Avoid using underlines (except in hyperlinks and annotations)
The uptake of your ideas depends on good typography. Underlines are not a best practice.
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Canadian media: Where are they now?
Following up on new media projects from 2020.
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Thoughts for publishing page titles, menu labels, slugs, and headings
Don’t feel like you have to make these bits of information identical. They work together.
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Don’t rely on PDFs
PDFs tend to get overused, despite their many drawbacks.
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Beware scammy letters from predatory domain name registrars
Cultivate strong institutional memory to avoid falling prey to domain slamming.
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About QR codes
We’re still skeptical about QR code use. When we’re asked to put them on designs, we follow a few guidelines
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You can write your titles last
Writing is a joy. But it’s also the other stuff. Don’t make writing more painful than it needs to be; don’t get stuck on headlines or subtitles. Titles are friction. In WordPress, like most CMSs, the headline entry looms at the top of the page. Never forget you have several options: Ignore the title field…
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Archiving against erasure
There are many decisions to be made when building an archive. These decisions have often been made by individuals in positions of privilege or by institutions themselves. This means that archives have often been used to perpetuate misinformation or selective information in the name of crafting historical narratives that maintain current power structures. This potential…
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Disrupting the myth of the archive
Perhaps the most significant piece of misinformation generated by archives is the impression of their own authority.
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Drucker and humanistic design
At the University of California, LA, Johanna Drucker works as a professor of Bibliographical Studies. She is also the author of Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production.
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Historiated initials and the medieval selfie
Humans are meaning-making machines with an impulse to organize. Today we code paragraph breaks into our web pages. In the medieval period they rubricated signified paragraph breaks with colour-shifts.
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Why embed cards are worth looking at
An embed card is a hyperlink with bonus information and is one way to pitch to a person why they should visit your web page.
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Checking, and fixing, your article previews on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin
Sometimes, after we publish an article, we have to make edits. It happens. And sometimes these edits might affect the feature image, the title, or the excerpt. The challenge occurs if the article has already been shared to social media channels.
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Reflections on the digital film screening Lesbian Liberation Across Media
In June I had the opportunity to attend “Lesbian Liberation Across Media.” It was a film screening put on collaboratively by queer archives and media projects in Canada, and hosted by some of my personal academic heroes. One central theme from this screening was control over media. But equally important were the themes of learning…
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Seven new media projects worth following
These seven media projects are embracing this new reality and bucking the status quo. They give me hope that there is a future for writers and journalists in Canada, one that doesn’t look the same as it did fifty years ago, but which could thrive just as much, and be a lot more inclusive.
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You are the expert on your content
Content is supreme, be it text or image. An image can be riveting, but a contextualized image can capture more than passing interest. It can entice someone into seeking a deeper understanding of your work. And you are the expert on your content.
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Linking “into” your website
Deep linking from peripheral content to core content facilitates a web of interconnection beyond the mere sharing of space on a platform…
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In general, hyperlinks should open in the same window
Making hyperlinks is a foundational skill in web publishing; know how to make.
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Effective use of headings in web publishing
Headings are like a table of contents in your pages and posts. They provide both visual and behind the scenes structure to your content. To provide this meaningful structure, though, your headings need to be properly employed…
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How to avoid cruft in posts and pages
Not everyone drafts their content directly in their web publishing content manager. Authors sometimes draft their content in Word documents, Google Docs or some other software. When this content gets hastily copied and pasted into a content management system (CMS) like SquareSpace or WordPress, funky things can happen. Cruft happens Pretty much all text on…
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Manual excerpts are helpful
Manual excerpts are an important part of your articles. They work mostly as short summaries. And if you get good at writing them, they will help your website…
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Always write good alternative text
Alternative text is necessary for good publishing. Images on a website can be really important content. They give context, shape meaning, and move readers. It is really important that images…
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Improve your security habits on National Pass**** Day, March 15
Having good passcode habits is an important aspect of online security. And it’s something we all need to work at. The Better Business Bureau has announced the fourth annual National Pass**** Day and we think it’s a good idea. March 15th is a good day to reflect on your passphrase habits. Here are the bureau’s…
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Web first publishing
Web first publishing means publishing your carefully crafted content to your website first. We recommend it nine times out of ten…
