vdebolt, Author at Web Teacher

Useful Links: CSS Selectors, HTML5 Tutorials, app planning

CSS3 Selectors: Selectors in the age of JQuery at standardista is a very helpful compendium of selectors and support.

The Ultimate HTML5 Tutorials and Useful Techniques has a whole bucket load of good tutorials listed.

Planning an iPhone app: where to start at Design Festival is a step by step guide to getting started building an app.

Big Personal Announcement

BlogHer is changing the way they curate, promote, and celebrate women bloggers. Part of that change is to hire Section Editors who will be in charge of finding and promoting the best of the female blogosphere (and some of the male blogosphere, too).

I’m the new Section Editor for Tech at BlogHer. This is an upgrade from my former status as an occasional Contributing Editor in the technology area. It means that I’m going to be the person in charge of finding great posts about technology. The posts will either be featured with a link, syndicated (for money!) as articles from technology blogs by women, or promoted as tech posts that appear on BlogHer through the normal blogging system they have in place. I’ll be looking for good tech videos to feature, for interesting women in tech to write about, and for interesting people and ideas from all sorts of tech topics.

I’d like to hear from the women tech bloggers. Tell me about your blog and pitch me about posts you’d like to see featured or posts you think are worthy of syndication on BlogHer. You’ll be able to contact me through my BlogHer Profile.

I’m not interested in product pitches, PR people. If a blogger has written a review of a product, that might interest me, especially if it’s something hot that a lot of people are talking about – for example a new game or app.

Just so you know, these are the blogs I’m already subscribed to. If you’re a woman with a tech blog that I don’t know about, please contact me through my BlogHer Profile or at virginiaATvdebolt.com.

.51 – Geekspace for Women
A Blog Not Limited
A Tech Geek Mom’s Nerd Paradise
Aliza Sherman: She Knows Social
ATMac
Backup Brain
Blogging Basics 101
But You’re A Girl
carrie actually
Cindy’s Take on Tech
CompSci Woman
Cool Mom Tech
danah boyd | apophenia
Digital Diva
Do It Myself Blog – Glenda Watson Hyatt
Geek Feminism Blog
GeekMom
GeekSugar
ginger’s thoughts
Jolie O’Dell
Mac Tips
Momathon Blog
momswithapps
Ms. Beane’s Brain
PHP-Princess
PINGV Creative Blog
rare pattern
RoniNoone
Scenario Girl
SheGeeks
Sims 3 Gamer
Social Media Design
Standardista
Stubbornella
The Background Fairy
The Female Perspective of Computer Science
The Hacker Chick Blog
The Mary Sue
Tiffany B. Brown
Veronica Belmont

This just started, and I’m not really into swing of it yet, but I will be soon. I’m trusting that I can take this on and still keep up something of value here as well. Crossing my fingers.

Review: Smashing CSS: Professional Techniques for Modern Layout

Smashing CSS: Professional Techniques for Modern Layout by Eric A. Meyer is from Sitepoint, 2011. This is a very different sort of book by Eric Meyer. Not in subject matter, of course, but in tone and purpose. Instead of his previous rather pedantic and encyclopedic listing of every thing you might ever want to know about CSS, this book is light, humorous, and organized to be read from front to back.

If you’ve been paying attention to CSS for the last few years, most of this book will be old news to you. But the book isn’t aimed for those already literate with CSS. It’s meant to help the newbie learn enough to master the basics and go on to create some cool looks and layouts with CSS. Every chapter has lots of examples, screen shots, code, and advice.

The first section starts right at the beginning with a chapter on Tools such as Firebug and SelectORacle. Chapter 2 talks about every kind of selector with advice about what works best when there is more than one way to accomplish something. The second section of the book deals with Essentials. In the chapter called Tips you learn about things like unitless line-height values, image replacement, and list styles. The chapter called Layouts reviews float containment and explains layouts like faux columns, liquid bleach, the one true layout, fluid grids, and the holy grail. In the Effects chapter he explains how to create an effect like his complex spiral. He also explains CSS pop-ups, menus, rounded corners, sprites, sliding doors, parallax, ragged floats, and constrained images.

The final section of the book is Cutting Edge, in which he moves away from reviewing the foundation CSS knowledge of the past and jumps into new ideas. There’s a chapter on Tables that shows new techniques for styling tables. He gives tips on using head, body and foot for table design and shows how to use a table to make a graph or provide data on a map. The final chapter is Cutting Edge. This chapter looks at HTML5, media queries, occasional children, occasional columns, RGBa, shadows, multiple backgrounds and transforms.

From a web education perspective, this would be an excellent book for teaching a CSS class.

Summary: A perfect book for those just learning CSS.

