300 Words

We're devoting space this week to a blog post from mwvisa1, who has written a few articles himself and occasionally turns a nice phrase in his EE blog, Redemption Songs.

How to Write an Article in 300 Words!

When I started writing articles here on Experts Exchange, it was purely to quench my thirst for writing. After a few years of writing and presenting, I am reminded that the important part of the process is the research -- the message. Like all communication, one must start with a clear understanding of the purpose. For example, the purpose of this message is to present a quick guideline on writing articles. Once one formulates the required message, including key points, the next step is to consider the audience and the correct platform. In other words, an article is not always appropriate; some content is more applicable as a blog entry or a newsletter.

So you have decided to write an article?

A big part of writing quality articles is ensuring it is the best medium for the desired message and audience. Subsequently, the delivery is also important. Be deliberate. Start with an introduction -- tell the audience what they are about to read. Follow-up with details -- tell the story. Last -- but not least and very crucial to the remaining communication steps -- conclude by telling the audience what they have just read, validating reception of the message. If done correctly, the communication cycle will perpetuate itself as the audience will provide meaningful feedback, which may inspire additional content.

Let your prose be your guide!

In summary, start with a good topic that is either very interesting or highly needed, and then enjoy the research! The journey here is often more important than the destination. Readers are often intrigued by the substance of an article and not its conclusion. Therefore, put effort into organizing the thoughts into a flow that invites interaction and feedback from the audience. Remember the point of communication is sharing an understanding with another. So connect through prose...

Happy writing!

Editors' Choice Articles

Nata's Corner

Okay, maybe this is a bit extreme when it comes to dealing with the people who steal credit card numbers, but there are times...

I was talking with the other half the other day about a grocery chain closing two stores not all that far away, and he said that they are probably in bad locations -- areas that were big enough to build a big store, but that turned out to be inconvenient to get to. He pointed out that the same chain had done the same thing in the town where we do a lot of our grocery shopping. "They're nothing special, so why go out of the way to go there?" he asked. But that made me think: The Internet has made us lazy. We want everything delivered to us; we don't want to go out and find it. Parents expect the schools to take care of their kids. We can order our groceries on line and pick them up whenever (or even have a taxi deliver them). It's almost like we want to spend as much time by ourselves as we possibly can.

I like looking through the Sunday paper, so we got a subscription to the Sacramento Bee, but we had to buy the whole week and they're piling up because I've already read most of the news I want to read online. (It's a good thing we have a long driveway, or we probably wouldn't get much exercise either.) My mother-in-law doesn't go shopping any more (and doesn't want to) because she can get everything online (she loves Zappos and Nordstrom's). The other half even does almost all of his work on line. We even went to a memorial service last weekend, and most of the information about it was delivered not by mail or even telephone -- but through Facebook.

By the way, both my mother-in-law and I got emails from Zappos telling us to reset our passwords. No link saying "click here to reset" -- just a very clear, nice email that says go to the Zappos site. Now that's how it's done correctly.

Speaking of Facebook, I'm almost to the point where I think I should just run a list every two weeks of the latest scams and viruses running through it; it's almost like it isn't news any more. There's the pink, red or black scam. There's the "Facebook isn't telling us the truth" allegations (DOH!). There's the baby cancer chain posts. There's the guy Facebook says is trying to scam it. There's the tiny blip on the radar screen of a bot stealing logins. And there's a decent chance that you will show up in an ad if you "Like" something.

It's a pretty safe bet that someone is going to post something like this to your Facebook wall:

Fortunately, someone else followed up. What's really going on is that every Facebook profile is assigned a unique identifier (like the MemberID number at EE), so the function is a shortcut to tag someone by that identifier. Those low numbers below 1000 are people who were on the original "Harvard-only" version of Facebook. Still it's a cute trick. But the point is that it's being sent around like it's gospel, which is a lot like those emails that used to say that forwarding would get you $1000 from Bill Gates. It's spam.

I couldn't help but think of Megan from the EE office when I saw this. When she left EE, she said that one of the things she wants to do is hike the Pacific Crest Trail, so it might be a good idea for her to keep an eye out for a wolf.

