Useful links: Twitter for .edu, public learning

Is Your School Missing Opportunities to Leverage Twitter? Examples and links to a white paper that describes what top schools are doing.

What is the scaffolding for learning in public? contains a ‘Bloom’s Taxonomy’ for public learning and wealth of resource links.

Pew Report: Search Still Drives News Traffic But Sharing is Important. Are you using Twitter links and Facebook Likes to direct your attention more than ever these days?

Tumblr tag search

Tumblr search aint’ exactly intuitive.

I originally signed up for a Tumblr account because the PR was that you could tag your own posts and they were searchable by tag.

But the Help files don’t even have an entry for tags, and nothing about how to search for tags.

Your on your own figuring out how to do it. I finally figured it out, but it took far too long.

For months, I’ve been saving links to articles about HTML5. I’ve been tagging them with ‘HTML5 and accessibility’ when I saved them.

I went to my Tumblr account and searched for HTML5 and accessibility. I searched My Posts. Here are the results: 0.

tumblr search results

I tried searching My Dashboard. I got four results, because they were all on the first page of the blog.

I found an actual link entry with the tag visible under the link. I tried clicking on the tag itself. Got the same four recent results.

help results

I went to the Help files. Nothing.

I kept trying. Then I found the secret. The secret is to add the hash sign to your search string.

tag search secret

When I did that, I got the pages and pages of results that I was looking for. Whew.

Really, Tumblr, how long would it take you to write a Help file explaining how to search for tags?

John Slatin AccessU – Register Now

Don’t leave your users in the dark! As web professionals, we all agree it’s essential to ensure that everyone, including people with disabilities, sees, hears and interacts easily with everything we develop. Learn how to make sure your site and applications universally accessible at AccessU.

What is AccessU?

AccessU is Knowbility’s annual training conference offering two days of concentrated classes, lead by national and international experts, in how to make electronic information technology accessible to everyone – including people with disabilities.

AccessU offers hands-on training courses geared toward giving you the skills you need to effectively integrate accessibility and usability into your designs. Course List at: http://www.knowbility.org/v/accessu-course-list/John-Slatin-AccessU/36/

At AccessU 2011, you will:

  • Learn how people with different types of disabilities using assistive technologies interact with the Web
  • See demonstrations of assistive technologies – screen readers, magnifiers and replacements for mouse and keyboard.
  • Learn techniques for evaluating accessibility and usability
  • Learn to implement accessibility and usability techniques into your own user-centered design process
  • Gain access to a variety of accessibility and usability resources

Where, When and How?

AccessU will be held at St. Edwards University in Austin, TX, May 17 through May 19. Conference registration is now open. Registration also includes free seating at Tuesday night’s movie at Alamo Drafthouse.

If you believe that the web should empower ALL people, if you want to know how to meet state and federal accessibility mandates (Section 508), or if you’re a commercial web developer who wants to understand emerging best business practices for the web, AccessU is THE PLACE TO BE!

Register now!

What’s New in Dreamweaver CS5.5?

by Dhruv Kapoor

Normally with a point release you expect a couple of minor improvements but that is definitely not the case with this version of Dreamweaver. This new version has a heavy emphasis on features for multiple screen resolutions and mobile devices. This upgrade hosts a wide variety of fantastic surprises that hone most of the available features of Dreamweaver CS5.

This is definitely a must-have for anyone looking to develop applications for mobile devices and can be a great tool for advanced web designers. New features available in this release include:

  • FTPS support
  • jQuery code hinting
  • Full jQuery mobile support, together with over a dozen mobile widgets
  • A preview of pages at different screen resolutions without leaving your document window
  • Powerful phone gap integration that lets you use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create Android and IOS apps
  • Web font support
  • Total support for all CSS3 selectors
  • New tool for the creation of drop shadows and rounded corners in CSS3

In the New Document box, starter pages are available for jQuery mobile that enables you to make an easy web app that is compatible with all major platforms in a matter of minutes. If you want to create something a bit more complicated, you will be required to make your own code. Luckily, Dreamweaver CS5.5 provides you with full jQuery mobile and jQuery core code hinting. This streamlines the process and makes it much easier to reach your goals.

One of the most impressive features of this release is undoubtedly the phone gap integration. Simply build your app in HTML, CSS, or JavaScript and Dreamweaver will build the native version and install it into a simulator. For now, it can only be used to develop applications for the iOS and Android operating systems but there are plans to expand this capability to include other mobile operating systems later on.

Other enhancements that may not seem as major but are still infinitely useful include the ability to create image-free drop shadows and rounded corners using CSS3. Live View allows you to immediately see the effects of your design changes without switching between a browser and style sheet. It also now supports hsla() and rgba() color formats, making it much easier to use transparent effects on your web creations.

Of course nothing is perfect and Dreamweaver CS5.5 is no exception to the rule. For one, you must be careful about where you insert mobile widgets. Instead of splitting or moving outside of an element as Dreamweaver normally does, it inserts new code at whichever point you happen to be at the time. Though not a major failing, this can be highly irritating over time. It can also lead to disaster for those who are not experts at writing and understanding code.

Additionally, it has a way to go with HTML5. Though full HTML5 code hinting is available, you can only insert HTML5 parts by making code in Code View. Some also consider the $199 upgrade price to be a shortfall of this release since it is still a bit behind Netbeans and PHP storm. Of course, those options require hand coding so many users may consider the price difference to be worth it. Love it or hate it, Dreamweaver CS5.5 is a point release that offers the benefits of a full upgrade.

This Guest Post is by Dhruv Kapoor. Dhruv is an employee of Offshore Ally, a company providing the best virtual assistants and link builders online. He is passionate about gadgets, graphics, and technology in general. Connect with him via Twitter.

Useful links: tech podcasts, rem, Whitney Hess, memes

Open Culture is a great resource for all kinds of educational podcasts and videos. Check out the technology podcasts list. Some terrific programs there that you will enjoy.

Have you heard of rem? It means “root em” and is a new feature in CSS 3 that you can learn about from Jonathan Snook in Font-sizing with rem.

I wrote a Women in Tech post this week for BlogHer about Whitney Hess. Women in Tech: Whitney Hess, UX Designer. It was inspired by the absolutely fantastic live blogging that Jeremy Keith has been doing for the last couple of days about the currently running An Event Apart.

A great thing about Wired Pen is that everything is questioned and checked. Like an oft retweeted quote attributed to Mark Twain hiding among the 4000 tweets per second about Osama bin Laden on May 1. Chasing a Meme: The Twain Quote that Isn’t.

Useful links: canvas and gradient pizzazz

Standardista (Estelle Weyl) deserves a useful links post devoted only to her blog.

First there’s a wonderful beginning tutorial on the canvas element: HTML5: Introduction to <canvas>. As a bonus, she explains the difference between canvas and SVG in a clear and succinct paragraph at the end.

In a page of example gradients called Striped Gradients, she shows some really amazing things that can be done with pure CSS 3, no images. Best of all, the styles are all in the <head> so you can take a look at how she did these eye-popping things.