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Archives Posts

Are articles touting 10+ resources actually valuable?

May 16th, 2009 by rdyson

I subscribe to quite a few RSS feeds and read them via Google Reader daily. All too often, about a third of the articles, usually coming from Doggdot.us have a title like “40 Best Design Blogs” or “100 Resources for Sharing Files”.

Personally, I rarely read these articles because I don’t find there’s much value in a large list of resources that usually lacks a per-item description. If I want a list of resources, I can perform a Google search. A long list of resources usually means the article’s author hasn’t actually reviewed anything.

I would find greater value in an article titled “Top 3 Recommended Design Blogs” with a subjective review of those three items, and perhaps a link to a larger list. I personally don’t have any need to read about more than 3-5 resources in the same category. Granted, there are situations when a large list is valuable, such as when you have a very specific need for a tool or website, but that’s a rare case, at least for me.

Of course, using “valuable” in the title of this post brings into question the value of this rant.

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Archives Posts

Converting and Optimizing PDFs Online

May 7th, 2009 by rdyson

Anna over at Productivity 501 wrote Adobe Create PDF/Share Review about Adobe’s website that converts and stores various document types as PDFs. I’ve been using the current Create Adobe PDF Online website for quite a while, and did a quick comparison.

I converted the same Word doc which contains several photos and is 6.2 MB with the current Adobe PDF Online and the new one. With the current website I was able to choose to optimize for Web, no such option in the new version. The Current conversion was much more efficient. I also saved the document as a PDF on the Mac for comparison.

Original doc size: 6.2mb
Apple PDF: 6.2mb
Current Adobe PDF Online: 164kb
New Adobe PDF Online: 3.7mb

In addition, the New site messed up some of my formatting and did not preserve web links.

Hopefully Adobe will take what they already have in the (fairly outdated, but much more functional) Create PDF Online and incorporate it into the new version.

I have uploaded the three docs (Original, New PDF site, Current PDF site) to drop.io for comparison. Note, the current Adobe PDF site only allows 5 free conversions per email address.

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