Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Low Visionary is from a low vision blogger in New Zealand.
BBC Ouch! Disability Magazine has bloggers, podcasts, news, message boards, newsletters and a columnist called Disability Bitch.
A Ragged Edge Online has all sorts of disability information, not just in technology areas but it all of life’s areas.
Disability Studies: Temple U sports the worlds most valuable blogroll where accessibility is concerned. Again, the focus is broader than just web accessibility.
Google New unveiled a bunch of new features today including the option to add a section to your news results for local news. Since my local newspapers requires a paid subscription to read their articles online, I love this new option.
Less wonderful is a new feature to see what comments people in the news are making about the news. And as a reminder that privacy is dead, Google has a new feature that will recommend news to you based on your search history.
There are also new options to view the news in the standard way, as images (using an accordion panel to display the links to the articles) or as text only.
The SXSWorld Magazine mentioned programs at four colleges in the last issue that are interesting. You can get an online degrees with these eLearning programs.
The Savannah College of Art and Design offers programs in fields like Interactive Design and Game Development, Design Management, Illustration Design and others. Some similar programs are at Vancouver Film School and Academy of Art College, which is in San Francisco. St. Edwards University in Austin has a digital graduate program. It’s not a tech degree, but a business degree that emphasizes digital distribution and asset management.
Zappos shares secrets of 75% Repeat Business at Christine.net explains why this company is famous for having the world’s best customer service. Christine says, “I’m starting to think that customer service may be sexy after all.”
10 Principles of Effective Web Design at Smashing Magazine is a good article. It would make a good handout in any class discussion of this issue.
Opera Releases Opera Mobile 9.5 with all sorts of new enhancements and faster speed.
Let’s say you have an HTML page that weighs in at 8K. You have some CSS that might contain 32K. And you have a couple of JavaScripts that are 4K and 12K. That adds up to 56K.
If you put the CSS and the JavaScript information in the HTML, you still have 56K. One would assume 56K is 56K no matter what. However, there’s a little thing known as browser cache to take into account.
Let’s say every page in your site uses the CSS and JavaScripts we’re talking about. If those are externalized, then the very first time a page from your site is downloaded, all 56K gets downloaded. But the external CSS and JavaScript files get cached. Which means, for all subsequent pages that are downloaded, all the browser sends out a request for is the HTML. If the HTML is all content (no presentation, no scripting), speed rules.
15 Amazing Women in Blogging is Extra for Every Publisher’s selection of his favs. I even agree with a couple of his choices. Can you guess which ones?
Web Worker Daily provides a concise summary of links involving the Microsoft attempt of a hostile takeover of Yahoo!
The Edublogs Magazine is new. Looks interesting. Its tag line: Education and the Edublogger.
CSS Reference at Sitepoint is the first of three comprehensive reference collections. The others will be about HTML and JavaScript. This one must be bookmarked.
January 31, 2008 by
Virginia DeBolt
★★★★★ Head First JavaScript by Michael Morrison (O’Reilly, 2008) may not ring up five stars for everyone, but I like the Head First books. They appeal to the educator in me, the person who understands multiple intelligences and learning theory. The educator in me knows why these books work for a lot of people who can’t make sense out of a “normal” programming language manual.
The Head First books are not your average technical manual. They are full of redundancy, humor, images, practice exercises, goofy conversations between things like global and local variables and dumb questions.
I have to give this book credit for my first ever spontaneous JavaScript insight. After reading about one of the simpler JavaScript functions, I actually thought, “Oh, that’s how the Dreamweaver CSS dialog works.” Now, I’m not the sort of person who thinks in terms of JavaScript. I think in HTML. JavaScript has been something I do carefully and by slavishly copying someone else’s direction. So I must attribute my spontaneous JavaScript insight to the fact that the type of learning experience you get from a Head First book works in my brain.
Here’s what the chapters in the book discuss:
If you’ve tried other JavaScript books and couldn’t get much out of them, try this Head First book. Recommended.
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