I'd like to ask all of you today for your feedback about the DominoPower tips, assuming you subscribe to them. If you don't yet subscribe to them, stop reading this article right now, go to http://www.dominopower.com, and scroll down to the big yellow box to sign up. Then, come back and keep reading!

Tip-writing philosophy
For those of you who do subscribe to the DominoPower tips, I've got some questions for you later on in this article. Following that, I'll give you my top five tips out of the 50 I've written. First, though, let me briefly explain my philosophy behind writing tips so you know where I'm coming from:

Stay on topic
I always keep in mind that the tips are for DominoPower Magazine. Therefore, I try to make sure the tips relate directly either to fine-tuning things for the Web or to improving the client-side productivity of the people who use Notes and Domino.

Be concise
I try to keep the tips short and to the point. The perfect tip to me is usually something that you can either implement right away or will easily remember later on when you need it. Lately, I've been trying to make sure that the tips don't run longer than three to four paragraphs, since I know that people are busy. I need to get the message across in as concise a format as possible. Anything longer than that probably constitutes a full article, anyway.

Work from experience
I write tips based on my experience using Notes and Domino every day. I've got sticky notes filled with tip ideas stuck all over my monitor. I also keep track of new ideas in a tip database (Domino, of course) that I've created. As mentioned in the opening paragraph, I also keep a personal database filled with other tips that I search through to make sure I'm not duplicating what someone else has already written.

Diversify
I know that the DominoPower audience is diverse and worldwide, so I try to vary both the difficulty and subject matter of my tips. I know that not everyone will find every single tip useful, but I try to write my tips in such a way that the highest possible percentage of the audience might be able to get something out of it.

I got an email recently from DominoPower reader Neale Upstone who thought one of my tips was too simplistic and might "alienate" some of the more advanced developers in the audience. My response to Neale was that I can understand how some advanced developers might not get as much out of some of the tips. Simply speaking, a lot of the old dogs out there know most of the tricks, and it's hard to teach them something new. When writing tips, however, I try to come up with something fresh and new as much as possible. I try to ask myself if I would like to receive this tip or not.