Category: ProductReview

Is this how you find your bliss?

Have you looked at Bliss Control? Start from there and adjust settings for all the things shown in the screen grab:

settings to change

After you pick the thing you want to change, you pick the place where you want to make the change. The app will connect you directly to the right spot in each of the sites shown below:

sites

The interesting thing about this service is that they don’t retain any login information – they simply guide you straight to the relevant place on the site in question to do whatever it is you want to do.

The young guys behind this interesting app are @benin, @Altryne, and @TboyTim.

Flickr, Picnik, and potential replacements

If you are a Flickr user you know that the online image editor Picnik that was integrated with Flickr is going away. What’s a photographer to do when all they want is a quick crop or to rotate a photo while looking at Flickr?

If you are a Google + user, you’ve probably noticed that the Picnik technology has moved into Google + and can be used to edit photos there. That’s nice, as long as you’re a Google + user.

There are alternatives to Picnik.

FotoFlexer will work with photos from Flickr (and Picasa and Facebook and other places) and will do pretty much what Picnik does.

PicMonkey was built by some of the folks who worked on Picnik, and does much of the same type of image editing. The hang-up right now is that it only works on photos you have stored on your hard drive. Not that having a free online tool to edit photos isn’t fabulous, but it needs to allow you to choose photos from online storage places and then save the changed image back to its original location.

Are you aware of others that make sense as replacements for Picnik?

Have a little fun with QR codes

There’s a beta site called QRhacker that has a clever twist on QR codes. It will generate a QR code for you based on some text, a URL, a phone number, a V card, or wifi access. Then you can customize it by adding a photo in either the background or the foreground. You can also select a foreground color.

I made two and saved them as images. One has my photo in the background, one in the foreground. Try them out and see where they take you.

background image foreground image

Changes in WordPress free sites

I have another blog called First 50 Words. It’s one of the free WordPress blogs, with a wordpress.com URL. I use that blog to post writing prompts for writing practice. For the past few months, there has been a constant reminder on the free blog, suggesting I upgrade to pro. This would mean I’d get a “real” URL. It isn’t expensive to do. I think the last time I looked it was $17.

But I like things the way they are. WordPress hosts thousands, perhaps millions, of free blogs. I don’t blame them for wanting some money from all the moochers like me who are using their free services. I just don’t want to change my blog or my URL.

WordPress won’t leave things alone. Now they are throwing up an annoying sidebar after each post is published.

wordpress sidebar

To get rid of the sidebar, you have to click. What you are left seeing after you do that is the newly published post. So WordPress arbitrarily decided that the next thing I want to do every time I publish a post is 1) see an intrusive sidebar, and 2) look at the new post. Since it’s dead easy to view your published post without any urging from the WordPress interface, I don’t really need this help.

I can only conclude that this is WordPress’ way of annoying me into going for the upgrade. It isn’t making me want to upgrade. It’s making me mad.

Dear WordPress, if you’re listening, I’ve used you here on Web Teacher and in other places for years. You are my favorite. You are my sunshine. You are my morning coffee. But you need to rethink the sidebar thing. Please.

When someone reviews your work

There’s no manual for behavior on the Internet. Most people behave well without it, but not all. I’m observing an incident at another site involving a review.

I publish many reviews here. Most of the time the people whose work I’m reviewing are pretty quiet about it. They may stop by to say thanks for the review or tweet the URL to the review. But they aren’t spamming the review with fake positive comments. That’s what’s happening at the other site. Bad behavior, bad judgement, bad idea.

Don’t try to make yourself look good with comments you try to disguise as being from someone other than yourself. Instead, take some time to review the basics of successful social media and interaction on the Internet. Then behave accordingly.

Faked self-promotion is just sleazy.

Review: HTML5 and CSS3 Visual QuickStart Guide

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HTML5 & CSS3 Visual QuickStart Guide (7th Edition) by Elizabeth Castro and Bruce Hyslop is the latest edition in the Visual QuickStart Guide series about HTML and CSS. A couple of changes are immediately noticeable about the book. Elizabeth Castro now has a co-author after producing 6 editions of this book on her own. And the book reflects a change in design Peachpit is putting into all its VQS books with full color and a generally brighter appearance.

