Category: UsefulLinks

Useful links for today

Google Search Tricks in TiKouka gives even more great search tricks for Google. Did you know about these useful search features?

MacHeist will sell you a bundle of 11 Mac software apps worth $368 for only $49. It’s good software: CSSEdit, Snap Z Pro, Cha-Ching and others. You can give 25% of that $49 to the charity of your choice. Hurry, the deal only lasts 10 more days. Nice going, MacHeist!

Digital Tools Help Users Save Energy from the New York Times is confirmation of something Bruce Sterling said at SWSWi years ago: until there’s a readout on everything telling us exactly how many particulates are in the air or how many pollutants are in the drinking water on a second by second basis, the status quo will not change. Hey, Bruce, the idea applies to energy use, too. ADDENDUM 1/16/08: Making Fuel Consumption Visible—yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about!

Useful links roundup

Web Worker Daily has a great set of links to online browser testing services. They list seven, some of them free, such as IE NetRenderer, which will show your page in IE 5.5, 6, or 7.

Flocking to the pictures, in TiKouka, gives an excellent overview of what the social media browser Flock is all about. If you are a big user of social media, Flock sounds like a good app to investigate and perhaps use.

Online Survival Guide: 9 Tips for Dealing with Idiots on the Internet provides some good advice from Internet Duct Tape. Don’t let yourself get disemvoweled.

The Kimberly Blessing Interview by Christopher Schmitt is worth a read. Blessing started as an Interactive Developer for AOL. She currently works for PayPal as the manager of their Web Development Platform Team. Kimberly authored the “The Circle of Standards” chapter for the book, Adapting to Web Standards. She’s also a co-leader of the Web Standards Project. The conversation ranges from web standards, to coping with SXSWi when you’re an introvert, to fan sites. (This last was of interest to me, since I’ve been running a fan site for years, but mine is a definite Web 1.0 site.)

A Look at Weebly

I recently tried out Weebly. It’s a site that offers drag and drop web page creation, along with free hosting of the pages you create. You can publish the pages you create on a domain of your own choosing.

They offer a blog among the choices as to what you can make with their interface, but if you add a blog to a site, it must be hosted at Weebly to work.

I was trying it out because I was writing a how-to article about it for eHow. I made a test web site, which reflects my quickly done effort while testing for the eHow article.

It is easy. Very easy. But if you run an HTML validator on the test site I made, you find 48 validation errors on the first page. The blog, where I didn’t go as wild dragging and dropping widgets and elements onto the page only (only?) has HTML 22 errors.

I didn’t make an effort to create anything real that I would use. I just tried out the elements to see if they fulfilled the promise of letting an inexperienced user create and publish their own information in a web page. Weebly does that. However, I don’t think it provides any useful fodder for education in web design. If you are teaching programming and want to look at a smoothly working example of a web 2.0 site, it could be instructive.

Are sites like Weebly going to eliminate the need for instruction and education in web design by making it so simple to get published on the web that even a kid could do it? I don’t think so. They have a place, a niche. For example, if you were getting married and wanted a short-term, fast and easy site to store information about the wedding and its related events, maps, gift registration sites, and such info, Weebly would be a solution. But Weebly is limited. Which means a solid grounding in the web development nuts and bolts is still necessary for most web site creators.

ADDENDUM: July 27, 2010. Weebly made news today with a new drag and drop image editor called Image Perfect. You can read about it at TechCrunch.

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Related Posts: SynthaSite, SiteKreator, and Webnode

Summary of eHow articles for December

Christmas Cactus

The Christmas cactus is about to bloom. A sure sign that winter is here.

Check out my latest on eHow.

Useful links roundup

24 Ways: CSS for Accessibility by Ann McMeekin is a nice set of CSS tips that would make a good handout or class discussion.

Six Tech Predictions for 2008 from Web Worker Daily is a quick and interesting read.

Bad Timing is Eric Meyer’s look at the flip side of the suit Opera brought against Microsoft in Europe this week.

 Why Accessibility? Because it’s Our Job by brothercake argues, “If we call ourselves professionals, we owe it to our clients, their clients, and ourselves, to do our job properly. A chef must care about health, a builder must care about safety, and we must care about accessibility.”

Useful links for today

WikiMatrix – Compare Them All is a wiki comparison tool. There is help in choosing a wiki, a comparison matrix, and a forum.

A series of reports on the Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace at Yale by 43(B)log begins with Reputation Economies, the day’s first panel. Blogger Rebecca Tushnet also posted about the second panel in Reputation economies, Panel II: Privacy and Reputational Protection. Her post on the third panel is Reputation economies, Panel III: Reputational Quality and Information Quality. The fourth report is Reputation economies, Panel IV: Ownership of Cyber-Reputation. Rebecca Tushnet was a member of this panel. Fascinating discussions at what must have been a remarkable symposium. In my opinion, it’s worth your time to read all four posts.

Today’s Useful links

Ensuring your HTML Emails Look Good and Get Delivered by David Greiner at Think Vitamin is informative on its own. Its also part of the new Email Standards Project campaign to bring mail apps into the standards fold, so you’ll find out what some of the current problems are in getting HTML email to look good.

Tiny Bubbles: SVG Version at Burningbird requires that you watch what happens for a couple of seconds. It’s a good demo of the very interesting effects Shelley Powers has done on her blog with SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). The clock in the sidebar is created with SVG, too. She has a book coming out from O’Reilly about SVG very soon.

Google Information for Webmasters tells you how to remove websites, cached pages, dead links and other material from the Google index. You can only remove your own info, no one else’s.

The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard is a “20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns.” This film makes me think of a serious problem that prevents change: we operate out of a split mind. One side of our mind wants to consume, consume, consume for the lowest possible cost. The other side of our mind wants to do the right thing for the common good and the planet. But acts we take as a money-saving consumer are exactly the wrong thing for the common good and the planet. We need to talk about and deal with this split between our behavior and the desire—no, the urgent need—to do the right thing.

Got Fear? This site was set up to prepare for the upcoming session “Who’s Afraid of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and the Big Bad CMS? A Digi-Drama About Fear 2.0” at the January 2008 annual meeting of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. They want to hear from you about your fears (and the fears you’re observing at your institutions) about the role of Web 2.0 tools and technologies in higher education.