Welcome to meryl’s notes blog (this here place you’re lookin’ at) in Plano, Texas. We’re honored to be a stop in Cindy Hudson‘s WOW! Women On Writing Blog tour. We’re giving away a copy of her book, Book by Book: The Complete Guide to Creating Mother-Daughter Book Clubs. Read on to see how you can win.

About Cindy Hudson: Cindy Hudson is the author of Book by Book: The Complete Guide to Creating Mother-Daughter Book Clubs (Seal Press, October 2009). She’s the founder of two long-running mother-daughter book clubs. Hudson lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two daughters. Visit her online at www.MotherDaughterBookClub.com.

Liven up Your Stories with Interviews by Cindy Hudson

You probably already know that good nonfiction often includes quotes from experts and other sources. Quotes lend an air of universality that the writer alone may not be able to portray. What may be less clear to you is how to find sources that will liven up your writing and give it credibility. Here are a few suggestions that to help:

1. Read books and magazines that quote experts like the ones you are seeking. When I was writing my guidebook for mother-daughter book clubs, I wanted to quote an expert in the field of mother-daughter relationships. I found my expert while reading an article about middle-school girls in Daughters magazine.
2. Put out a call through your blog or newsletter. Relating stories from moms in book clubs around the country was also an important part of my book. Before I started writing, I collected email addresses of those who sent in book reviews or contributed ideas to my website, Mother Daughter Book Club.com. When I was ready to write, I made a list of the kinds of stories I was looking for then put out a request to subscribers of my newsletter. I also posted a notice on my blog.
3. Talk to people you know. Chances are your friends and other acquaintances have a wealth of knowledge about many different professions, hobbies and interests. Make a list of everyone you know, where they work and anything else you know about them to help you identify sources. If you don’t find exactly what you’re looking for, ask those with the closest connection to recommend others. I connected with a well-known expert on library book groups through the librarian at my local branch.
4. Use social networking sites. Let your contacts at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter know what you are searching for, and they may have ideas to pass along.
5. Ask sources you’re already using. Chances are, they know someone else they can recommend you contact.
6. Do a broad Internet search. I was recently reminded that you can find just about anything you are looking for by typing key words into your favorite search engine and pressing the return key. You may even find unexpected results that will add extra dimension to whatever you are writing.

Remember to leave yourself enough time to connect with someone you hope to interview in person or over the phone. Even email interviews may take more time than you expect if your source can’t answer your questions right away.

Win: For a chance to win a copy of Book by Book: The Complete Guide to Creating Mother-Daughter Book Clubs, please leave a comment at least 50 words long about how you make the most out of interviews. Or share an interview tip. You have until 11:59pm on May 11, 2010 to qualify for the drawing. The unbiased and robotic Random.org has the honor of picking the winner.

Maybe because of my hearing loss, I tend to notice the slightest changes in facial expressions. I never thought anything of it until a friend mentioned it. She invited me to stay for dinner and I accepted. About 20 minutes later, I noticed her facial expression changed slightly.

I told my friend that I changed my mind about staying for dinner as I forgot about something the family needed to do at home. She was stunned because she knew I had figured out that her husband wasn’t happy with the dinner invitation. Reading body language and facial expressions help with business situations.

Learn about the 8 body language killers [Thanks, CEO Consultant]. The article says words count for only 7% of a presentation. The rest comes from voice and visuals.

The warnings take the perspective of a person giving a presentation. Recognizing these will help you adjust your presentation or interview to avert disaster as it’s never too late to try to turn things around.

Quickly: if you or anyone you know is familiar with WEP, WAP, IPSEC, please help. Email me if you know of experts and I’ll contact them. Thanks.

I’ve been so busy lately that as soon as I remember to do something, I forget. For the past couple of weeks, I wanted to write the meryl’s notes newsletter for June. It looks like I’m going to miss it as there’s no chance I’ll get it done and distributed today. Since the newsletter is informal, I didn’t want to kill myself to get it done when I have two others to distribute and a third in the making. Heck, I didn’t have time to write my daughter, who is at camp, an email yesterday (first time I’ve missed since she’s been gone).

Been getting to know Coldfusion (cfm). Am having a blast. I use the concepts I learned to create dynamic pages in PHP. It’s tricky since PHP and CFM are different, so when I find a problem in the code, I can’t use PHP as guidance. Databases don’t come to me naturally. It’s weird because I love geeky stuff and software, but my brain isn’t wired for it. But I did get the database working with Coldfusion and have other ideas for other projects. I’ll report on how I do things in cfm soon.

