Announcement: Blog Changes

I’m changing my blogging schedule here at Web Teacher. Instead of posting every weekday, I’m only going to post once or twice a week when I have a substantive post on a relevant topic.

I’ve been at this blog for 12 years, I’m ready to step back a bit.

There will be no more Useful Link posts. I’m leaving that whole area in good hands with Deborah Edwards-Onoro who posts a wonderful weekly roundup of web development and design resources on her blog. I suggest you subscribe to her blog, or follow her on Twitter at @redcrew.

The resources available in The Women in Web Education Daily and HTML5 News will still be coming your way with daily updates on topics of interest to web designers, web developers, and web educators.

I’ll still be happy to run guest posts if they fit in with the content here at Web Teacher.

My goal with this change is to concentrate on more helpful tips and tutorials and step back a bit from all the curation and listing of helpful material elsewhere.

Thanks for being a reader, and I hope you’ll enjoy the new focus on fewer posts with more instructive content here at Web Teacher.

Useful links: School of Webcraft, Affordable Blogging Tools, Creativity

Have you looked at Mozilla’s School of Webcraft? If you have worked your way through these courses, I’d really like to hear about your experience.

5 Affordable Image Creation Tools that I use In My Blogging is from ProBlogger.

There are some interesting ideas on creativity from Minh Tran in Comic Con and Creativity.

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?

Yes, Pinterest Can Help You Grow

I do something a bit eccentric with Pinterest. I keep track of books I read in the two book clubs I belong to. I could be doing better with Pinterest, and I’ll bet you could, too.

Pinterest screen shot of book club board
A screen shot from one of my book club boards at Pinterest.

Are you missing out on the value of Pinterest? Apparently it’s a secret traffic getting, marketing tool known only to women. If you’re missing out, you may suffering from male-Pinterest-blindness, or you may be like me and not yet organized to harness the full potential of this site.

Lauren Bacon, the genius behind Curious for a Living recently posted Why Pinterest is Seriously Valuable (and What It’s Teaching Men in Power). Here’s a small Snippet of what she said.

This morning, I read Kevin Roose’s New York Magazine commentary on Pinterest’s valuation with a familiar combination of amusement and irritation. Now, to be fair, the headline (“It’s Time to Start Taking Pinterest Seriously”) is the worst part – but I’m pretty confident he didn’t write it, so I’ll just shake my fist at that headline writer. (Perhaps New York would consider “It’s Time for Men to Start Taking Pinterest Seriously”?) But the body of the article is frustrating to read, as a woman in tech, because it feels like Roose is having a series of “Aha” moments that he could have had ages ago, if only he’d looked outside his own personal preferences and seen what has been patently obvious to every women I know in the tech sector: Pinterest is a freaking gold mine.

Further, she states,

Tech sector leaders – startup founders, VCs, and so on – need to climb out of their solipsistic holes and start targeting users that aren’t themselves.

There are plenty of convincing facts in this article at Curious for a Living to encourage men to take a look at women’s spaces. I suggest you read every word of it very carefully.

BlogHer’s Master Class

BlogHer, which absolutely pays attention to the needs and habits of women, recently held a Pinterest Master Class. They published the class so that anyone can learn how to make the most of Pinterest as a marketer or a brand.

At BlogHer, we like to share the knowledge. Here is our Pinterest Master Class — a series of three videos equaling an hour of content — all focused on getting the most out of Pinterest. We want to share the expertise we’ve developed with digital influencers — and with brands — who want to learn how to better leverage the enthusiasm of the powerful female consumer for this digital marketing space.

Jory Des Jardins, a co-founder of BlogHer, led the class. The Pinterest Master Class videos are available on BlogHer, YouTube, and right here.

BlogHer Master Class: Harness the Power of Pinterest (Part 1 of 3)

Pinterest Best Practices and Busted Myths (Class 2 of 3)

BlogHer Master Class: Harness the Power of Pinterest (Part 3 of 3)

This session is the most helpful in terms of thinking about how to create and produce images that will work with your blog and bring in traffic from Pinterest.

Pinterest is about getting up to scale with good content. Get organized and start pinning.

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.

Useful Links: Resolution Resource, iPad Air, Usability

Device Screen Resolutions Ordered by OS is a very useful resource from David Storey.

Bryan Cranston now pushing iPads to Apple addicts. This funny headline gives me the opportunity to make a comment on the new iPad Air. I have a regular iPad and an iPad mini and I much prefer the smaller one simply because of weight. I applaud the arrival of a lighter full-sized iPad.

Designing for Usability: Three Key Principles comes from Measuring Usability, a blog by Jeff Sauro with many helpful articles.