Well, just because everybody else is blogging about it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t.

When I’m formatting content for a site I’m always Googling for the proper codes for encoding character entities. Copyright symbols. Trademark symbols. Curly quotation marks. Em and en dashes. Etc. This neat little online tool will be invaluable in the future. Just type in something similar to what you’re looking for and “Bob’s your uncle.”

DOMTool: “To use DOMTool simply paste an HTML snippet into the input field, press ‘Create DOM Statements’ and voila, there you have the DOM sequence to create that content.”

Very handy.

Okay, maybe not (I’m not entirely sure what does make life worth living, but I digress…).

Google is constantly upgrading their online applications. They always seem to have something cool in the works. A week or three ago they upgraded the personal portal to add tabs. Today they roll out a major upgrade of Google Reader. Half the fun of using Google products is just the raw usability and elegant simplicity. Those who hold Google up as an example of “successful bad design” do a grave disservice to the craftsman at the big G. The other half of the fun is the process of “discovering” what they’ve changed and exploring it to its fullest. Total geekasm.

You just never know when they’re going to change things up. It’s a little like xmas morning all year around - you just never know when Santa is going to visit.

Today my Google Page Editor account was activated, so I jumped on to try it out and created a simple page. The editor is pretty basic, but I don’t think I’m necessarily their target demographic. I suspect they are planning on taking on other free web page providers like Geocities or Myspace. They seem to be using Divs and CSS for the main layout but not for user defined formatting changes (can you say <font face=”verdana”>? …ugh).