Jeffrey Brown’s presentation at the WE Rock Tour event in Chattanooga. How to rock web education in your classroom.
Wish I could embed the video here but there’s no option for that. Educators will be interested in watching it.
Web Education Rocks!
Useful Links: validators, keyboarding, Gmail, fake ads
The W3C has a new validator at validator.w3.org/unicorn they are calling a “unified” validator. Unified because it checks HTML (including HTML5), CSS, and RSS feeds.
The validator at validator.nu also checks HTML5, and can be set to check for ARIA roles as well.
Introduction to Keyboard Maestro from ATMac has a discount offer good through August.
Google came out with multiple account sign in yesterday. Here’s how to use it, from Demo Girl.
Fake Vintage Ads for Facebook, YouTube and Skype. Something to make you smile today.
Another conversation with Ann Smarty, SEO expert
In the first BlogHer interview with SEO expert Ann Smarty, we talked about how you can improve your search engine rankings and build your traffic as a blogger.
Rhiannon Wilson left a comment on that post, saying,
I think these are great tips for bloggers. But like she said, blogging is more network focused, but as for us eStore Owners, Search Engines are our lifeblood. We get 80% of our traffic directly from search engine searches. I would love to hear her tips for eCommerce websites.
I contacted Ann Smarty about the idea. She said she would be willing to do another interview with me, this time more focused on business. I sent her some of my own questions and a few I got from a quick email exchange with Rhiannon.
Read Ann Smarty’s expert advice on optimizing an eCommerce site for search engines at BlogHer.
HTML5: the new hgroup element
In HTML5, the new hgroup element serves an interesting purpose. I want to build you an example, starting with the hgroup element and working outwards to show how it could be part of the new article element.
The hgroup element can contain only h1-h6 elements. Here’s an example:
<hgroup>
<h1>10 Terrific Tech Blogs by Women</h1>
<h2>Code, Gadgets, Issues, and Science</h2>
</hgroup>
It isn’t necessary to use an h1/h2 combination. It could be an h2/h3 or h3/h4. It depends on where you’re putting it. The defining attribute of hgroup elements is that the first heading element is what goes into the document outline. The secondary heading is not part of the outline. The secondary headings in the hgroup are meant for taglines, subheads, and other lesser text that relates to the main heading in the hgroup.
HTML5 contains a new header element. The hgroup element can be nested in a header element, like this.
<header>
<hgroup>
<h1>10 Terrific Tech Blogs by Women</h1>
<h2>Code, Gadgets, Issues, and Science</h2>
</hgroup>
</header>
Keep in mind that the header element can contain other elements such as a nav or a figure, although I don’t have them in the example.
As we keep working outwards from the headings, we can imagine that the header element is part of an article element. That might look like this:
<article>
<header>
<hgroup>
<h1>10 Terrific Tech Blogs by Women</h1>
<h2>Code, Gadgets, Issues, and Science</h2>
</hgroup>
</header>
<p>Tech tips, geeky how-tos, thoughtful analysis of issues, news about the latest gadgets, ideas for improving your blog—you’ll find it all in these 10 terrific tech and science blogs. They just happen to be written by women.</p>
<p>more content</p>
</article>
The article element can also contain a new element called footer. The article footer would contain material relevant to the article—perhaps a date, an author’s URL, or other material.
<article>
<header>
<hgroup>
<h1>10 Terrific Tech Blogs by Women</h1>
<h2>Code, Gadgets, Issues, and Science</h2>
</hgroup>
</header>
<p>Tech tips, geeky how-tos, thoughtful analysis of issues, news about the latest gadgets, ideas for improving your blog—you’ll find it all in these 10 terrific tech and science blogs. They just happen to be written by women.</p>
<p>more content</p>
<footer>
<p>Some footer content</p>
</footer>
</article>
The now complete article represents a stand-alone piece of content. It has a heading and content and can be lifted of-a-piece to be placed elsewhere or syndicated some way. In a document outline, it would appear with all the content outlined under the top level heading in the hgroup element.
What’s all this about Facebook Questions? I’m just asking.
[Cross-posted at BlogHer in a slightly different version.]
Facebook rolled out the first baby steps toward the new Facebook Questions yesterday with an announcement on the Facebook blog: Searching for Answers? Ask Facebook Questions.
To ask a question to the community, just click the “Ask Question” button at the top of the homepage. You can also ask questions about your friends from their profiles, similarly to how you would post on their Walls.
Not everyone has an “Ask Question” button yet. Just a few users are included in the beta testing. When you get it, it will look like this.
