Practice Blawg » Technology

RSS: Your Personal Web Realtor

Nancy Hupp — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 19:38:15 +0000

A few years ago I picked up a book that, right on the cover, advertised itself as a “tour de force.” Guess what? I read it; I didn’t get it. While apparently an “exceptional achievement,” it eluded me. Nothing worse than feeling dumb.

I felt the same way when I asked a more tech-savvy coworker what “RSS” meant. “Really Simple Syndication.” Hmm. Given that it was so simple, how could I follow up with, “What the heck is it for?”

While I’ll admit that I would have been reluctant to tackle something termed “Exceptionally Complex Concept,” I was equally hesitant to explore RSS because all I could think was, “What if someone explains it and I don’t get it?”

Alas someone did explain it and I did get it so I will pass on the favor because I have a sneaking suspicion that there are still plenty of smart people who don’t know what RSS is or why they might want to utilize it.

The basic concept is that information on the Internet is vast and ever changing. RSS gives you a way to tame the beast:

content comes to you versus you surfing around OR
you tailor the content your receive, thus are not bombarded with all that is available

An awkward but perhaps useful illustration is the housing market. Let’s say you want to buy a house. You can drive around and look for “For Sale” signs, but the instant you think you’re done, other houses will have gone on the market. So, even if you like driving around, you never know when you’ve seen what is available at any given time. Furthermore, you can’t tell from the curb what’s inside. So, many people sit down with a realtor, specify what kind of house they’re interested in, and the realtor lets them know when something comes on the market that meets their specifications.

RSS is your realtor, except RSS doesn’t get paid a commission, it’s free. Like your realtor, you can tell RSS how you want to be notified of what’s available. You can say

“Send me an email regarding each new addition.” OR
“Put each new addition in ‘a reader’ as it becomes available, and I will go there when I have time.” (sort of like stacking things up on the corner of your desk)

Now you can read the email when it arrives or read it later. You can go through your inbox when you have time or you can pick up the whole stack and throw it out. The one thing you don’t have to do is go looking. You need only decide to read or delete. (Note: to avoid overwhelming your inbox, Microsoft Outlook maintains separate folders where RSS feeds go, or you can set up filters and rules in Outlook so your email feeds go wherever you want them.

So, RSS saves you time. Instead of surfing around from website to website, you just go once and “subscribe” to a website’s RSS feed. Do that by clicking on the (typically) orange RSS icon then follow the instructions. Now, whenever that website has new content, it will come to you. And while you’re at it, subscribe to our Practice Blawg feed here.

If it is a website with various kinds of content, you can ask to be notified only when certain kinds of content are updated. In other words, you can “tailor your feed.” The New York Times is a good example: Click here. See? You can ask to receive any news updates, only sports updates or further tailor to just ones on college basketball.

So, to recap, you now realize you can stop running around the Web and let the part of the Web that interests you come directly to you. Or, as I mentioned earlier, come to your reader. In other words, instead of coming into your email inbox, you can have it stack up somewhere. That somewhere is a reader. Check out any of these popular free readers.

If you decide to go the reader route, set up the reader first, then tell the RSS to send info to the reader, not to your email inbox. Either way you are taming the vast, ever-changing information flow on the Web. You’ll get exactly what you want, you won’t miss new content postings, nor waste time surfing.

In closing, I hope you have found my explanation of RSS to be a really simple tour de force.

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Impress Your Friends: Website Graphics

Andrea Hable — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 18:35:50 +0000

While looking at updates for practicelaw and the new mndocs site, we came across three nifty ideas to take your website up a notch.

First up, SpicyNodes. It promises to make your site “spicy” by organizing your site and allowing users to “scan large quantities of information and linger over the details important to them.” It’s basically an interactive mind map. On a law firm website, I could see using this to organize practice areas, information about the firm, or as an overall site map. It’s free for individuals but there’s a monthly fee for businesses, and it’s still in Beta.

For anyone with Q & A on their site, try this nifty little FAQ. It makes your Frequently Asked Questions more interactive by clicking on the question to see the answer. See it at work on our mndocs site, though installation on your own site may not be for the faint of heart if the terms CSS and jQuery make you squeamish or itchy. It’s a free download from CSS Tricks, a great site that provides a lot of web design tips and resources.

Lastly, try Wordle. Have you ever admired a tag cloud on a blog? Now you can have a word cloud for any website with RSS or other text you enter. Here’s the one for Practice Blawg using the option to pull words from any site with RSS:

And here’s an example of the option to just enter plain text with words from the MSBA Goals.

Use word clouds on a page of your website (maybe about your practice areas or law firm philosophy), or on marketing materials. You can customize it with font, number of words, text and background color choices, shape of the cloud, and direction of the words. Tagul is another similar service.

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Staying Updated on a Budget

Andrea Hable — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:40:53 +0000

Keeping overhead low is one of the most important things a new solo can do while building a practice. While there are lots of ways to save money — from your office choices to technology — something we shouldn’t limit is our education. That is, staying updated on the law and learning how to run a practice. Fortunately, there are many tools for this that are free or reduced cost. Here are some of my favorites:

Read your newsletters. You get a lot of them. Whether electronic or paper, voluntary or involuntary, these are good sources for recent changes in the law or upcoming CLEs and networking events. You don’t have to read everything, but glance through them before recycling or hitting delete. Having a hard time managing the influx of information? Rather than unsubscribing to everything, learn how to to filter your emails so you can go through this non-urgent category once a day or week. (I use tags and filters in my Google Apps and Gmail accounts to keep things under control.)

