Hackpacker

Finding the right weight for your content is a balancing act. Image via pixabay . Recently, I've been working with a university who has a lot of very complex information on their website. Their content has to simultaneously speak to a range of audiences including students, prospective students, current staff and more. The problem of many audiences often makes for long pages that are hard to decipher. So how do you keep that content clear for everyone without making content too complicated? 1. Pick the perfect page length. Lots of clients want to know what’s the perfect length for a web page, which is like asking how long is a piece of string. The perfect length depends on what you want the page to do. On Medium, they define their page length by reading time, with the magic number being a 6-7 minute read (along with a lot of other recommendations for writing a successful Medium article ). As Medium puts their average reading speed at 275 words per minute, this gives y

The announcement of the finalists for this year’s Walkley’s awards  may be the first recognition of microcopy by the mainstream media. In the category of Headline, Caption or Hook , The Australian newspaper’s website has been nominated for its cute 404 error pages . The pages are little gags about how politicians respond to failure, like former PM Paul Keating announcing “This is the 404 we had to have.” Then there’s George Brandis saying “ If this is going to be like explaining metadata to David Speers, kindly count me out.” Over forty randomly generated messages written in the style of flubbing politicians pop up whenever you hit a page that no longer exists. Most are penned by Strewth columnist James Jeffrey , who uses these glitches as a chance to splash a few laughs across the website. Even Donald Trump gets the chance to point out The Australian 's website bugs  Rather than just a dry 404, this playful content hits a sweet spot with readers as

There's been an odd devolution on the web from procrastination to poisonous. For some the Trumps and trolls are all too much so there's been lots of quitting Twitter, sending Facebook dark or adopting a kittens-only policy on Instagram. Artists and writers have to be selective in their intellectual diet so a few years ago I wrote an article called "The Distraction Engine: Digital Detox for Writers" looking at ways to moderate the harmful intake of web and social. Recently while talking about her book The Natural Way of Things at the National Library of Australia (full talk online) , Charlotte Wood talked about her decision to leave social:  So I was on Twitter for ages and I loved it... but I was completely addicted to it then and I was just never off it... when you’re writing a book you do need to be private, you know you need to be quiet or I need to be quiet. So I went off Twitter for nine months when I was writing this book. Wood recently returned t

Over the last couple of months I've been part of the Hardcopy Professional Development program for writers offered by the ACT Writers Centre. The format broke into two long weekends - editorial and Intro2Industry. The latter wrapped up on Sunday after three intense and well-programmed days that brought agents, experts and literary shaman to the ACT. Okay so there were no actual shaman but the list of svengalis was impressive. Probably the best part was the range: from traditional dead tree publishers to the digital experimentation of IF: Book Australia . Over the entire program opinions varied (fiction books, apparently, must be at least  70,000 words , 60,000 words , okay 50k but that's really as low as publishers will go - unless it's a digital book) but there were a lot of great insights. So the only way to summarise a busy program is with a listicle right? Here's the top five things I got out of the program: 1) The Book is a zombie that refuses to die So t

When asked about the worst words of 2013, The Atlantic ’s Richard Lawson responded that he hated the usage of curation. His objection to the word was that it has shifted far from its original high-art meaning: "It's a reappropriated term that used to mean something good - putting lovely and interesting things in a museum! - but now denotes a technique of cobbling together preexisting web content and sharing it with readers/followers/whomever. In other words, linking to things.” And he’s got a point. Social media means we’re all curators now. Anyone who signs up for a Twitter account is curating a stream of links and cat videos for their followers and friends.  But personalised curation is a response to the information overblown that the web has created. Social media has given many users a way to make sense of this by looking to trusted curators: their friends. Learnist is a good example of social media curating lessons as users learn from their friends about

In her debut novel In-human Anna Dusk mixes poetry, Aussie vernacular and a gutsy werewolf heroine. Don’t ask Anna Dusk if werewolves are the new vampires. Sure she’s releasing a lycanthrope book just as the zeitgeist howls with The Wolfman and the Twilight franchise has been re-booted by shapeshifting spunk Jacob. But Dusk began In-human over 12 years ago so she’s hardly jumping on the fangwagon. In-human follows Sally, a high school girl who tears out of the humdrum of rural Tasmania as she transforms into a werewolf. Her allegiances are tested between family and the pack, between hunger and herself. Far from Twilight ’s de-fanged fairy tales, In-human is powered by Sally’s anger with buckets of sex and blood. As Dusk sees it, “Growing up in a small town and having people constantly commenting on her all the time really pisses Sally off.” Dusk is no fan of Stephanie Meyers vegetarian vampires. “Where’s the fun in that?” she laughs flashing her prominent canine teeth. “Peop