(This post is geared towards programmers.)

This blog is about structuring your personal knowledge. Code snippets and, more generally, programming language information, are interesting in that everyone and their cubicle neighbour seem to have their own approach to organizing them. Here I survey some interesting software and approaches I’ve read about, their features, and present my own method based on my personal wiki.

Browsing the web, we see tons of different layouts: each site has his own. Though that makes for a more diverse experience, it’s not the best when you want to sit down and take the time to read a long article.

In this post I write about Aardvark, a Firefox extension which allows you to rearrange page elements quickly, notably to isolate the text and make it easier to read.

Herein I digress on repetition of information, its evil in regards to information overload, its upside and its causes. I also present and explain an extension I created that allows to dynamically grab search results from WikidPad pages to reduce manual duplication.

A few days ago I published a JavaScript-based web program which takes a text as input and flashes groups of words successively, which can be used in practicing speed reading. It’s inspired by many other similar programs available on the Web, some free, some commercial. The technique is called RSVP, for Rapid Serial Visual Presentation.

In the rest of the post I elaborate on similar software and the effectiveness of speed reading in general.

This is a work in progress, but I’ve developped a small speed reading application in JavaScript. It’s definitely not the first of its kind, but I wanted web version with more options. I’m also planning to open source it, and I’ve yet to see an open source web app of this kind.

The app: http://www.fsavard.com/code/speedread/