The literary world – especially academics – has a number of readability metrics that show how “hard” a given work is to read in English. If you are a writer, these metrics can give you a pretty good swag at how easy it will be for people to read your work.

In this article, I’ll show you a very simple way to gauge your own readability by using your RSS or Atom feed. (I’ll also talk about a fun way to analyze the word-smithing prowess of your readers.)

Qualitative Wordsmithing

Readability metrics use factors like words per sentence, multisyllabic frequency, and so on. These are three of the more common ones:

• Flesch Reading Ease: Measures sentence structure and complexity to determine how easy it is to read without stopping and re-reading, etc. Higher is better, but between 60 and 70 is a good score.
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade: What grade of school you will have needed to complete to handle the writing style and structure. Needless to say, this doesn’t reflect subject matter. A score of 5 that deals with quantum mechanics will only apply to 5th graders who already understand quantum mechanics. A score of 17 is something best left to grad students, who will probably curse you for it.
• Gunning Fog: Measures the obfuscation of meaning; the lower the number, the better. TV Guide is a 6. Government cover-ups and legal papers score 20 to 30.

Online Tool Time

Running the stats for these metrics by hand isn’t something a human needs to do. There are several online tools that will analyze your website/blog and give you readability scores. My personal favorite is the Readability Test by Juicy Studio.

The problem with such tools is that they only look at your homepage, so the results are skewed by static content like navigation or “About Us” blurbs. They are also – in most cases – only getting a small working set of articles to score. If you have reader comments showing up on your home page, that content will change your score as well.

The fact of the matter is that you probably don’t want to analyze your homepage, you really want to measure the readability of your content. There’s good news here: although the online tools like the one by Juicy Studio were intended to analyze web pages, they can be used in a much more powerful way.

The Feed Shows How You Read

Here’s a easy way to get better scores without static content interference and with more content to analyze: Use your full-text RSS or Atom feed URL instead.

The online readability tools are designed to ignore HTML markup, so they happily ignore the XML markup in RSS or Atom as well. That leaves you with a pretty high ratio of real content to be scored. Most feeds have 10 or 20 items in them, which is way more content than is on the typical home page.

The main caveat here is that you need to publish a full-text feed to get a realistic score. A smaller caveat is that some feed configurations will duplicate the content (partial text and full text in the same feed item), but that won’t have much effect.

For example, The Juicy Studio tool scores the TechBrew site and feed with these differences:

As you can see, the feed provides a much larger sample of content. I’m pleased to note the Flesch Reading Ease scores are consistent, but it would appear that you’ll need to be nearly in 7th grade to be a happy subscriber. (For an explanation of the scores, go back to the top of this article. You skimmer.)

Trolling for Comments

Less practical but more fun is when you use this same technique on a website’s comment feed. Many blogs provide an RSS or Atom feed of just posted comments. That feed provides a unique – but admittedly not very sophisticated – way to measure the sophistication (or obfuscation) of a site’s reader base.

For example, here are the Flesch-Kincaid Grade for the reader comments at some well-known sites:

• Robert Scoble: 5.70
• TechBrew.net: 4.81
• TechCrunch: 4.56
• Gizmodo: 2.99

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on this one.

Word Power: Better Readability, Next Time

I’ll conclude with a practical tip: Take a look at your own feed and check out your scores. You may see something you’d like to improve.

If you have Microsoft Word, you’ve actually got a nice set of readability metrics right at your fingertips. Use Tools > Options and in the “Spelling and Grammar” tab check the “Show Readability Statistics” box. (The grammar and style checks are also pretty thorough, if you can stomach them.) Whenever you finish your spellcheck, a Readability Statistics dialog will show you your stats. (Click the image to the right to see a larger sample.)

Happy editing!

“Half my life is an act of revision.” – John Irving

Nov 14, 2007 Update: Revised to improve flow. I had to eat my own dogfood on this one.

This is a true story, currently unfolding. (Thankfully, not where I work.)

My friend “Paul” works at a large international company in a small developer team that builds web applications. The technology stack is J2EE, including Spring and Hibernate in the mix.