A rash of counterfeit tickets to popular events like Cirque du Soleil shows and playoff games are being sold on CraigsList. Obviously, not every offer you see on the site is bogus, but if the price is way out of line -- I saw four $240 per seat tickets for a concert on sale for $400 total recently -- then it's a pretty good bet that the offer isn't for real tickets. And you're not likely to get any help from the promoters or ticket agencies either.

Finally, if you've ever thought about installing some "Internet monitoring software" on your teenager's computer, you might want to think twice. A police officer in Germany did that, but his daughter's friends found it and hacked Dad's computer -- which also got them into the national police's suspects tracking systems.

Kudos

Recently our colleague mbizup wrote an article, targeted at people who post questions in the Microsoft Access topic area, about getting database issues resolved while managing sensitive information sensibly this is a Must-Read for anyone posting questions. You'll save yourself and a lot of other people a lot of headaches.

Oklahawkfan ran into a security problem in Vista that was answered by rogerhunt with an assist from rpggamergirl: "The importing of the reg keys worked ....with a little gamergirl tweeking! Thanks for all the great help once again....your the BEST!!!...."

BBDIT was looking for a way to automatically change file ownership. It took Qlemo a bit of time to get there, but eventually he worked everything out: "Qlemo, thanks so much for all your time (and this was considerable) and your patience. You are exactly what this site needs. Thanks again!!"

Copying and pasting between workbooks is one of those things most spreadsheet users want to learn sooner or later. Most recently, Quickstepbr got a lot more than he expected when aikimark helped him out: "Aikimark helped not only in solving my problem, but helped with great suggestions for future questions."

There are a few of us who couldn't drag ourselves away from Experts Exchange for New Year's Eve. That group included rortiz77, who found that suddently, Internet Explorer was associated with all of his .EXE files, and Run5k, who gave him the fix: "SWEEEEEEEEET!!!!! IT WORKED!!!! Ah...yes...I can enter the new year happy and stress free :) Thanks a million Run5k!!! Super fast and 100% correct solution!"

We're becoming used to seeing matthewspatrick come up with solutions in Excel; he referred to his article on the VBA Dictionary class to help gideonjones solve a problem with merging data from two spreadsheets: "Well holy cow. I just created this macro and ran it... tried to read through your code to try to understand how it knew to do the various specific things... couldn't figure it out... ran it... everything is right where it needs to be, the exact desired out put I required. I am blown away :D this is a level of wizardry far beyond my ken, you have my thanks! You have all the points!"

We would be remiss if we didn't point out that pdvsa probably meant no offense when mbizup provided him with a solution to his problem with inserting null values in Access; he had no way of knowing that "thank you mbizup! you da man..." wouldn't refer to the correct gender. Fortunately, younghv provided a suitable Atta-Girl.

In Brief

We're behind you seven per cent: If you don't know what SOPA is, you've been hiding. Spawned from the bowels of industries notoriously loathe to change (unless it makes them lots of money) and promoted by a good number of members of Congress more dazzled by movie stars than than by the billionaires at Google, Facebook and the rest. What's really going to be interesting is to see the fallout from Reddit's self-imposed outage today, and whether anyone else follows suit (Wikipedia's founder wants to). One is reminded of Bertholdt Brecht: "Grub first, then ethics."

We've been around a lot of political campaigns in our day, though -- and it seems to us that Reddit's members had a tactic that is much more likely to be successful -- especially in an election year. It certainly got President Obama's attention; then again, he may be the only elected official in Washington who knows where the ANY key is.

From the inbox: Our occasional correspondent skirklan wrote to us just before the New Year:

Trying to keep a straight face: We know you've read this before: Yahoo has hired a new CEO with no experience selling advertising. On the other hand, it gives us an excuse to dig up The Four Tops.

Most buzzwords used in a sentence of fewer than five words: Winner!. Let us know if you have a clue as to what it means, because in the words of one of our colleagues, "The experience is weak."

Thanks for the hot tip: Rupert Murdoch, owner of the same News Corp that became a running gag for months, has come to the conclusion that News Corp "screwed up MySpace". Let's not forget that whole LA Dodgers business. On the other hand, almost everyone else has screwed up almost everything else.

They can find their way home, too: Not only can pigeons deliver information faster than email, but it turns out they can count.

No refund on the advertising either: The US Securities and Exchange Commission has charged a company with selling $500 billion through LinkedIn. Nobody bought the spam. And on the subject of sleazy, the law firm that was suing bloggers for "stealing copyrighted news articles" from the Las Vegas Review-Journal had its domain name sold at auction before its attorneys became the subject of a state bar investigation.

