with anyone. You’d be surprised (or maybe you wouldn’t) at how many people got upset when I started sending one and two sentence emails that ultimately lacked the “personal fluff” they were used to. I quickly abandoned the practice for fear of losing all my friends.

The re-birth of the short email

A few weeks ago, I came across the three sentences site through my feed reading and was re-energized. I took a look at the 2, 4, and 5 sentence varieties but ultimately set myself on 3 and haven’t looked back. I quickly threw together the disclaimer, slapped it on my personal email, and asked permission to use it on my work emails as well. Since I work for one of the coolest companies out there I was given the “ok” and that’s where I sit today.

Personal Benefits

So I love writing shorter emails. Not only do I find my writing improving, but I find myself more likely to send emails. I know that if I can keep it short, there is a much better chance that my email will get read and be responded to. I do spend more time writing each email in order to get it under the 3 sentence limit, but to me it’s well worth it.

Hope you’ve found my little journey enlightening!

Update: I just tracked down where this whole sentences thing got started and this looks like the original. His disclaimer may be better than mine:

Q: Why is this email 5 sentences or less?
A: http://five.sentenc.es

I recently started and finished The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz and I have a hard time even explaining how good this book is. You need to buy this book. Go into the bookstore with blinders on (ignore the other choices) and get it today. Seriously.

Ok, so why do you need to read this book? Because it’s all about the mess of choices that we face everyday and how, as the the sub-sub title states, “the culture of abundance robs us of satisfaction.” There is a ton of info in this book about the way we make choices and insight into how we can be happier with the choices we make.

Now beyond just personal enlightenment, if you are someone in industry that is trying to better serve people, this is a must read. It will help you understand how people choose and why they often choose not to choose when presented with too many choices.

I’ve found this book to be extremely beneficial both personally and professionally. It has helped be happier with the daily choices I make and I think it’s helping build better websites.

Ok enough sales pitch…go buy it so we can talk about it.

So I’m blogging more and posting more comments on blogs I read…which overall is a good thing. However, maintaining and following the conversations I get involved in via comments is super tedious. So I looked to my old friend Delicious for help in the matter.

I started by adding all the articles I’ve commented on to Delicious with appropriate tags plus two of my own homegrown tags: watching and contributed. Why two tags? Eventually I’d like to move articles off my “watching” list, but would still like a place to track down all the conversations I’ve “contributed” to.

Next, I wanted to be able to go to my “watching” tag in Delicious and quickly open up all the links. Hmmm…there’s not really a way to do that. So my buddy JS and I spent a half hour together and made our own. Here is the finished product that you can just drag into your “Bookmark Toolbar” on FF: DOAL: Delicious Open All Links

Now, anytime you are viewing a page in Delicious using FF, you can easily open all the links by clicking on that bookmark. (I don’t know what to tell you non-firefoxers…maybe someone in the comments can help you out.)

So, if you’re not a nerd, you should probably stop here. However, if you like Javascript, I’ll give you a quick walk through of what I did to get this thing going.

First, I went to my selected Delicious tag and opened up Firebug to start playing around. Using the inspect method, I see that the only “h4” tags on the page are the ones that house the links I want. Being a regular prototype user, here was my first attempt via the Firebug console: (Ok it’s not the first thing I typed, but my first real attempt)

$$('li.post h4 a').each(function(element) {window.open(element.href)});

Wow…that is good looking, sexy, one line JS! But it doesn’t work. For some reasons the “window.open” event wasn’t firing as expecting when inside the “each” function.

So I move to something like this:

var links = $$('li.post h4 a'); 
for(var i=0; i<links.length; i++) {
  window.open(links[i].href)
};

Ah the for loop…it’s been a while. This code works in Firebug, so I condense it to one line, put “javascript:” in front of it, paste it into the address bar, and hit enter. No go. ”$$” is not a function. Crap. Assuming prototype lives everywhere is a bad assumption. Let’s try to make it work without my favorite JS library.

var h4s = document.getElementsByTagName("h4"); 
for(var i=0; i<h4s.length; i++) {
  window.open(h4s[i].getElementsByTagName("a")[0].href)
}; 

Sweet. This working in the address bar, and opens up the right links, but it’s causing my Delicious page to go away. Let’s fix that.

var h4s = document.getElementsByTagName("h4"); 
for(var i=0; i<h4s.length; i++) {
  window.open(h4s[i].getElementsByTagName("a")[0].href)
}; 
window.refresh();

That’s better. Now all you do is right click in your bookmark toolbar, choose “New bookmark”, name it and insert the one line version of the code with “javascript:” in front of it and you have a Delicious extension!

I’m open to re-writes and suggestions for better efficiency, so if you’ve got ideas, let’s hear them.

Seriously who talks like that? Unfortunately too many of us that build web apps speak this way through the copy we use on our sites. Trey Reeme recently re-inspired me to stop talking like a techie and start talking like a human.

So I’m trying to do better, but it’s not all that easy. I’ve been in tech-land a long time. So I thought I’d start a personal “techie to human dictionary” to help me out. You can checkout this page to see where I’m at. (Don’t get your hopes up, there’s only 4 entries.)

I’d much appreciate any feedback or ideas! I’d really like to see this thing be a real resource…so let’s get started.

A feeble attempt to make my copy more human

• API = tool for programs to talk to each other
• CLI = text only, no mouse
• GUI (gooey) = better looking page
• Post = ?
• Submit = ?
• Thread = Conversation
• User = Person or Member