Unfortunately, except for Paul and a coworker, most of the team is underskilled for the complexity of this programming environment. Their manager, for all his talk about building software for two decades, doesn’t even know basic HTML. This manager is also a destructive optimist in the fullest sense.

It comes as no surprise that their current project is a mess and is missing important deadlines. The boat is swamped and they’re taking on water, so to speak.  The manager – rightfully so – has started to panic.

A common mistake that many managers make in this situation is to start adding people to the project at the eleventh hour. If one woman can make a baby in 9 months, then it makes perfect sense that adding eight more women will get it done in 1 month. Right?

The manager didn’t do this. No, to expand the metaphor, he added men. He put 5 Visual Basic developers on the J2EE+Spring+Hibernate project, just two weeks before the deadline. He says he’ll teach them everything they need to know to get it done in the next two weeks.

Sometimes the main purpose of one’s life is to serve as a warning for others.

The next big platform for app development is likely going to be mobile devices. Unlimited data plans, GPS functionality, and reasonably-good processing power make such devices a ripe target for commercial and open-source goodies.Google and Microsoft have both recently released search+map applications for the Windows Mobile platform. Microsoft has introduced Live Search Mobile and Google is offering Google Maps Mobile. (GMM is also available for Palm and Blackberry.)

I own a HTC Apache PocketPC and a Pharos iGPS locator, so I decided to take both apps out for test drive. I tested them on both my phone and the Microsoft Device Emulator for Windows Mobile. While each application offered similar functionality and a couple of unique features, there was one aspect in particular that made one of them the clear winner.

Here are the results:

Platform Overview

The phone I used is a standard PocketPC with a touchscreen, stylus, and slide-out keyboard. It runs Windows Mobile 5, a miniature version of Windows with mini versions of Office applications and Internet Explorer. It is wifi- and bluetooth capable as well. (Taking pictures of the screen in action wasn’t practical, so screenshots in this review were done with the Device Emulator.)

Download and Installation

A quick download from ls.windowsmobile.com gets you the CAB installer for Live Search (LS). The installer is 418KB, and installs with a single prompt for location. Once running, you must accept a EULA and wait several seconds for the app to load. This seems to be a first-time hit, because subsequent runs don’t take nearly as long.

Google Maps Mobile can be had at google.com/gmm, with the CAB installer downloading at 376KB. The install also takes a single prompt, with a EULA for the first run. You also must click through a text splash every time you launch GMM, which admonishes you to not use it while driving. Ahem.

Google gets kudos for a smaller URL (the less typing to get a mobile app the better) and points for a smaller download (size still matters on limited-memory devices), but the ‘Don’t Drive While Mapping’ nag every time gets old.

Map Interface and Usability

The mapping functionality of both applications are similar at first blush, but after a little use the differences become more obvious.

Both apps allow you to drag-move the maps if you have a touchscreen device. LS uses the center pad button to zoom, while GMM gives you on-screen zoom controls on the lower left. (Click the thumbnail on the right to see a side-by-side comparison of the two map views.)

Each app has a Road View to see the street layout of an area. These are functionally equivalent, but I found the Google version to be easier in bright sunlight, because the colors have more contrast.

If you’re in an area where traffic data is available, you can get traffic overlays for both applications. This colors major roadways with red, yellow, or green according to traffic speeds. Updates are pulled by both applications on a regular basis, about 2 minutes.

From here, the usability of the applications begins to diverge.

Microsoft’s Arial View provides a photograph view with overlaid street names. I have always found this perspective to be a compelling one, but the street names are essential to keep your bearings. Google’s Satellite View is photographic as well, but the street names are glaringly absent, making the view useless for most uses. Normal Google Maps have a hybrid view, so the omission in GMM is as puzzling as it is annoying.

When you have used search functionality to put a marker on the map, I like the way that Live Search displays business telephone numbers right there. GMM makes you click the marker to see the phone number. One other nice thing that only LS offers is the ability to name a given location (like ‘work’ or ‘home’) for easy reference later. Granted, you shouldn’t use these applications while driving, but if you’re trying to find something while at a red light, the fewer clicks the better.