If you’ve used Yahoo! Answers or Quora, you know what Facebook Questions is about. You ask a question, you get crowdsourced answers. (Liz Gannes points out at GigaOM that Questions is very similar to Quora, a site started by former Facebookers.)
The defining feature for Facebook users to keep in mind is that Facebook Questions are public. Public to the whole Facebook population—all 500 million members. This is not a private conversation among you and your friends. This is a public as Twitter’s public timeline. Which means there are a lot of brains out there with the information you seek. It also means you need to use it with the awareness that it’s totally public. You cannot ask an anonymous question. Your name is attached.
It isn’t a status update, it isn’t a comment, it isn’t a game or a chat. It’s a way to get your questions answered. You hope the question is answered by someone who knows what they are telling you, but there’s no guarantee of correctness with Facebook Questions. Good answers do get voted up, however.
A very enthusiastic review at ReadWriteWeb in Why Facebook Questions Could be Zuckerberg’s Dream Come True states,
Company founder Mark Zuckerberg, wrong as he is about many things like privacy, has said that his goal with Facebook is to build empathy and connection between different people all around the world. If he was in it for the money, he would have taken Yahoo’s $1 billion offer years ago and run. That goal of cultural change may very well be served better by Questions than by any other Facebook feature to date.
Right, we all just want world peace. Will Facebook Questions help get us there?
A few other features include photo questions such a “what bird is this,” taking polls about questions, tagging questions with important keywords, and the ability to follow specific questions that you have an interest in.
One observer, in Facebook Questions: A Potential Threat to Google Search thinks Facebook Questions will do away with search. Search provides instant answers. You have to wait for someone to take on your question with the crowdsourced questions sites. I don’t think the two are in competition. Yahoo! Answers and Ask.com haven’t eliminated search.
What do you think of the Facebook Questions? Will you use it when it rolls out to your account? Do you think it can engender meaningful discussion? Thoughtful answers?
Useful links: Influence, Font Previewer
From The Access Point, a listing of the most influential women’s voices on the web.
ABIE from Access Communications
The Access Point is using the post/graphic to bring attention to their new ranking tool, ABIE, that “determines online influence based not only on data from the top ‘ranking’ services out there, but also on factors such as audience engagement levels and the frequency original content is shared across the social Web.” I don’t see where they’ve done a similar thing for influential men.
Google Font Previewer is super helpful. As I mentioned in an earlier article, Embedding fonts the Google way, it’s very easy to use fonts from the Google font directory. Now Google has provided an app that lets you pick one of their fonts, apply some CSS3 text-shadow, and set a few spacing options. You see how it looks in the preview. It spits out some code you can copy.
This font is called Lobster. Here’s how I made it look in the preview.
This is the code the app provided:
<link href="//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lobster:regular" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" >
<style>
body {
font-family: 'Lobster', serif;
font-size: 28px;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: 400;
text-shadow: 2px 2px 2px #aaa;
text-decoration: none;
text-transform: none;
letter-spacing: 0.024em;
word-spacing: 0em;
line-height: 1.13em;
}
</style>
The code could use a bit of editing to remove unused properties (e.g. text-transform: none;), but it is a time-saver to see how text is going to look with the text-shadow styling.
Mapping with Flickr
Have you played with the map function on Flickr? I’ve been ignoring it, choosing not to give my location on my photos because I put up a lot of family photos and I didn’t want them identified by location.
I administer a group on Flickr for Women in Tech. Maybe you’ve noticed the tiny slideshow of the images from that group pool in the blog sidebar. I clicked on the Map view in Flickr while looking at the Women in Tech photos in the Flickr group and was delighted to see the results.
Thanks to the folks who do have mapping enabled on their photos you see this map. You see a thumbnail of the particular photo and a marker on the world map showing where the photo was taken. If you use the left or right arrows in the thumbnail window to move to different photos, the location markers on the map change. If you click on a location marker, images associated with that location pop up. If you click on a thumbnail, the location marker is highlighted. You can sort by interesting or recent.
Playing with this made me rethink the value of using location markers (or geotagging) photos. I was wondering if I could do it on a photo by photo basis, so I looked in the Flickr Help. I found this:
Can anybody see where my geotagged photos were taken? Is the location private?
You can keep where you took your photos private, if you want, or assign permission to any level you’re comfortable with. You can set a default privacy level for any photos you add to the map, and you can change the location privacy per photo as well. To change the settings on a photo, double-click it in Organizr. Click the Location tab. That’s where the privacy setting is, as well as the latitude and longitude of your photo’s location. (You can edit that too, if you have that information.)
That means I’m going to start geotagging photos from conferences and public events. Yes, indeed.