Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

The second edition of Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug which came out in 2005 is a short 200-page stylish book on Web Usability. It has glowing reviews on Amazon. Jeff Atwood (I'm a long-time follower of his blog and I discovered "Code Complete" after reading through some of this articles) is a big fan of this book. Going by the reviews, I picked this book thinking it is a classic on this topic. I found that one-fourth of the short book was just pleasantries, credits, index, author plugging about his successful career as a consultant ["I'm writing this book for people who can't afford to hire (or rent) someone like me."], workshops & his (then) forthcoming book and lots of blank space. The author tells us 'I was proud of how short the book was. It took a lot of work, but it was an important part of the "practices what it preaches" business' but when you read the chapter  "Omit needless words" that has  4 pages...

[Update - 2022]  YouTube now automatically generates a transcript & timestamp that can be toggled Subtitles within videos help non-native speakers clearly understand & follow what's going on while the video is playing. If you wish to take notes from a YouTube video, you will find this tip for extracting the subtitles from a YouTube video (that has subtitles) to be a time-saver. I have adapted this tip from an answer to a related question on the Quora website - Open the video page in Chrome browser (or any other browser that provides HTTP debugging/Developer Tools) and pause the video Right click anywhere on the page, and click on Inspect Element OR hit the F12 function key. Click on Network tab Under the Network tab look for an item called timedtext.  Right click on it and open that file in a new tab. An xml file containing subtitles with their timestamps(the stuff inside of <>) opens up. To get rid of the timestamps and just have the plain transcript...

The Twitter micro-blogging service converts URLs within a tweet to a shortened form using its t.co domain to conserve the number of characters so that users can pack more into a 140-character limited tweet. Some evil guys misuse this service to cloak hyperlinks to shady websites. An unsuspecting reader may fall into the trap if the tweet is crafted to make the user click the link. While security is one reason why a developer may want to show the expanded form of the URL while displaying a customized view of a Twitter stream, there are other benefits of using the expanded URL that the Twitter API provides. If the expanded URL points to an image or video, the URL can be parsed to show it directly in the customized view. Here's a code sample to show expanded URLs alongwith tweets . It utilizes a script from the CodeBrunch site that displays a collection of Tweets with "infinite scrolling" -