Both applications are both GPS aware, allowing you to center a map at your current location. GMM puts a small blue ball on the map to represent your location, whereas LS has a directional triangle to show location and orientation. The triangle is easier to see, and the orientation aspect is really nice. Unfortunately, I experienced a number of hiccups with LS when it came to location updates, so it was ultimately much less reliable than the GMM functionality.

On the flip side, LS takes little advantage of the touchscreen capabilities of the PocketPC. While GMM lets you click-and-hold anywhere to bring up a context menu for handy commands, Live Search makes you go through the bottom menu bar for nearly everything. This essentially forces you to use the stylus or use the directional pad as a stand-in for arrow keys.

One last factor in the area of usability: GMM offers a number of keyboard shortcuts (see the help file for details) to perform common tasks. LS offers neither a help file nor any shortcuts that I could find.

Search Capabilities

Both Live Search and Google Mobile Maps let you search (screenshot) for things near your location. This lets you quickly find the closest hotel, restaurant, museum, or whatever interests you.

Live Search lets you search by either drilling down through business categories or using free text, whereas GMM only offers a free text search. I didn’t think I’d care much about LS’s category feature, but I found it really nice when looking for restaurant ideas.

Once you’ve found something, both Google Maps Mobile and Live Search give you options to save it to your contacts (address book), see it on a map, get directions to it, send the info to someone via SMS, or just call the phone number outright. LS lets you tap a phone number to call it, while GMM makes you use the options menu.

Routing (Getting Directions)

You can use either app to ask for directions to a location, but the way this is handled is perhaps the biggest divergence between the two.

Live Search gives you a series of text directions, each of which can be clicked to see it on the map. The route is overlaid on your map, with each waypoint marked as a tiny circle. The circles are click-able, but you’ll need a stylus and a steady hand to actually hit them.

Google Maps Mobile shows the directions on the map with a callout for each step. You are given forward and back buttons on-screen that take you through the waypoints. Each waypoint is a large diamond, making them really easy to spot or select.

Here are screenshots (1, 2) of the two apps side by side.

After using both of the approaches, I found myself wishing that each app had some of the functionality of the other. I like the list of directions when I’m in a familiar area. (“Turn left on Academy for 2 miles, Turn right on Platte for 1 mile”) But the turn-by-turn laid on the map is also really handy when you don’t have a good mental picture of the intersections. This distinction alone is enough to make me choose one app over the other, based on the use case for needing directions.

GMM routing has a killer feature that bears mention. As stated earlier, it is much better at utilization of the touchscreen than LS. Accordingly, you can tap anywhere on a map in GMM and mark a starting point and end point It will then calculate and display the best route. This is simply perfect when you don’t have the time to key in an exact address.

Performance Considerations

A video is worth a thousand pictures, so I did a quick video demo of each app going through the paces. The goal of the demo was to start at Invesco Field in Denver (formerly Mile High Statdium) and find a nearby famously-named night club. (Disclaimer: I’ve never been to either.) The videos were originally intended to show you how each works, but they also illustrated just how much slower Live Search was when performing the same tasks.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’ll grant a fudge factor for missed clicks or hesitations on my part, you’ll see that GMM is still considerably faster than LS to accomplish the same basic task flow. The entire sequence took about 2 minutes with Google Mobile Maps, but it took 3 minutes to finish with Live Search. Since the average red light cycle is 2 minutes in U.S. cities, that extra minute feels like a lifetime. Because we wouldn’t use these while driving. Ahem.

The Votes are In

Okay, technically only one vote is in: mine. Here’s a recap of the comparison:

• Both apps had an easy install, although Google’s was slightly smaller.
• Highlights of Live Search are the arial view, categorical searching, GPS orientation on maps, and name-able locations.
• Google Maps Mobile strengths are touchscreen integration, on-map routing, and more reliable GPS integration.
• Live Search performance is noticably slower, in everything from zoom animation to map dragging.

The verdict: If you don’t absolutely need the satellite view or categorical searching, Google Maps Mobile is the clear winner by a long shot. A better GUI and faster application performance prove to be indispensible when you’re in a hurry (or have a limited data plan.)

