I just released an upgrade to Wikipop, my WordPress plugin. I had a number of requests for the plugin to support Wikipedia languages other than English. I added a popup window in the visual editor that allows you to select your language, and if you want, search Wikipedia for text other than the text you’re linking. Check out my plugin page for the full changelog and a link to the download. If you already have Wikipop installed, you can just upgrade automatically from the WordPress administration panel.
Online retailers and service providers face an interesting challenge when it comes to their customer service strategy. On the one hand, one of the things people like about buying stuff online is that they can do simple shopping at home in their bathrobes while they’re microwaving a Hot Pocket, and they don’t have to bother with the trivialities of human interaction. While I’d rather buy something like a tailored suit from a brick-and-mortar store with a real live person who can assure me that I’m dropping hundreds of dollars on something that’s actually going to be worth my money, I can’t say that I would really miss the customer service experience I have every week at a place like the grocery store if I switched over to an online alternative like Fresh Direct.
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Living in New York I’ve had the pleasure to get to know a lot of talented musicians. A whole lot. And not just talented in that small pond, listenable-but-probably-still-going-to-be-working-at-the-Fashion-Bug-five-years-from-now kind of way. A lot of these people are people who I fully expect will make real-life paying jobs out of their music, if they want to. Fortunately for them, they’re launching these fledgling careers at what should be a great time, historically speaking, for the self-promoting artist. Given the tools available online, a new artist supposedly should have everything they need to make a go of it, assuming they have the talent to back up their efforts. But something appears to still be missing.
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about keeping my attention focused, inspired in part by a few things I’ve read recently, and in part by the fact that we’re in our most frenetic time of the year at work, which means attention is a precious commodity. The difficulty of the situation is that I work in a business where the fragmentation of attention is not only common, it’s sort of encouraged. The trouble with maintaining focus in any office environment is that you can’t really escape the fact that you’re in said office to work collaboratively with other people, and those people are going to want to talk to you. This problem is magnified in the tech sector because A) the great thing about the internet is that there’s all kinds of stuff happening all at once, and B) many of our exciting new communication tools (Twitter, IM, etc) are designed to capture your immediate attention, regardless of what you’re doing.
Here are a few things I’ve been putting into effect to maintain my ability to focus at work and at home. This isn’t a particularly original list, as there are a whole lot of very smart people writing on this subject, but this is what’s been working for me:
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