Category: Uncategorized

About a month ago, Blackboard and Web CT announced a merger.
Blackboard and WebCT Announce Plans to Merge
They promise that, “Over time, Blackboard will incorporate the best features and usability characteristics from the two product lines into a new standards-based product set.”

If you’ve used either of these programs at your university, you probably have a wish list as to what needs to be done to make the program more usable and funtional, as well as standards compliant. What’s on your wish list?

Technorati Tags: accessibility, Usability, education, web standards

Web Site Cookbook : Solutions & Examples for Building and Administering Your Web Site (O’Reilly, 2006) by Doug Addison is the first of the O’Reilly cookbooks I’ve really looked at closely. It’s a reference book rather than an instruction manual. It’s the kind of book where you look in the index first to find the page you need and read just the bit from the page that answers your question.

The thing that I find valuable about this book from a teaching point of view is that it answers all those questions that students ask (and need to know) that aren’t in the book you’re probably using as your chief text. What kinds of questions am I talking about? Almost everything related to making web sites is in here: finding hosting, buying domains, creating graphics, designing logos, adding information to mailto links, using cookies, creating favicons, using htaccess and mod_rewrite, self-signed SSL certificates, custom error pages, maintaining a MySQL database and more.

Teaching aside, this reference would be useful to anyone who was still not completely sure about everything involved with building and maintaining a web site. It’s a good reference book to have on your shelf.