My hope is that the next version of each app takes careful notes from their competition. GMM needs street overlays on the satellite map, GPS orientation, and a list view of routing directions. LS needs more on-screen controls, better on-map routing, and it needs to hurry the heck up.

If you have any observations or rants about these two apps, drop a comment below. I’d love to hear about your experience.

A mouthful’O buzzwords, eh? Bear with me…

Much has been said about tagging and tag clouds; it seems there’s no shortage of these simple ideas mostly because they provide new ways to get a glimpse of information that is traditionally difficult to understand. After all, tag clouds provide ways to make unanticipated connections with information that’s not always obvious. Indeed, you can glance at a tag cloud and get a sense of what the content details might be about – exceptions might include poor tagging practices or time centricity (e.g., JetStream)

At MyST we decided to add a “topic cloud” feature to our corporate blogsite services but with a clear focus on findability. We noticed that most tag clouds worked on the premise that given a specific tag – show the associated information items (i.e., blog posts, or whatever). But that’s quite limiting – some of the best discovery experiences I can recall relate to discoveries of things that are “nearby”. A GPS tool can take you to a very specific position, but as an avid hiker, it’s what’s across the valley that suddenly becomes an interesting place to traverse to.

Topic Cloud was designed as a combination topic search engine and tag cloud rolled into one. Our customer still believe the UI is clunky (and it is), but it attempts to push the envelope because it merges ideas like search, cloud scaling, and topic families into one user interface.

Cloud Scaling

We thought of this idea because a tag cloud is contextual – at any moment you might be at the top of the cloud, or somewhere inside the cloud. When inside the cloud, the context is less ambiguous and the cloud should be as well – hense the term “cloud scaling”. For example – here’s a link to the top of the cloud for our own blogsite.

http://blogsite.com/topics

It’s big and not as helpful as the subcloud for “google” (assuming we value information about Google).

http://blogsite.com/topics/google

All outward indications are that we’ve written stuff about Google, but let’s say we’re looking for specific references to Google ads, but we’re uncertain how our authors might have tagged those instances.

Tag Families

Understanding what’s also close by is an extremely important aspect of search because we all tend to describe things differently. This is where tag families come in handy – they expose other more discrete tags based on containership of other more ambiguous tags. In this regard, Topic Cloud is extremely powerful because it automatically determines containership relationships.

There’s a lot to this Topic Cloud idea and in coming posts I’ll expose how we achieve these capabilities as well as discuss some of the native elements concerning how we use XML to fabricate and render clouds.

While Topic Cloud has been in use for more than a year across many corporate blogsites, we really haven’t explored the possibilities and obvious improvements, so I’d love some feedback on this. I’ll give you a good dose of the programming architecture in a future article. In the meantime…

• Topic Cloud Technical Brief
• Topic Cloud FAQ

If you’ve seen references to Network Address Translation (NAT) but never really dug into what it does and why we have it, this 411 installment is for you.

Old School IP

Once upon a time, 4.3 billion possible IP addresses was enough for everybody. Oh, those days were so simple, weren’t they? Now the Internet is all grown up and is running out of unassigned IP numbers. One estimate shows that in five or six years all IP addresses will have been handed out, and then somebody is in big trouble, mister.

This is all because our IP addresses are (only) 32 bits long, thanks to the architects Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). Nobody foresaw just how many IPs a networked planet would need.

New School IP

So the wheels are in motion to get everyone to move to IPv6, which has a 128-bit address scheme. This would allow for 3.4 trillion billion billion billion addresses, which by all accounts should hold us for quite awhile. If each mite on the dust bunnies in your computer case needs an IP address, there are plenty to go around.
In the meantime, we need to mitigate the problem of running out of 32-bit IP addresses, and Network Address Translation (NAT) is one technique that can help quite a bit. We’ll talk about how, after the jump:

Got NAT?