No refund on the advertising, part II: Google broke its own rules. The reason you haven't heard much about it is because no one is suprised.

Why EE sends me a test blast of every newsletter: Jason sent us a newsletter from a hosting service, the first part of which is reprinted here as it appeared when it arrived.

Makes you almost want to go watch GoDaddy Super Bowl ads. And speaking of the Super Bowl, we might be closing in on a day when we don't have to read lips to know what athletes say when they strike out, fumble or foul.

Finally. And again. And again.

Not having a Happy New Year: That would be Google. Fined by a French court over auto-complete (no sense of humor, those French judges). Got caught stealing data and breaking its own rules and submitted itself to self-flagellation. Pushed "social search" to less than enthusiastic reviews (and pop culture critiques). Threatened with being blocked in India over obscenity. Had a trial date set in its fight with Oracle over Android and Java (but got a reprieve). Admitted selling ads for illegal goods. It's tough being so perfect.

Symantricks: Not a good couple of weeks for Symantec either. First, some of its source code was stolen, and then it got sued for using scare tactics to sell its software.

A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real people: Everyone knows China spies on everyone. Apparently, so does India.

Egg-streme displeasure: What do you get when you combine the newest Apple phone, sub-zero temperatures, and a long line of fanboys waiting to get one, only to find the Apple store doesn't have them? Scrambled eggs.

Happy birthday: The New England Journal of Medicine is 200.

Hope springs eternal: Those of you who spend your days removing viruses like Koobface off computers might want to follow Graham Culey's blog over the next couple of weeks.

Right up BooMod's alley: Qualcomm is offering up $10 million for a working tricorder.

Upon further review: So get this. You hit four out of five spots on a slot machine, but it starts telling you you've just won the big jackpot. You believe it, right? At least, until the casino says you only hit four out of five, and to win the jackpot, you have to hit five, right? So, you take the $100 and dinner they're offering you because the machine screwed up, and merrily go pouring that C-note back into the machine, right? Nope. You sue.

Wait'll next year: The Consumer Electronics Show was in Las Vegas last week, and so were the actresses looking for work, but that probably won't be enough to return it to relevance, as Microsoft won't be back next year, following Apple's 2009 decision to bail.

On a related note, the proletariat in China probably won't be attending -- and won't be on anyone's mind either -- at next year's CES.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Police in Boston admitted they screwed up with they arrested a man for recording the arrest of someone else. A Steve Jobs live action doll complete with [law] suit. Jersey Shore's Snooki added a whole new dimension to the term CES booth babe.

Milestones

New Savant: DatabaseMX is the ninth EE member to reach 10,000,000 points in a single topic area, and the second in the Microsoft Access TA; he also went over 10,000,000 points overall. Congratulations, Joe!

New Geniuses: rpggamergirl took advantage of the four weeks since our last regular newsletter to pull of the trifecta, scoring Genius certificates in the Windows XP, Anti-Spyware and Anti-Virus topic areas. Earning his fifth Genius certificate was sdstuber, this one in SQL Query Syntax; he also went over the 7,000,000 point level for his career. GrahamSkan also picked up his third Genius certificate, in Microsoft Office. Earning their first 1,000,000 point certificates were appari in MS SQL Server; scott in Microsoft Visio; e_aravind in Exchange; and kevinhsieh in Windows Server 2008. Thank you for all your great work!

My First Million: Experts Exchange members who reached the 1,000,000 point level in December were lcohan, jakethecatuk, 8080_Diver and DarkoLord. Well done!

Milestones:

• Ray_Paseur became the 19th member of Experts Exchange to reach 11,000,000 points since joining EE.
• CodeCruiser has earned 8,000,000 points in the VB.NET topic area, and by reaching 2,000,000 points in the .NET topic area, he has over that level in three different TAs.
• dariusg has earned over 6,000,000 points overall.
• chris_bottomley has earned over 2,000,000 points in both the Excel and Outlook topic areas.
• hanccocka has earned 5,000,000 points overall.
• ScottPletcher reached the 5,000,000 point level in Microsoft SQL Server.
• barryhoudini has earned over 4,000,000 points in the Microsoft Excel topic area.