A review by Virginia DeBolt of Smashing CSS: Professional Techniques for Modern Layout (rating: 5stars)

Big News from Adobe

In Introducing Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Product Family, Adobe made some announcements important to educators.

First, they are moving milestone releases such as CS3, CS4, and CS5 to a two year cycle. The in between years will get updates like the just announced CS5.5. Here’s what they are doing to the web suite.

For Web folks: huge updates to HTML5 and Adobe Flash authoring tools, enabling designers and developers to deliver mobile applications on Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS, iOS and other platforms — and create rich browser-based content across screens. All the big HTML5 checkboxes are ticked in Dreamweaver CS5.5: jQuery mobile framework integration for browser-based content, PhoneGap’s in, as well as WebKit engine updates. We’ve also launched Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 Premium and the Flex 4.5 framework now includes mobile support. Now hundreds of millions of mobile devices can be targeted with content and apps, created through our web tools. Remember, Adobe tools support the development of both HTML and Flash content, don’t let crazy headlines make you think otherwise.

Secondly, they announced a subscription plan that means users will always have access to the most up to date version of the software for a monthly subscription fee. The Adobe announcement page does not show specific subscription pricing, but an article I linked to yesterday in a Useful Links post does gave a chart of subscription pricing.

Both these announcements are important to web educators, especially the news that Dreamweaver will come equipped to write HTML5.

Useful Links: Rent your software, new RFP rules, Photoshop SDK, higher education

You Can Rent Photoshop and other Adobe Software gives you some useful and potentially helpful information.

The New RFP says RFP and procurement process for software should start with finding software that doesn’t suck.

Speaking of Adobe, because of an open SDK, developers are now creating Photoshop apps for tablet devices. Adobe Turns the Tablet Into a Photoshop Companion.

Here’s one for the educators. Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet, It’s Higher Education. I’m looking forward to the discussion on this one – check out the comments at TechCrunch.

Multiple Background Images with CSS3

There are two background images on the demo page. The page is a standard Dreamweaver HTML template page, with the styles in the document head. To add a second background image URL, the Dreamweaver style element must be edited manually.

Here’s the relevant rule:

background: url(img/Adelie_Penguin-sm.jpg) right bottom no-repeat, #FFF url(img/bg.jpg) repeat;

You can view the results in this demo page, if your browser supports it.

If your browser does not yet support multiple background images, here is a screen shot of the Opera browser rendering of this rule.

The various background images are in a comma separated list. The order of the images listed by url in the background rule is important. You can think of the list like layers in Photoshop or like z-index stacking. The first image in the list is at the top of the stacking order. As you add more and more background images to the list, they move to the back in the stacking order.

If the penguin image were second, it would be obscured by the repeating background. However, if the second background image were not repeating, but instead had a no-repeat placement and the top left, then both images would be visible and the listing order of the urls in the background rule would seem to be less significant. Nevertheless, it’s a good habit to keep stacking order in mind when listing the urls for multiple background images — background images in specific positions might overlap each other if the page is resized.

16 SEO Tactics That Will NOT Bring Targeted Google Visitors

By Jill Whalen

In my day-to-day reviews of client websites, I see lots of things done to websites in the name of SEO that in reality have no bearing on it.

In an effort to keep you from spending your precious time on supposed SEO tactics that will have absolutely no effect on your rankings, search engine visitors, conversions or sales, I present you with 16 SEO tactics that you can remove from your personal knowledge base and/or SEO toolbox as being in any way related to SEO:

Meta Keywords: Lord help us! I thought I was done discussing the ole meta keywords tag in 1999, but today in 2011 I encounter people with websites who still think this is an important SEO tactic. My guess is it’s easier to fill out a keyword meta tag than to do the SEO procedures that do matter. Suffice it to say, the meta keyword tag is completely and utterly useless for SEO purposes when it comes to all the major search engines – and it always will be.
XML Site Maps or Submitting to Search Engines: If your site architecture stinks and important optimized pages are buried too deeply to be easily spidered, an XML site map submitted via Webmaster Tools isn’t going to make them show up in the search results for their targeted keywords. At best it will make Google aware that those pages exist. But if they have no internal or external link popularity to speak of, their existence in the universe is about as important as the existence of the tooth fairy (and she won’t help your pages to rank better in Google either!).
Link Title Attributes: Think that you can simply add descriptive text to your “click here” link’s title attribute? (For example: <a href=”page1.html” title=”Spammy Keywords Here”>Click Here</a>.) Think again. Back in the 1990s I too thought these were the bee’s knees. Turns out they are completely ignored by all major search engines. If you use them to make your site more accessible, then that’s great, but just know that they have nothing to do with Google.
Header Tags Like H1 or H2: This is another area people spend lots of time in, as if these fields were created specifically for SEOs to put keywords into. They weren’t, and they aren’t. They’re simply one way to mark up your website code with headlines. While it’s always a good idea to have great headlines on a site that may or may not use a keyword phrase, whether it’s wrapped in H-whatever tags is of no consequence to your rankings.
Keyworded Alt Text on Non-clickable Images: Thought you were clever to stuff keywords into the alt tag of the image of your pet dog? Think again, Sparky! In most cases, non-clickable image alt tag text isn’t going to provide a boost to your rankings. And it’s especially not going to be helpful if that’s the only place you have those words. (Clickable images are a different story, and the alt text you use for them is in fact a very important way to describe the page that the image is pointing to.)
Keyword-stuffed Content: While it’s never been a smart SEO strategy, keyword-stuffed content is even stupider in today’s competitive marketplace. In the 21st century, less is often more when it comes to keywords in your content. In fact, if you’re having trouble ranking for certain phrases that you’ve used a ton of times on the page, rather than adding it just one more time, try removing some instances of it. You may be pleasantly surprised at the results.
Optimizing for General or Peripheral Keywords: You’re not gonna rank for a one-word keyword. You’re just not. You are likely not even going to rank for a 2-word keyword. So stop wasting your time optimizing for them, and find the phrases that answer the searcher’s question. For example, most people seeking legal help aren’t putting the one word “lawyer” into Google. They have a very specific need for a certain type of lawyer as well as a specific location in which they hope to find said lawyer. So rather than throwing the word “lawyer” all over your site, ask yourself this: There are people out there who want what you’re providing. What are they typing into Google? Now focus on those words instead. And don’t even get me started on people who put words on their pages that are barely related to what they do “just in case” someone who types that into Google might be interested in what they offer. You won’t rank for those phrases anyway, but even if you magically did, they won’t make you any sales.
Targeting the Same Keywords on Every Page: The keyword universe for any product or service is ginormous. (It really is.) Even if there are one or two phrases that bring you the most traffic, why the heck would you want to miss out on the gazillions of others as well? Stop focusing every page on the same handful of phrases and start targeting each page to its own specific set that most relate to what you’re offering there.
Focusing on Ads as Links: Banner ads, Google AdWords links and most other forms of online advertising do not create links that count toward your link popularity. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use this form of marketing – just don’t be deluded into thinking that it will have a direct effect on your organic search engine rankings and traffic.
Mad-lib Doorway Pages: While you may offer lots of products or services that are extremely similar to one another with just one minor change, it’s not a good idea to create separate pages for each of them and making only minor keyword changes to each of them. While this may be okay for paid search landing pages, it’s a duplicate content spammy nightmare for organic SEO purposes. (In fairness, I do sometimes still see this technique work, but it’s still not advisable to do it.)
Linking to Google or Other Popular Websites: It’s the links pointing to your pages from other sites that help you with SEO, not the pages you’re linking out to. ‘Nuff said.
Redirecting a Keyworded Domain to Your Real One: So you have your business name as your domain (as you should), but you have noticed the unfortunate fact that Google seems to really like domains that have keywords in them. Buying one (or more) and redirecting it to your actual website can’t provide you with any advantage because a redirected website (and its domain name) is never seen by the search engines. And besides, even if there were something magical about doing this, again, you’re only talking about one keyword phrase.
Republishing Only Others’ Stuff: While it’s fine to republish an article that someone else published first, if that’s all your blog consists of, it’s not going to help your search engine rankings. Instead of republishing entire articles, discuss them in your own posts and provide your thoughts and opinions on what’s good / bad / ugly about what the others are saying. It’s all about adding value.
Making Minor Changes to Freshen Content: This is not going to help a thing. If any old articles or posts need to be updated, then update them. But just changing a date or a few words will not have any effect on your search engine rankings or traffic.
Nofollowing Internal Links: Perhaps you’re not looking for your privacy policy page to be followed by the search engines, so you add a nofollow attribute to it. That’s all well and good, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that this will somehow control your PageRank flow and get you better rankings. It won’t.
Main Navigation That Links to Every Page: If linking to pages in your main navigation gives them more internal link popularity and therefore more possible weighting with the search engines, then surely linking to every single page of the site in your main navigation should be a good idea, right? Wrong! It isn’t. All it does is spread your internal link popularity too thin and confuse the heck out of your site visitors. Don’t do it. Choose to link only to top-level categories and perhaps subcategories (if you have a reasonable number of them) in your main navigation. This allows users to drill down further when they’re in the category sections themselves.

Did I miss any? I’m quite sure I’ve just touched the surface on waste-of-time SEO tactics. How about you? Do you agree with the above? Disagree?

Jill Whalen is the CEO of High Rankings, an SEO Consulting company in the Boston, MA area since 1995. Follow her on Twitter @JillWhalen