A private network – perhaps like the one you have at home – doesn’t need a public IP address for every workstation, it only needs one public IP addresses for the firewall or router. A router/firewall equipped with Network Address Translation can do the following:

• Get an outbound requests from a private network device, and track the connection information in an address translation table
• Rewrite the request’s packet addresses so they look like they’re coming from the firewall’s IP address
  Send the packets out to the Internet
• Get the response back from the Internet
• Use the address translation table to figure out which private network address needs the response
• Rewrite the response’s packet addresses to contain the correct private network address
• Send the response back to the private network device

NAT not only makes it easy to conserve public IP numbers, it also provides a significant level of security. Because any connection with the Internet must be initiated on the private network, intrusion attempts initiated on the Internet are very difficult to accomplish. Devices on the public Internet have no insight to the private network topology, and thus cannot directly contact any devices therein.

NAT isn’t perfect, of course. Some protocols call for connection initiation at both ends, something NAT doesn’t allow without opening extra ports in the firewall. Still, NAT is useful both as a way of conserving public IPv4 addresses and for security purposes.

For more information, we recommend “How Network Address Translation Works” as a good resource. Wikipedia also has a good overview of NAT.

(In the meantime, you might want to clean out those dust bunnies.)

I’m writing a series for Wired.com about neurotechnology and my son. Here’s an excerpt:

What if your computer missed your keystrokes whenever it was playing music? Or what if it couldn’t read from the hard drive when a picture was on the screen? Or maybe every time the CD tray opened, a random window would close? Imagine that all system functions work fine by themselves, but not in combination. You would probably send your computer to the repair shop, if not the dump.

What if it wasn’t your computer that acted this way, but your child’s brain? Now what would you do?

My son’s brain can’t handle all of the sensory input his body is sending him. Caleb has Sensory Processing Disorder, the human equivalent of a computer that can’t adequately multitask, or a network that drops packets when there is a lot of traffic. All of his senses work individually, but his brain loses information when they are combined. This problem wasn’t obvious to us when he was younger, but now that he is in first grade, the complications are growing.

Read the full article here.

If website design and development is something you do, then Cascading Style Sheets should be as common as your morning coffee. And if by some random chance you’ve made it this far without the use of CSS in your web development, this may be just the place to find some links that can take you down the road to enlightenment. Keep in mind that this is not intended to be an exhaustive list of resources, but rather an attempt to soften the learning curve a bit.

Lets dive in, after the jump…

Why CSS?

I’m not the type to blindly jump into learning a technology. I need to know what the benefits are for my taking the time to do so. These were some very useful sites that helped me wrap my head around not only CSS, but around the bigger picture commonly referred to as Web Standards and how CSS plays its part.

• The benefits of Web Standards – a great presentation from MaxDesign.com
• What Makes CSS So Great? – CSS-pioneer Eric Meyer on CSS.
• Design Rant! – Owen Briggs on why CSS is necessary, and how to apply it.

Sign Me Up!

So, CSS will save the world, right? Well, no. But it may save your website. So I’m sure you want to get started right away. Don’t know where to begin? No worries, the WDG (Web Design Group) has a nice reference for those who are completely new to the subject.

• Guide to Cascading Style Sheets

Daily Nourishment

The links above should get the average CSS noob up and running. But if you’re a quick learner, or if you’ve already got the basic concepts of CSS down and want a few more references, I’ve got you covered. Here are number of other resources I’ve found useful in the daily routine over the last few years.

• NYPL Style Guide – another great “basics” site.
• A List Apart – a multi-author website design showcase.
• CSS Panic Guide – a quite thorough list of fast references.
• Brainjar – some really nifty concepts using CSS with Javascript.
• Position Is Everything – Pie is good … and so is this site.
• Index DOT Css – when you need the nitty-gritty on each and every CSS property.

And while I find online references to meet the majority of my needs on a day-to-day basis, there’s something to be said for the offline references as well. There’s countless books on the subject, but two that come to mind as must-haves from this humble developer are Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide and CSS Pocket Reference, the latter I keep on my desk at all times.

Inspiration

Finally, if you’re like me, you regularly become hungry for interesting new ideas and concepts in the realm of standards-based web site designs. Here are a few of my favorite sites that should tickle your fancy in that arena.

• css Zen Garden – the site that got me hooked.
• Unmatched Style – devoted to recognizing beautiful website designs.
• CSS Beauty – a database of awesome design ideas and useful how-tos

If you know of more must-have CSS resources, please add your favorites to the comments section below.