The River

The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.

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Dispatches From A Standing Desk, Week 1

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It was somewhat shocking to learn how long it would take to fully recover from a dislocated toe — 6 to 8 weeks and, in my case, even a bit more. But, finally, I felt comfortable enough on my feet again to give the standing desk another shot. Last weekend, I set everything up again and was determined to start afresh on Monday morning.

I have to say that my first instinct when I walked into my office was to sigh. The last thing I wanted to do was to stand up all day. But I got over it soon enough, and reluctantly assumed the position.

My Setup

As a reminder, I’ve got the Ready Desk holding my external monitor, wireless keyboard and wireless mouse, while alongside it, I’ve got my laptop arranged as a second, sitting, workstation.

Photo via TheReadyDesk.com
Photo via TheReadyDesk.com

The idea is that I can switch between the positions as needed, because, even though there’s plenty of evidence that sitting all day is killing us, it turns out that standing all day isn’t so great either. Ask waiters and nurses. [Read more…] about Dispatches From A Standing Desk, Week 1

How to Make Lists Look Better in HTML

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The other day, Muhammad Saleem, one of our contributors at Marketing Land, tweeted a question asking how a person might format a blog post and add regular left-justified text between items in an ordered list. This might seem like an oddball inquiry, but we come across this issue all the time, especially when columns have really long lists, or lists where each item is quite long.

We try to spread out our text pretty well, so it’s easier to read and just looks less daunting. Because this list issue is so common, I’ve come up with a few tricks to overcome the issues.

First, this problem that Muhammad Saleem mentions… How do you break up an ordered list by putting text between list items? The key is a maybe little-known modifier to the ordered (and unordered) list code in HTML.

[Read more…] about How to Make Lists Look Better in HTML

Open Architecture Network

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My buddies at Architecture for Humanity this morning launched the beta version of the Open Architecture Network, “a stand alone site that allows will allow designers, community groups, NGO’s and others to post projects, browse others, comment and review projects, discuss relevant topics, contribute to shared resources, collaborate with each other and access project management tools to support their work”.

They’re unveiling the site at the TED conference today. The idea of the site, as for the organization, is to help designers and architects use their talents for the greater good of those in need all over the world. Commendable, for sure, and pretty damned cool besides. AFH rocks!

P.S.Wired ran a story on the site today.

Tom Shot

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I only heard this weekend that Dynamic Logic‘s COO Tom Deierlein, who was called up by the Army to go to Iraq about a year ago, was shot by a sniper in September. He’s OK, and seems to be in good spirits, but he’s got a long road to (hopefully) full recovery.

The company has set up a Web page for Tom where people can comment and share well wishes.

Just wanted to post to say you’re in my thoughts, Tom, and I’m hoping you heal quickly and remain in good spirits. It sounds like you were doing great work over there, especially in helping poor children and needy Iraqi families. Sorry things turned out the way they did, but am happy you’re back in the U.S.