How about HOWTO improve the readability of your content? Some simple ideas for measuring and improving what you write for the web.

I was reading my shiny new Make magazine #11 last night and found this nugget:

{ProductX} creates empowering tools that let me fulfill my potential to help others to fulfill theirs.

The product itself is cool: it’s like a CNC machine for milling wood, which would be a blast to use. But, the language of the ad is bullshit. What I don’t like about it is the use of the corporate voice: it’s indirect, de-humanizing, and uninspiring.

So what is the advertiser really trying to say? Can you say it better?

How difficult is it to write a compiler? I wish developers would learn about compiler design and construction before inflicting new file formats on the world.

How about Fifteen Craft Exercises for Writers? It’s never to late to start writing more.

Get With the Program, a NYTimes article about the various tools authors are using today to create their universes. I’ve always seen a great potential for better (narrower?) writing tools, this confirms that there are still a few unexplored possibilities.

Some differences between Windows and Unix non-blocking sockets. Writing portable network code is not as easy as it should be.

Philip K. Dick on writing science fiction in his longish (but interesting) essay titled How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.

The official set of online Rails manuals, including a Rails cookbook and a good guide on Rail’s URL routing/rewriting. The docs for a user login plugin and an overview of plugins in general.

Newsforge brings us: What to watch out for when writing portable shell scripts. Missing from the script: dealing with space-laden filenames (IFS=$'\n').

Kurt Vonnegut has 8 rules for writing fiction, which are surprisingly portable as rules for writing software.