UsefulLinks Archives - Web Teacher

Gather Content Offers a Free UX Guide

Gather Content, an online software tool that allows people to streamline their web content production, is making their UX Guide available as a free download.

The book, UX Design And Content Strategy: The Project Guide, is described as a hands-on resource for all UXers and a project guide to UX design and content strategy that explores the relationship through a website project. The book is a 64 page PDF document.

I haven’t read the book myself, but if you are interested in a project based approach to user experience, it certainly is worth a look.

How to Protect Yourself from the Weakest Links in The Internet of Things

So many things are connected to the Internet now. Your thermostat, your refrigerator, your baby monitor, your light switches, your health tracker. Did you know there are web sites designed to find all the Internet connected devices and potentially allow them to be hacked?

You don’t need to be a computer genius to hack into someone’s security system, door locks or cars. Using the username admin with the same password often yields access to such devices with no trouble at all.

Having access to one of the Internet connected devices in your home could be the weak link that allows someone to hack into other devices in your home, such as your computer.

The most important step you can take to protect yourself is to change default usernames and passwords on all your Internet connected devices. Boston University has a great post on how to create a secure password.

If possible, make the device accessible only from your private home network (which has a secure password, right?) You can then log in to your own network away from home, but others won’t be able to.

Protect your data. Be safe out there.

Great tips for screen reader demos in the classroom

For those of you who teach accessibility in web design, it’s always a problem to demo the process that screen reader users use to access web pages.

Jared Smith, writing at Web Standards Sherpa, has some great tips for how to simulate the screen reader experience for someone using free technology. Check it out.

10 Awesome Free Photoshop Extensions

Photoshop is one of the most amazing pieces of design software ever created, and I, for one, absolutely applaud Adobe for adopting the software-as-a-service business model, which makes Photoshop and the rest of the Creative Suite more accessible to graphic designers everywhere. Another key component of Photoshop is the ability to extend it with third-party plugins. If you want to take Photoshop to the next level, download the following 10 awesome free Photoshop extensions today.

Skeumorphism.it

The days of high-gloss and texture are over – flat is in! With this Photoshop plugin, you can make your design flat in, well, no time flat!

Flat Icon

The Flat Icon plugin lets you instantly access more than 25,000 icons to use in your designs, right from Photoshop’s interface.

CSS3Ps

Crafting a compelling design in Photoshop is one thing, but turning it into workable CSS styles for websites is another. This handy Photoshop plugin automatically converts your layer styles into CSS.

BlendMe.in

Access thousands of vectors to use in your designs fast and easy right from Photoshop’s interface with this awesome plugin.

Interface Tools

The ultimate interface toolkit for Photoshop, Interface Tools eliminates the need to endlessly search for Photoshop tools and provides a host of other functions that streamline the design process, all free of charge.

GuideGuide

Grid-based layouts are the most attractive, but Photoshop makes it painfully difficult to work with grids. With GuideGuide, you’ll have properly proportioned grids in seconds.

Layer Guides

If you add guides to your layers, you know how tedious it can be to click, click, click for every single layer. Layer Guides adds guides to all of your layers with a single click.

Divine Project

PSD to WordPress designers take note: This is the ultimate extension for you, because it helps quickly convert Photoshop designs into workable WordPress themes. Zero coding required!

Web Font Plugin

Access Google and WebINK web fonts from Photoshop’s interface with this ultra-useful plugin.

CutandSlice.me

For all its advances, Photoshop is still old school when it comes to slicing graphics for the web. The Cut&Slice Me plugin makes it easy to quickly slice graphics for today’s web, including the capability to slice and capture all button states at once.

What’s your favorite free Photoshop plugin?

Author’s Bio: Brian Morris writes for the PsPrint Design & Printing Blog. PsPrint is an online commercial printing company. Follow PsPrint on Twitter @PsPrint.

Useful links: HTML5 Document Outline, Ugly Code?, RWD

Did you see the post where Steve Faulkner called the HTML5 Document Outline a dangerous fiction? Go read it, especially if you’ve been teaching it.

Ugly Code for Hidden Pictures or playing with canvas, as I like to call it, has some interesting ideas for coding with canvas.

10 Things You Need to Know About Responsive Web Design is an Adobe Dev article. It’s an excellent overview of the topic.

Useful Links: Online Education, HTMLDevConf slides, Twitter counts

An Honest Look at Online Education is helpful and comprehensive.

A collection of links to slide decks from the HTML5 Developer Conference.

Assessing My Personal Gender Bias on Twitter is a terrific post by Terence Eden. Are you ready to put some arithmetic to your gender bias?

Useful Links: Content Ideas, Beauty Pageant, Date Input

I saw this tweeted by Kristina Halvorson, so I took a look. It’s a tool to help you generate ideas for new content for your blog, called Content Strategy Generator. It works through Google Drive.

To Increase Women’s Participation, They Added a Beauty Pageant. Good grief!

Date input in HTML5: Restricting dates, and a thought for working around limitations is from Tiffany B. Brown.