Buy a season pass. One of the best things I did when I started my practice was buying a season pass. I bought mine with Minnesota CLE, which offers a few different levels of passes, and some of the county bar associations offer them too (RCBA and HCBA). Take into account how many CLEs you might want to attend and compare the cost of buying a pass to the cost of individual courses. You might find yourself attending many more than you’d otherwise attend without the added cost.

Last year I attended the Probate & Trust Law Section Conference, Strategic Solutions for Solo & Small Firms in Duluth, Real Estate Institute, Tax Institute, plus a handful of one-day courses. I recently attended the Family Law Institute to stay up-to-date for practicelaw, and am looking forward to attending most of the others again this year, especially the Solo Small Conference again in August. (I hope to see you there!)

Join bar associations and sections. Shameless plug, I know. But your membership gets you discounts on CLEs plus access to other free services, such as practicelaw.org, Fastcase, and Court Opinions. Depending on your needs, the cost of membership might be cheaper than paying full price or using other services.

Look for free CLEs. Many MSBA sections, county bar associations, and law schools also frequently offer free CLEs. Find these by keeping up with the other sources listed here.

Use social networking. Not only for connecting with your colleagues, social networking sites are also a great way to stay updated. On LinkedIn, join groups related to your practice area and read articles posted by the groups or your connections. On Facebook, become a fan of your favorite organizations or law firms. These might overlap with each other or any blogs you follow, so pick and choose what methods you prefer. Many of my lawyer friends also post interesting legal stories on Facebook and LinkedIn, and keeping up with your connections is a great way to stay in touch with people who might be a good referral or resource.

Join groups and listservs. MSBA section members can sign up for e-mail listservs where subscribers can ask and respond to questions.

Also ask around to other attorneys in your practice area if they know of any study groups. I belong to an estate planning study group and I know there are a handful of others out there. Can’t find one that fits your needs or schedule? Start one yourself. Find a few other attorneys with similar interests. The key is to do it regularly, preferably once a month on a set day, and make sure you’re comfortable asking questions to the group.

Subscribe to blogs. Google Reader is one of my favorite tools. While many people know it as a way to keep up with blogs, it aggregates any site with RSS, making it easy to add news sites and even Twitter feeds. If you’ve never seen it in action, check out this quick explanation of the basic concept, and another for an example of how to set it up. I like it so much because it only shows me the items I haven’t read, so I don’t have to scroll down pages on blogs I haven’t visited for a while, plus I only have to go to one site to see everything. It’s much easier to check Google Reader once a day than to check 20 or 30 blogs every day (or even every week). You also have much more control over what you see than from getting your news on Twitter or other real-time sites since you can decide what to follow, how to view it (expanded or list, new or all), and you can easily mark them all as “read” if you’ve had your fill for the day.

You can also organize your feeds by tags. For me, I have tags for Minnesota, Estate Planning & Probate, National Legal News, Solo-Small, Marketing/Practice Management, Ethics, Legal Writing, Funny, General Business, Opinion, and Technology. I don’t use Twitter, so I also added the mnbar and mypractice feeds to Google Reader. You can view all your feeds at once, by tag, or individually.

Don’t like Google Reader? There are many other feed readers like Feedly or Firefox add-ons. My final tip? Don’t get bogged down by blogs. Either use the “mark all as read” button liberally, or weed out your feeds periodically to keep just the really good ones. Looking for more? Most of my favorites are on the practicelaw blogroll.

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Post tags: Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, MSBA Sections, RSS, Social Media, Solo

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Jureeka: Useful and Cool, But Limited

Gregory Luce — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:00:57 +0000

There’s been a bit of geek-world excitement recently about Jureeka, a Firefox add-on that automatically catches legal citations in web pages, enabling you to click on the citation and get the case from one of the public online caselaw repositories. I must admit, it’s pretty nifty. But for Minnesota lawyers, it’s currently limited to Minnesota caselaw after 1996. Basically, that’s what is available online through the Minnesota judiciary’s website or through Minnesota’s state law library.

Limitations aside, Jureeka is a useful add-on to have for Firefox, just to have it working inconspicuously in the background. If it happens to spot a citation it recognizes, you’ll be better for it, as the case will be a quick click away. But if you think it’s going to be a nifty cite-checker for your briefs (so long as you get them online, which is not hard to do), it’s got a long way to go, specifically in adding content to its federal district court, state court and state rules databases. For instance, it will recognize the U.S Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals decision of Board of Regents of University of Minnesota v. Shalala, 53 F.3d 940 (8th Cir. Minn., 1995) but not the U.S District Court case of Board of Regents of University of Minnesota v. Glaxo Wellcome, 58 F.Supp.2d 1036 (D. Minn., 1999) or the state court case of Board of Regents of University of Minnesota v. Reid, 522 N.W.2d 344 (Minn. Ct. App., 1994). If you have Jureeka installed, you’ll see what I mean by hovering over the citations with your mouse.

Don’t get me wrong. Jureeka is free, so who can complain. It also packs a real “cool” factor and likely signals more impressive things to come. But that time is not yet here.

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Keyboard Shortcuts

Andrea Hable — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:48:03 +0000

Every month we get together with Minnesota State Bar Association members for Off the Clock, an informal discussion about tech tools for solo and small firm practitioners. Once a week we post either a tech or writing tip so you can better yourself two minutes at a time.

One of the best ways to save time is to use keyboard shortcuts. Your wrist and arm will thank you.

Don’t try to memorize all the shortcuts from the links above; find a set that you use most often.

My absolute favorite is Find (ctrl+f on a PC, command+f on a Mac). It works in almost every program, except when you have a PDF that doesn’t recognize the text. If you’re not sure if it’s working, try searching for a word you know is in the text to test it.(...)
Read the rest of Keyboard Shortcuts (78 words)

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