Reading Why I Deleted Email Interviews inspired my newest article, Why I Am Stuck Doing E-mail Interviews. Donna’s article is excellent and that’s why I was motivated to write my perspective. I try to educate people on the idiosyncrasies of leading life as a person who is deaf at Bionic Ear Blog. In fact, doing this blog helped me discover things about me that my hearing loss impacted. I grew up with an “I can do anything except talk on the phone without the relay” attitude. Now, I’m older and wiser and accept that’s not the case.
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Molly E. Holzschlag: Author, Speaker, and Teacher

Molly Holzschlag has worked for over a decade in the online world. She has written and contributed to over twenty books covering Internet-related topics. She has amazingly rolled out three books in the second half of 2001 including XML, HTML, XHTML Magic, Perl Web Site Workshop, and Color for Websites : Digital Media. She is the former executive editor of Webreview, a weekly site dedicated to Web professionals.

There are so many newsletters and e-zines covering web design available today, what would be valid reasons for publishing another online newsletter / ezine? How can a newsletter / ezine distinguish itself?

Right now is a time to sit back and watch. If you’re already doing publishing on either a commercial or independent basis, keep doing it, and keep trying to do it better. If you aren’t involved in publishing now, I would say put a lot of time into the observation and study of what has been and is now successful on the Web and in print, and why.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to publish a newsletter / ezine?

Start with the basic question of “who is my audience?” Designers should know that, developers should, and certainly anyone trying to publish information should know that too. Begin there. Then, clearly define your publication’s intent. Find the need in your audience, fulfill that need.

What is the PERL Web Site Workshop about? How does it differ from O’Reilly’s popular PERL series?

Perl Web Site Workshop is a book for Web designers who want to understand more about how to make Perl work on their Web sites. For the record, I don’t know anything about Perl programming, I co-authored the book with Jason Pellerin. Jason knows Perl. I contributed the designer voice and a great deal of editorial structure.

The book, interestingly enough, was originally written for O’Reilly. In the end, we mutually and on good terms decided the book would need a deep rewrite in order to match the audience (see what I mean about audience?) that O’Reilly typically caters to. While many of their books cover a very broad range of topics, they are best regarded for their advanced books on programming.

Sams Publishing has several excellent series, very hands on that help introduce products and technologies to beginning and intermediate audiences. This book was a much better suit to that audience and we’re all delighted with the way it worked out.

Many may not be aware of your book, Color for Websites: Digital Media Design, since it is published by a UK company. How is this different from Lynda Weinman’s well known color-related books? What is the focus?

Color for Websites is a highly polished, visual book published by a graphic design publishing company rather than a computer book publisher. That makes a difference, because the emphasis is on learning through visual inspiration. There are some fascinating aspects of this book, particularly the last chapter, which describes influences of culture and gender on human perception of color.

Tell us about your book, XML, HTML, XHTML Magic.

Well, this isn’t really my book at all. I was the lead author, which means also that I directed the editorial voice of the book. However, the content is totally collaborative: Christopher Schmitt, John Kuhlman, Martin L. DeVore, Jason Cranford Teague, and Steve Franklin all contributed projects.

I like this book because of its collaborative nature and because it’s well designed and fun.

You can’t make a mistake with XHTML, otherwise it wouldn’t be XHTML. What are some of the frequent mistakes encountered by users attempting XHTML?

I’m going to change this to include HTML and XHTML, because these guidelines work no matter which one you’re authoring. Follow these practices (note that not all of them are required for conformance in a given language or version, but follow this and you won’t go wrong in either):

1. Understand what a Document Type Definition (DTD) is
2. Pick a DTD for your site or project (this will be based on demographics and site intent)
3. Understand what a DOCTYPE declaration is and use it
4. Properly structure your documents (html, head, title, body; use of headers, paragraphs, and lists)
5. Wherever possible, separate presentation from structure (ie. Font from paragraph). This is done in HTML and XHTML with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
6. Wherever possible, use CSS layouts over table based layouts
7. Author all elements and attribute names in lower case.
8. Be sure to close any non-empty element (e.g. p, li) with a closing tag
9. Quote all attribute values
10. Validate your documents

In an article you wrote last year, you mentioned that XHTML was not catching on. Recently, we’ve seen a recent influx of XHTML plus CSS pages. Does this change your opinion of XHTML’s inability to catch the wave?

Absolutely! It is now becoming cool to pay attention to W3C recommendations. How weird, but great is that?

However, most of these XHTML-based pages are personal Web sites or designer Web sites rather than large company Web sites. What do you think will happen? Will the designers influence the companies?

Yes, I think that designers will influence their clients. I also think that clients in general are getting more educated. As higher bandwidth and contemporary, recommendations-compliant browsers continue to proliferate worldwide, we’ll naturally shed a lot of the cross-browser compatibility concerns that we’ve had to deal with.