While Peachpit can take credit for the new look, I can see the influence of Bruce Hyslop here, too. Having read, dog-eared, and dreamed my way through the first six editions, I see a change in these books that I think Hyslop must be responsible for. There is a different tone, the sidebars are lengthier and pull in a considerable amount of information about HTML5 and CSS3 from blogs and articles by a number of web design experts.

There are 21 chapters taking over 500 pages. Some of the chapters are fairly massive. “Video, Audio, and Other Multimedia” gets a 38 page treatment, “Tables” on merits only 5 pages. The chapter “Defining Selectors” is particularly good. Here’s the full table of contents.

  1. Web Page Building Blocks
  2. Working with Web Page Files
  3. Basic HTML Structure
  4. Text
  5. Images
  6. Links
  7. CSS Building Blocks
  8. Working with Style Sheets
  9. Defining Selectors
  10. Formatting Text with Styles
  11. Layout with Styles
  12. Style Sheets for Mobile to Desktop
  13. Working with Web Fonts
  14. Enhancements with CSS3
  15. Lists
  16. Forms
  17. Video, Audio and Other Multimedia
  18. Tables
  19. Working with Scripts
  20. Testing and Debugging Web Pages
  21. Publishing Your Pages on the Web

If your budget only allows for one HTML5 and CSS3 book, this book is a terrific way to invest your money. I’ve reviewed HTML5 for Web Designers and Introducing HTML5 on this blog. I think this book is better than either of those books. That’s not saying the two books mentioned are not excellent books, because they are. I’ve read both of those books carefully and I still learned new and helpful things from HTML5 and CSS3. Plus, the VQS style is inherently easy to use with each topic detailed in small step-by-step bits. It’s so easy to find the one thing you need to know at any given moment with a VQS book.

Another advantage of this book over the others I mentioned is that it can get a beginner going but it also offers a lot of good information for the experienced HTML and CSS wonk. If you’re teaching either of these topics, this book is classroom gold.

Definitely recommended.

Summary: Complete information about HTML5 and CSS3.

A review by Virginia DeBolt of HTML5 and CSS3 (rating: 5 stars)

Review: Introducing HTML5

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Introducing HTML5 (2nd Edition) by Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp is from New Riders (2012). The book includes everything from descriptions of new structural elements (like article, nav, and aside) to canvas, data storage, enabling offline, and drag and drop. It even includes some things that are not actually part of HTML5, like geolocation. There are many example codes, lots of JavaScripts and help with using new APIs to make your pages do all sorts of HTML5 tricks and magic.

In my opinion, the core audience for this book is the back-end developer who wants to write the scripts and do the programming to make HTML5 perform services that were not available before. The front-end developers will find the first few chapters helpful, but may be less interested in all the programming details in later chapters. (Front-end folks might consider HTML5 for Web Designers instead.)

The authors get a resounding +1 for including accessibility information about everything they discuss.

Here’s a look at the full table of contents.

  1. Main Structure: basics about doctypes, structural elements and CSS
  2. Text: new structural elements and how to use them properly, the document outline, WAI-ARIA and more
  3. Forms: new input types, new attributes, validation
  4. Video and Audio
  5. Canvas
  6. Data Storage: web storage, Web SQL, and more
  7. Offline: the cache manifest, applicationCache and more
  8. Drag and Drop: how to, interoperability
  9. Geolocation: API methods
  10. Messaging and Workers: chat, messaging, threading
  11. Real Time: web sockets, server-sent events
  12. Polyfilling: Patching Old Browsers to Support HTML5 Today: feature detection, various scripts, Modernizr examples

The book is written with a sense of humor and warmth that keep even the most tedious information from becoming boring. This is done in large part with humorous examples and illustrations. But beyond writing style, these guys really know what they are doing, and they want you to be able to do it, too. If you are looking for help with anything listed above in the book’s contents, you’ll find it here. The code examples from the book are all available for download, making the many snippets of HTML, CSS and JavaScript shown even more easy to use.

Definitely recommended.

Summary: Excellent guide for the developer who wants to put HTML5 to use right now.

A review by Virginia DeBolt of Introducting HTML 5 (rating: 5 stars)