Email Etiquette Tip - DON’T SHOUT!

If you USE ALL CAPS in your email or message board posts, you will immediately make yourself seem inexperienced or ignorant. Most experienced computer users consider the use of all capital letters to be the Internet equivalent of shouting.

For those of us who spend a lot of time hanging out in cyberspace, messages written in all capital letters are reminiscent of trying to hold a conversation in which one person is shouting every word while others are speaking at a normal volume.

Also, a message written in all capitals is harder to read. In blocks of text rendered in all capitals, words lose their “shape” because they are all the same height. Each word becomes a uniform rectangle. Most people read and quickly recognize words by looking at their overall shape. We do not read by visualizing words one letter at a time.

Capital letters are best left for their intended usage and, sparingly, to emphasize a particular word or phrase.

If you are new to the ways of the Internet, this restriction on the use of capital letters might seem silly and you might dismiss it as unimportant. However, using all capitals in your messages will adversely affect how people perceive you online.

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Perl Template Toolkit

The Template Toolkit is a fast, powerful and easily extensible template processing system written in Perl with certain key elements coded in C for maximum speed. It is ideally suited (but not limited) to the creation of static and dynamic web content, and incorporates various modules and tools to simplify this process. The Toolkit is highly portable, with minimal dependencies or restrictions on how and where it can be used. It is robust, reliable, well documented and freely available as Open Source.

Features

Fast, powerful and extensible template processing system.
Powerful presentation language supports all standard templating directives, e.g. variable substitution, includes, conditionals, loops.

Many additional features such as output filtering, exception handling, macro definition, support for plugin objects, definition of template metadata, embedded Perl code (only enabled by EVAL_PERL option), definition of template blocks, a ’switch’ statement, and more.

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What is RSS?

RSS

RSS is a family of XML files format for web syndication used by news websites and weblogs. The acronym stands for one of the following standards:

* Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.9x)

* RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)

* Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.x)

RSS is used to provide items containing short descriptions of web
content together with a link to the full version of the content. This
information is delivered as an XML file called RSS feed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. An orange rectangle with the letters XML or RSS is often used as a link to a site’s RSS feed.

RSS is widely used by the weblog community and major news
organizations.

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Basics of Blogging

This short article—intended for the readers of blogs—will describe the process for newcomers.

Categories.There are two categories of blogs.

One is the traditional weblog, where a Web surfer shares his online discoveries.

The second is the Web diary, where a person shares his or her thoughts of the day. Often, blogs of one style have elements of the other. A diarist might discuss a link, while traditional webloggers will commonly ramble on about something that happened to them that day. Though the discussion here applies to both types of blogs, it focuses mainly on the weblog style.

Blog layout. Blogs are laid out in a last-in-first-out style. This means that the last item posted or written is at the top of the blog. Very few blogs violate this model, since it earmarks the site as a blog, and the mechanism of the software encourages it by default. Online magazines that purport to be something else are actually blogs if they use this style, and are probably laid out with blogging software.
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Windows.NET—what’s that?

Windows.NET will be the next server release from Microsoft. Here are a few features that are expected to debut in this OS:

* Larger memory support—memory block move and copy will improve performance.
* Application domain—applications are protected from each other.
* Common Language Runtime—will be bundled with the OS.
* IIS (Microsoft’s Web server software) moves into the kernel—this will improve performance but the chances of IIS bringing the server down will rise.

Why .NET?

Daniel Ingitaraj, senior marketing manager at Microsoft India says, “Class libraries are the same across languages. Earlier, ADO was always connected—it assumed the existence of a LAN. ADO.NET assumes a disconnected world (dial-up Internet).”

“Once you use pointers, you are out of .NET. C# marks pointer code as unsafe,” adds Ingitaraj. “ASP was traditionally easy to write but difficult to manage. There was no concept of reusing code, no Object-Oriented features, no caching. In ASP.NET there is a new file extension—.aspx. On the first run, the aspx is compiled and stored for future use—a DLL is created. If there is a change in the aspx source file, the CLR recompiles it,” says Ingitaraj.
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What are Weblogs?

Weblogs are Web pages built by real people, blessedly free of corporate-speak and ubiquitous images of tall-shiny skyscrapers, smiley people gazing intelligently into laptops, or besuited, smarmy business-types shaking hands. Weblogs — logs of the Web, see? — are the where the real action is. They are the creation of individuals, usually musings on national, local or personal events, links to interesting articles, a few lines of comment or discussion collected and presented by one person. While not sounding like much, Weblogs are a milestone in the short history of the Internet.

Part of a blog’s charm is its simplicity. In most cases it’s plain text simply but elegantly laid out. Pages are quick to load. The content is concise and measured. The more you read a blog you like and the closer you feel to its author, the more you will trust their choice and follow the links offered. While for some people the appeal of the more personal blogs is in connecting with others through a kind of virtual diary of one’s thoughts and observations, for others the more straightforward digest of recent news — and the blogger’s interpretation and comment on that news — serves a more prosaic purpose. Above all, it’s free.
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