In many ways, we really haven’t discovered the true way to design the Web. We’re getting closer. It’s the greatest challenge of the Web designer and developer’s profession: to create sites that are completely sound both technologically and esthetically.

Many conference, magazines, and ezines have dropped the “Web Design / Development” themes in exchange for Web services and technology leadership. What are your thoughts on this change?

The constant renaming of things confuses the masses.

In an appearance at Web Design World in New Orleans, you and Jeffrey Zeldman took a look at Web sites and commented on the good and bad. What are three important factors that make a successful Web site?

That depends upon your definition of success! For me, there’s only one real factor in a site’s success: Are you serving your audience? This holds true for commercial as well as personal sites.

And three problem areas that can ruin a Web site?

Ad banners, ad banners, and ad banners. They don’t work anyway, so can we make them go away, please?

What are you working on? What is next for you? Where can your fans find you other than at Molly.com?

I have several books in the works, which will be announced on my site and in my newsletter. I’m also starting an as yet-to-be-named new column covering contemporary techniques and issues in Web design and development. I’m speaking at a few low key events, I am glad for a little break in the very aggressive traveling schedule I used to have, but I do miss the conference scene, mostly as it kept me in regular face to face with my favorite friends and peers.

Any words of wisdom for the frustrated Web designer in today’s environment?

Look at this time as an opportunity. I’m struggling to do that myself, but I know it’s true. Despite the problems with the economy and global events-no, because of them-we must somehow find ways to work toward better goals in communications. And fundamentally, that’s what the Web is about. So let’s all learn to do it better.

Eddie Traversa: Author, DHTML Guru, and SVG Expert

Eddie Traversa is an author, Web consultant, and DHTML and SVG guru. His book, Dynamic XHTML Developers Guide is a joint project he worked on with Jeff Rouyer of HTMLguru.com fame.

For those who are new to SVG, what is it?

In a sense we are all new to SVG, so it’s important to understand what it is and how this will ultimately affect our web development / design practices. SVG is an acronym for Standard Vector Graphics. A simplistic but good way to think of SVG is to think of it as the HTMLXHTML equivalent for Vector Graphics. It is a XML based programming language that allows for the creation and manipulation of Vector Graphics.

The XML part is pivotal to SVG because it allows for the easy integration of other specifications such as SMIL and the DOM to name but a few. Vector based graphics also have the advantage of being a lower weight than traditional graphics such as jpg, gifs and also do not degrade when scaled. Combine these advantages with the ability to manipulate every aspect of the image and/or text it makes for a very compelling and attractive medium for developers and designers to explore.

The interesting part from a psychological viewpoint, is that artists will be programming and programmers will be creating “art.” SVG provides for the blending of two areas that were previously thought to be quiet separate. Time will tell what effect this will have on our work flow and web page building practices.

How does it compare to Java? Flash?

SVG is most often compared to Flash because both work with Vector Graphics and both have motion and multimedia capabilities. There are some really important differences though. SVG is open source, meaning that you can right click on the page and see the source code. That is an enormous benefit to developers and designers because many people like to get behind the scenes and learn by pulling someone else’s code apart.

A good way to think about this is that SVG can do everything Flash does and then some. Flash cannot do everything SVG does, at least not without a considerable amount of effort and trouble. For example, it is feasible to create an international language system in Flash, where the Flash page adapts to the users language. But doing so would require some extensive effort on the Flash developers behalf. In SVG it is simply a matter of adding a few tags to accommodate different languages.

SVG really is a feature rich specification and that cant be emphasized enough. But, it does currently fall behind Fash and Java in terms of popularity. Chances are if you create a flash page or have a java applet on your web pages that the user will be able to access your page without too much difficulty. Since SVG is relatively new by comparison, chances are that the user will need to download a plug-in and the plug-in itself is quiet large to download and is cpu intensive. That’s a significant advantage that Flash and Java both currently hold over SVG. But, the future looks brighter as browsers move towards supporting SVG outright and that means no plugin.

Much of the above also holds true for Java, but an important distinction here is that attempting to do many of the things that SVG is capable of with Java results in a much larger file size by comparison.

Other than the Adobe Plug-in, what other tools does one need to begin creating SVG pages?

You will need a good HTML editor to write out the code. Other than that you don’t really need anything, but I find when creating complex graphics something like Jasc’s Web Pro is useful as it’s specifically designed for SVG. You can also create SVG in Adobe Illustrator, Ulead PhotoImpact 7 and quiet a few other programs. Basically, any graphic program that allows for the creation of SVG is handy to construct complex vector images.

