Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Here’s terrific short video called Find Your Next Growth Market with Nilofer Merchant. Sorry, I can’t find any code to embed it here, but it’s worth a listen and very short.
How to Use CSS3 Columns is a quick and easy tutorial.
Grandma Got STEM is a new blog where people can send in information about the older women in their lives who have been working for decades in STEM fields. Invisible no more!
5 Expert Tips for Improving Your Navigation Menu is from Usabilla blog.
Mike Montiero talks about measured responses online at The Pastry Box Project. He asks, “when your response is worse than the action that elicits it, then who’s the asshole?”
Once and for All: Tech is Not a Meritocracy is from Curious For a Living. The article concludes,
If we can agree that cognitive bias and
internal barriers exist in the tech world (and I really, really hope that we can, because there’s plenty of evidence to support their existence), then we can begin to acknowledge the sometimes painful reality that we do not work in a pure meritocracy. That, in turn, will allow us to work creatively on strategies to help us to build systems that more closely resemble the merit-driven tech culture we so passionately want to see.
In A White Boy’s Observations of Sexism and the Adria Richards Fiasco, author MarkCC made some unbiased remarks, including,
What I do know is that for a member of the minority out-group, there is frequently no action that will be accepted as “right” if it includes the assertion that the majority did something offensive.
PDF Techniques for WCAG 2.0 from the W3C talks about tools and techniques and gets very specific about how to add tags, alt text, columns, form controls and more to PDF documents.
Adobe is closing its browser lab. All you Dreamweaver teachers take note.
There’s a good summary of all the latest news in web standartds at .net magazine: Hot in Web Standards.
If you’re a blogger who does reviews (as I do) you should take a look at the new FTC guidelines for disclosing info in product reviews.
This terrific new site is a step-by-step tutorial that will get you educated on CSS layout in an easy, visual style: Learn CSS Layout.
No more little boxes filled with software from Adobe Creative Suite. It’s a Creative Cloud or download only world out there, folks.
The Kickstarter project to raise $2million for a Veronica Mars movie was fully funded in less than one day. Completely amazing what the right project can do with Kickstarter. You can still get in on the action.
Yesterday Google announced it is retiring Google Reader, breaking my heart and the hearts of a lot of blog readers like myself who have a regular daily reading list. I’m going to be researching alternative RSS readers today and will have some for you by tomorrow today (see Google Reader: Oh, the Pain).
The Problem of CSS Form Elements is at Smashing Magazine.
Seven Things Still Missing from CSS at .net magazine.
Video from the recent W3Conf are available on YouTube.
The Google Glass Feature No One is Talking About. Is Google becoming Big Brother?
Lerio Designs has blog posts with weekly roundups of web design and development resources that is excellent and worth subscribing to.
Here’s a comprehensive post on keyword research that would be good to share with students.
I’m always fascinated by stories about what women in the gaming and animation industry do. (My 16 year old grandchild wants to have a career in the field.) Here’s an interview with Brave Shading Art Director Tia Kratter.
Nick Disabato talks about how he works to achieve gender diversity in his industry.
Derek Featherstone discusses the best way to markup the first instance of an acronym in this Web Standards Sherpa Q&A.
I may finally have to play a game on Facebook. Look at this Half the Sky game which lets you do real good. The NYTimes explains,
The players can then make equivalent real-world donations to seven nonprofit organizations woven into the game.
Ten dollars, for example, will help buy a goat for Heifer International; $20 will help support United Nations Foundation immunization efforts.
One of my students asked me the other day about why she should bother to make an accessible web site if blind people weren’t her audience. I answered her question adequately, but I wish I’d had this nice list of reasons at the time. How does accessible web design benefit all web users?
Latest test results on screen reader support for HTML5 sectioning elements can be found at tink. Almost there in JAWS, but spotty in others.