How to - Convert Word Docs to Web Pages

Useful ...

Convert Word Docs to Web Pages

http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Convert_Word_Docs_to_Web_Pages

Microsoft Word has its place, but that place isn't the web. If you've ever tried to convert a Word document to an HTML document, you know that Word's built-in tools can have disastrous results -- bloated files, proprietary markup and exposed personal information are among the gems you'll get with Word's "Convert to HTML" function.

To get to a semi-sane starting point, try using Word's "Save As: Web Page, Filtered" rather than the regular web page option. This will strip out many of the proprietary tags and won't include potentially personal and revealing info contained in the File Properties dialog.

TinyMCE

Another viable option is TinyMCE, a JavaScript Rich Text Editor that offers a "Paste from Word" option. Paste From Word is intended to be used by those who would like to just "Select All" in Word and paste the content into TinyMCE. Depending on the complexity of your document, TinyMCE may be able to fix some of Word's styling quirks and output usable HTML.

Textism

The good folks over at Textism have a tool that will, to quote the Textism website, "strip Microsoft's proprietary tags and other superfluous noise from Word-generated HTML documents." The results are not only much closer to standards compliant web markup, they also create much much smaller, quickly loading pages.

I used Textism to convert this document from Word to clean HTML. I think, it did a pretty good job.

CAPTCHA is Dead, Long Live CAPTCHA!

Interesting post on coding horror. 3 of the most well known CAPTCHA's are now broken - Google, Hotmail and Yahoo!

Wisdom comes from Gunter Ollman, he notes:

CAPTCHAs were a good idea, but frankly, in today's profit-motivated attack environment they have largely become irrelevant as a protection technology. Yes, the CAPTCHAs can be made stronger, but they are already too advanced for a large percentage of Internet users. Personally, I don't think it’s really worth strengthening the algorithms used to create more complex CAPTCHAs – instead, just deploy them as a small "speed-bump" to stop the script-kiddies and their unsophisticated automated attack tools. CAPTCHAs aren't the right tool for stopping today's commercially minded attackers.

Read more here.

Microsoft's moving business model ...

Om Malik wrote on GigaOM:

Microsoft’s willingness to pay big dollars and bid aggressively for aQuantive ($66 a share versus mid-$30s trading price) shows that the Barons of Redmond truly believe that advertising will play a big role in its future. How that eventually plays out - remains to be seen.

As an aside, as Microsoft moves away from its more predictable software (OS and productivity suite) based business models into new categories - games, subscriptions and now advertising - do you think some of the predictability in their business model is going to be … to put mildly… be replaced by volatility?

Greg Sterling has more thoughts about the deal after his chat with Joe Doran, General Manager, Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions.

Apple the next Microsoft?

VE3OGG writes on Slashdot

"Apple, the penultimate source of cool. The marketers of slick. The next 'evil empire'? While it might sound goofy at first, Rolling Stone magazine is running an article that summarizes some very interesting points that detail how Apple could become the next technology bad guy. Among the reasons given: Apple's call to be rid of DRM (while continuing to use it in iTunes); Apple's perceived arrogance when they warned consumers not to upgrade to Vista, while not rushing to fix the problem themselves; and Apple's seemingly unstoppable market dominance in the form of the iPod. The iPhone featured heavily as well, a product that is months from release but steals the press from more competitive products. What do you think, could Apple eventually take the place of Microsoft?"

I don't think this is true. Apple is doing this right things, and while doing the right things some times you put off other people. The 'iPhone' marketing technique is very common, while it keeps a lot of people salivating for the ultimate communication device, it also sets very high expectations for Apple to deliver. iPod changed the way people live their lives; it has caused human beings to evolve.