Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Projectseven.com: Tutorials: PVII Write Styles is a free tutorial and extension that “allows you to write a style sheet dynamically – before your page content loads.”
Project Seven says, “This tutorial will show you how to take a popup Layer controlled by Dreamweaver’s default Show-Hide Layers behavior and make the contents of the Layer accessible to all browsing devices by using the PVII WriteStyles Command to style it dynamically.”
Now there’s an outfit called dodgeball.com :: location-based social software for mobile devices that takes the concept of social networking (think Friendster) and ties it to mobile devices and location technology to create a way to connect you with people who are friends-of-friends and within 10 blocks of you.
One of the things that has fascinated me about the Internet from the beginning is that it is democratic: anyone can have their say. What social networking is capable of doing is extending that freedom of expression to like-minded groups who can gather themselves to action almost instantly. Where that is going is hard to predict, but it will definitely go.
Oh, the times, they are a-changin’.
CSS Vault: The Web’s CSS Site This site looks around the web for interesting CSS based sites and makes note of them. It also sponsors a redesign contest.
More Eric Meyer on CSS is the latest book from the world-recognized guru of CSS, Eric Meyer. It is from New Riders Voices that Matter series.
This book is so much fun! I don’t know when I have had such a good time reading a book. Reading it is like finding a small door to a hidden tunnel that whisks you into the brain of Eric Meyer. But unlike the movie “Being John Malkovich,” the magical tunnel doesn’t allow you to enter Eric Meyer’s brain and take it over. It allows Eric Meyer to take over your brain, revealing his thought process, his problem solving style, his design approach, his knowledge. No, More Eric Meyer on CSS is not the magical realism of the movies. It is the practical application of CSS to solve real-world design requirements.
The book is not for CSS beginners. The assumption is that you know the basics and that something like
#sidebar h4, #sidebar ul {margin: 0 6px 0 0;}
already makes sense to you. Meyer takes on ten design projects. They are: converting an existing page, styling a photo collection, styling a financial report, positioning in the background, list-based menus, CSS-driven drop-down menus, opening the doors to attractive tabs, styling a weblog, designing a home page, and designing in the garden (the CSS Zen Garden, that is). For each project, Meyer provides the design requirements, sets you up with images and files, and then works through each one of the design problems and shows you one (or several) methods of using CSS to meet the requirement.
During one phase of my career, I had a couple of contracting jobs at IBM and was struck by the awesome reverence the programmers had for those rare programming stars among them who wrote “elegant” code. No false trails, no unneeded loop-de-loops, just graceful effective code. Meyer writes CSS like that–graceful and elegant–and you get to be inside his brain as he does it. You get to go though it with him, think his graceful and elegant thoughts–soak in them, bask in them, learn to use them for your own design requirements. I repeat myself and say that this book was fun to read and do.
Do I recommend this book? Yeah, about 110%.
Here’s a book I want but don’t see available. Somebody please write it!
This book would walk a user through the requirements from each of the blogging engines, such as Blogger, Movable Type, Inknoise, Pixagogo and so on. This book would explain what someone who was trying to customize a blog layout would have to include to get the blog to work for their particular blog engine. This book would also provide tips for each specific weblog engine as to ways to customize the look and function of a weblog.
If there is already a book like this and I just can’t find it, would you please let me know what it is?
Digital Media Tools by Nigel Chapman and Jenny Chapman from Wiley Publishing is one of Wiley’s many educational books aimed at university level courses. This book includes chapters about Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, ImageReady, Illustrator and Premiere. It doesn’t attempt to create expert users, but covers the basics of what each program does and how to use it. It would be a good text for an overview course or an introductory course.
An unusual characteristic of this book is that it covers two versions of each program. In this second edition from 2002 (the third edition is scheduled for 2005) the Dreamweaver chapters cover Dreamweaver 4 and Dreamweaver MX in two separate chapters. There is a chapter for Illustrator 9 and Illustrator 10, and similar inclusiveness for the other software. This seems like an excellent idea to me, since colleges and universities are always struggling to adopt new software versions and may have periods when everything hasn’t been upgraded yet. Since this single book would have to get you through six different applications in a digital media course, having some extra options as to the software included in the book makes a lot of sense.
The book weighs in at over 600 pages and does not include a CD. Additional materials are provided at digitalmultimedia.org, which also features materials for another book by the same authors, Digital Multimedia. There are some very good suggestions for projects in the book, some of which require integration of more than one of the tools included to complete.
Macromedia – RoboDemo for Higher Education is a new product which is meant to help you create interactive instruction, tutorials, training, demonstrations, simulations and other online material in a Flash-based technology that requires no knowledge of Flash.