A little useful tool, for those who don’t mind slightly dabbling with HTML coding: a meta-tags analyzer.

While meta-tags are not “the” thing anymore when it comes to SEO (search-engine optimization), they’re still quite useful when it comes to getting properly indexed by search-engine spiders, and making sure that the ones on your webpage are up-to-date and appropriate can never hurt. At least, running my sites through it has pointed a few flaws to me, that I can now correct.

Y Tags: html | metatags | seo

I stumbled upon this site after following an ad. Yes, sometimes I click on AdSense banners; somewhere in the world, maybe some blogger has been cheered up by my click appearing in their reports. Anyway—I gave a try to Shvoong.com, more out of curiosity than of real hopes to make money through it, I admit.

So, what is Shvoong? Behind this word is a multi-language online database containing abstracts about books, ideas and concepts (said abstracts being written by the members themselves, who can earn money each time they’re read). The idea behind it is to provide summaries on the most topics possible, so that visitors can quickly have access to them. It’s not meant to provide full information, only summaries (usually in about 300, 600 or 900 words). Readers also have the opportunity to rate the abstracts; the better rated an abstract is, the better it brings money to its author. Probably this wouldn’t be much money, of course, unless one writes ten or twenty abstracts a day, perhaps.

The concept is nice. Whether it really works or not, this is another matter, but it’s nice regardless.

Y Tags: abstract | shvoong | writing

Found through Badgerbag, here’s a an amusing tool written by Ka-Ping Yee of wolog.net:

Regender filters the web & remaps gendered terms. He swaps with she, woman with man, and – best – Michael with Michelle. It’s surreal to read the New York Times front page when all the reporters and subjects of reporting are women. (Or have even the thinnest veneer of womanhood: a name.) It’s surreal to realize how surreal it is. Though I’m one of the rantiest feminists around, and I think a lot about it, it still jolted me to realize just how much of the world is about men, run by men, and reported by men. I don’t even NOTICE. It goes under the radar. It’s “normal”. Ping’s tool de-normalizes patriarchy. Coming up against my own sexism—because not noticing the imbalance is sexist, make no mistake – is tough and disturbing.

Amusing, and also giving a lot to think at times, when finally noticing how much “rewriting” a whole site can make its content look suddenly so very different in meaning. I’ve tried it on a few pages, from this very blog to online newspapers, and some of the results indeed end up being almost surreal (changes applied to names are part of making it so, I think—especially when seeing “Frank Inter” instead of “France Inter” in one of my own posts, and frantically searchingthe Edit button before realizing it wasn’t a typo on my part). It would probably have even more of an impact if I were to use it to browse my regular sites during a week or so, perhaps confusing my brain, perhaps opening my perceptions some more, who knows?

An example of what Regender can do? Here’s an excerpt of a regendered post at Burningbird:

“Elwell informed his boss in Anthony of 2004 about being pregnant with quadruplets, and that he wouldn’t be able to travel for some weeks because of complications. His boss, Tina Armstrong, showed him a chart of the organization with his name removed in Mark, saying that he was being removed from the position because he couldn’t travel. She offered another position in operations, which he considered a demotion. He countered with a request for the East Coast sales director position, which meant he could continue in his field of interest, sales, and be able to travel for his job, because he could take trains or drive.”

An interesting shift of perception on the world, isn’t it?

I had first spotted a link to this website on Bombast.org, so later on, I went and checked it for myself for a little longer than just clicking and having a quick look. The website is called Vischeck, and provides interesting information about color blindness, as well as examples and a page to check how your website will appear.

Roughly 1 in 20 people have some sort of color vision deficiency. The world looks different to these people: they often find it hard to tell red and green things apart. This often means that they sometimes can’t see things that ‘color normal’ people can see.

Many pictures, documents and web pages are hard for color blind people to read because the people who designed them didn’t think about the problem. Vischeck lets them check their work for color blind visibility. It is also interesting to anyone who is just plain curious about what the world looks like if you’re color blind.

This may not seem more than a curiosity; however, for a graphic-designer or for anyone who dabbles in web-design and wants to obtain the most accuracy possible when it comes to displaying a site, this is a “detail” that not many people usually take into account.

(All in all, once tested through Vischeck, this blog remains readable. It’s a good beginning, I think.)