Some people may find it faster and easier to use PhotoShop to create graphics like those found in your tutorial examples at Webreference. What advantages does SVG offer over graphic programs like PhotoShop and Freehand?

As mentioned above there are graphics program around that will allow for the creation of SVG. It is also possible that programs like Photoshop will support SVG in the future given that the company has made a significant investment in SVG. I don’t see that the transition to creating the graphics for SVG will be that great a learning curve.

But creating graphics is only one part of SVG. SVG easily hooks into other technologies like SMIL and the DOM and this to me is really what separates SVG from traditional images like gifs or jpgs. We can manipulate an SVG image color, shape, texture, make it morph into something else, literally the possibilities are endless. In a paradoxical way the advantage (more control over web pages) is offset with the disadvantage (lots to learn). In short SVG isn’t perfect.

Because you have to indicate the exact points for the property such as:

   (fill:rgb(39,44,231);)

what is the easiest way to determine the points?

I think it is more important to remember the general concepts of working with SVG than attempting to remember every point in a complex graphic and then remember the points that need to be animated. To help in this endeavor, I usually split the work flow into two separate domains; Creating and styling the images and manipulating the images.

Typically, I create and style the images in a graphics application, which removes much of the tedium of typing out numerous points. There may be some touch-up work involved, where diving into the code allows more finite control (knowing what the code means is important here), but the general flavor of the image is handled by a graphics application.

Dynamically manipulating the image I prefer to hand code in, because very often I need very precise control. What helps me personally in determining the points to manipulate and how to manipulate them is my experience with DHTML and Flash. If you know how to dynamically position a CSS layer or manipulate some of its properties, then the jump to SVG is not as great as many would believe. Similarly, if you have experience in Flash then you already have experience in manipulating Vector Graphics, particularly if you use Action Script to do so. In short, if you have some experience with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash then these stand you in good stead to handle SVG.

There is even a way to work with SVG for those that prefer to work in an application. For example, Jasc’s Web Draw allows you to dynamically manipulate SVG through the use of a time line. Adobe GoLive also includes SVG support so there are now quiet a few software programs beginning to appear with the SVG developer in mind. The problem with using packages like this is you are always bound by the capabilities of the programs, where as by comparison the only thing binding you is the specification itself and your imagination.

Other than your tutorial and Webreference, what other resources do you recommend for people who want to learn more about SVG?

I am really fond of the material at the Adobe SVG center, that’s a good starting point as it links out to other SVG resources. Then, of course, there is always the Holy Grail of SVG; W3C.

Congratulations on your current book project on Dynamic XHTML. What can you tell us about it?

Dynamic XHTML Developers Guide is a joint book project by Jeff Rouyer of HTMLguru.com fame and me. The primary focus of the book is to lead the reader through the process of building a state of the art Dynamic XHTML site. One of our goals of this book, was to inject as much of our personalities and humor into the book as possible, without distracting the reader from the actual content. To achieve this, we created some characters, eg, Herbert the Sock Monkey and Lenny the Lizard, among others, and they are used as guides throughout the book and the templates to help illustrate concepts in an amusing way. We think its going to be an informative and a fun book to read.

As readers read through the book they will be introduced to “Smart Web Page Technology” where the page ‘magically’ transforms to user defined preferences. There are quite a number of Dynamic XHTML techniques throughout the book, ranging from building different menu systems, to graphical techniques used in the making of the templates, to some really neat Dynamic XHTML text effects, that originally were based from C++ and advanced geometry. While the above may sound complex to some, Jeff and I have gone to some lengths to make both the novice and the expert feel at home. That’s really been the tricky part of writing this book.

How is it different from other books on XHTML?

Most of the books I have seen / read on XHTML focus on the XHTML specifications and therefore tend to be reference oriented. Reference type books are valuable additions to the XHTML paradigm, but they don’t lead a user through the process of building a complete XHTML web site from the ground up. Dynamic XHTML Developers Guide addresses this issue by deconstructing a Web Template. It also differs from other XHTML books, in that it presents new concepts to the Web Development / Design Community. Both Jeff and I like to think of ourselves as “pseudo inventors” so the book reflects our latest thinking on state of the art Dynamic XHTML techniques.

What do you think we can expect to see in the next few years?

I think the next few years will mark an important development phase that is likely to define the Web for years to come. For example, will Flash die off, will be XML become the language of choice, will Netscape ever make a comeback? It will be exciting to be involved in this era, but at the same time a little daunting as the changes may be quiet rapid.

I think the developers and designers who keep pace with these changes will most likely be the ones that not only survive but also thrive.