One perk about the web designer and developer life is that I'm always learning. Always. Today I learned how to...

Quickly convert content to code#

Today I found myself pulling out the headphones, turning up the Moana soundtrack, and tediously beginning the manual process of copying content in between HTML tags. About a quarter of the way into this process, I stopped and told myself there needs to be a better way. I thought to myself, "if only some of these pages had a CMS editor for my co-workers to add basic content to... Wait!" That's when I realized we have a CMS for one of our sites. I managed to save my entire afternoon by copying the Word content into this CMS editor, copying the "Source" view, and pasting it into the new page I had set up.

Work order closed. Next project initiated.

Remove all hyperlinks in a Word document#

While doing the copy and paste, as mentioned above, I found a few formatting issues that needed to be corrected. One of them being that each list item had a non-visible hyperlink. Likely an oversight on the part of the person who gave me the document. The problem was that those links all led to 404s because I took down those inaccessible PDFs over a month ago.

Again, the programmer's mindset nagged me. There had to be a way to remove hyperlinks in one fell swoop! Thanks, TechWalla, for giving me the keys (pun intended) I needed to accomplish this task in 2 seconds:

1. Ctrl+A (select all content)
2. Ctrl+Shift+F9 (remove hyperlinks)

Hyperlinks eradicated!

A Final Thought#

A mixture of design and development at my job has been fulfilling. But most of all, both tasks have been very complimentary. I try to think from the perspective of how a user is interacting with our pages. Additionally, I think of how to make my own work (and those after me or collaborating with me) more efficient, so more time can be spent on a thoughtful user experience. The teeter-totter of design and development. Or is it circular, one blending into the other, with no bold black lines?