A blog can change your life

Just in case you’ve been hiding under a rock lately and haven’t heard of PostSecret get over there and take a look. This blog is hosted free on blogspot and has changed the life of the guy who dreamed up the idea for the blog. People are invited to send in a postcard with their secret on it. The site is wildly popular and the owner has put some of the postcards into a book which is selling well. The postcards have been shown in an art gallery with thousands of people attending. One inspired topic plus the internet can make a huge difference in someone’s life.

Accessible Image Replacement

Mike Davidson — sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. It is described in this article by Mike Davidson. Many of the wow web designs on sites such as CSS Zen Garden rely heavily on image replacement. Not all image replacement techniques are accessible, however, sFIR is a step in the right direction.

Professional vs. Unprofessional web development practices

Le blog personnel de Joe Clark: Failed Redesigns Joe Clark tears into some sites who fail to redesign with the latest standards in mind. Instead they still contain tag soup, tables, or other design factors he labels unprofessional. He says the designers should have known better.

The question becomes, for me, Are we teaching students to know better? If your students leave your classroom thinking tables-based layouts and tag soup are the way to do things, then have you failed as a teacher? Have you turned people loose in the workplace who are less than professional? I think the answer is yes.

We need to work toward ensuring that college teachers meet professional standards so that students will reach the same levels of professionalism.

Review: Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML

Head First HTMLHead First HTML with CSS & XHTML by Elisabeth Freeman and Eric Freeman is from O’Reilly’s Head First series. The teacher in me has burned with curiosity about Head First books for some time now, but this is the first Head First book on a topic I feel competent to comment about.

If you’ve looked into my past and examined my writing credits, you know I wrote some books a few years back that involved a lot of work with multiple intelligences. My assumption about the Head First books was that there would be an emphasis on multiple intelligences. I guessed right, but I also fell short.

The book uses humor, goofy word play, unexpected juxtapositions of ideas, stories, clever visuals and diagrams and several different types of activities and quizzes to create what they call a brain friendly way to learn. I attempted reading it with fresh eyes, as if I knew nothing about HTML, and I found their technique to be clear and their explanations made material easy to learn. Because they are using repetition and creating numerous activities and exercises for practicing on each new bit of information, I think new information would be easy to remember. Easy to learn, easy to remember—a winning combination. They also made points with me by using standards, good coding practices, and CSS from the very first.

I don’t know if O’Reilly is targeting an academic market with the Head First books, but this one seems much better suited to the individual learner than to the requirements of a classroom situation. So I cannot recommend it as a text to base a semester around, but I certainly recommend it as a book for individual students to use as a reference, resource, and tool. I recommend that teachers have it on their shelf for the same reasons. Teachers will find some clever new ways to present ideas in this book.

This is no serious-toned technical manual. This is play. If you don’t want to play, you’ll be insulted by it.