Idea:  We all have nonstandard characters that we want to use in our posts, tweets, status updates, emails, comments, and what have you.  In the dark ages, one had to enter the character entity in HTML markup to have it show up in a post (entering “ö” for “ö”, for instance.)  Entering the actual character (the “ö”, for instance) could make your character disappear when you hit “Submit” or (!) crash the software that ran the blog or message board (I told you it was the dark ages.)

But now, not only is there better handling for more extensive character sets (such as ISO 8859-1) in web apps (and, crucially, browsers), but using HTML markup in, say, Facebook or Twitter will actually not work.

So: why not keep a list of characters you need most frequently in a place where you can cut-and-paste?

The absolute best place to do this is Google Notebook, but for some unfathomable reason, this product, which is one of Google’s best, is no longer accepting new signups.  So you may have to put it somewhere like an email draft, or a blog draft, or … somewhere else.  It’s best if it’s on the Web, so you can access it wherever you need it.

Each of us has different character needs, but mine looks like this:

♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ ♯
№ ✓ ✔ ✗ ✘
← → ↑ ↓ ⇐ ⇒ – —
« » † ‡ …
♥ ♡ ☺ ☹ ★ ☆ ☠ ☮
® ™ ± ° ℃ ℉
² ³ ¼ ½ ¾ ƒ ℵ ∂ ∞ ∫ ∴
≅ ≠ ¿ ¡ £ € ¢
ñ ç ö æ œ

I also keep a list of frequently-needed words:

Renée
naïveté
über
résumé
Gödel

This page at Big Baer is really useful.  So are lixlpixel live preview and fileformat.info, without which writing on the web would be much more difficult for me.

So, idea:  Play with those and make your own list!

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 23:12:14 +0000
Under computing, websites, writing
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