Useful Links: Girls in IT, wearable tech, early edu

Why schoolgirls are not interested in studying IT is an essay by a 13 year old English schoolgirl.

This bracelet could replace your passwords, your car keys, and even your fingerprints. This is the ultimate in cool and something a forgetful password keeper like myself thinks is a great idea. It’s also the ultimate privacy invasion. Since it can be anything, how long until its baked into something like Google Glass or whatever comes after Google Glass?

3 Tech Skills Every Kid Should Learn at School (but doesn’t) is right on the mark.

Useful Links: Hate your CMS? Student Reps, Mobile Guidelines

I am so angry at computer

The Real Reason People Hate Their CMS brings up a lot of points worth pondering.

Adobe spreads the love on campus. If students are willing to become Adobe student reps they can get free Creative Cloud memberships.

The BBC Mobile Accessibility Standards and Guidelines (pdf) are available in draft form. Listen to this very interesting interview with Henny Swan, BBC accessibility specialist, about how the guidelines were created.

2 Excellent (and Free) Text Editors

Since any basic text editor can write HTML, CSS, and various scripting languages, I like to let my students know which I recommend and why.

I have two favorites. Both are free. Both use color coding and indentation to make reading and troubleshooting easier. Both provide line numbering. One is for Mac and one is for Windows.

For the Mac, I like TextWrangler. TextWrangler is a “lite” version of BBEdit. Many Mac users may already own BBEdit, but if you aren’t in that position, you should get TextWranger.

For Windows, I like Notepad++.

Both these editors allow you to have multiple tabbed windows open at once a number of helpful functions for dealing with code and for general editing. I’m not sure about Notepad++, but I know that TextWrangler has FTP built in.

I consider a good text editor an essential, even if you use a tool like Dreamweaver to do most of your work. I find, for the way I work, that I often open up pages in a text editor for various chores instead of using Dreamweaver – or in addition to using Dreamweaver.

Useful links: SVG, Programmers, Old Electronics, Fonts

Usage of SVG for websites. I saw a link to this post and discovered there’s a website measuring all sorts of stuff about web traffic and usage.

We need a digital first curriculum to teach modern journalism. All journalism students must be programmers is among the provocative statements in this article.

Old Cellphones, Once Bound for Landfills, Now Bring Colleges Money. If your college isn’t using Funding Factory, you might want to check this out and let them know about it.

Type Wonder claims to be able to get you fonts from any available site with ease. I didn’t dig into the details about cost and copyrights, I am just passing along the info for any of you looking for fonts right now.

Shared photo albums on Facebook

Mashable reports Facebook Unveils Shared Photo Albums. They aren’t exactly like Flickr groups, but they do have some similar features.

With shared albums, more than one person can contribute photos to the album. The person who created the album can choose to delete or modify photos that get submitted. Contributors can edit the photos they submit themselves.

A shared album can have up to 50 contributors, each of whom can submit up to 200 photos. This might work well for an event like a wedding or a shared vacation. It isn’t for something like a BlogHer conference or a SXSW conference where thousands of people attend and take photos. It’s more for events you shared with people you know on Facebook, because each contributor is invited.

The privacy settings for shared albums allow for public, friends of contributors and contributors only. Only the album’s creator can set the privacy controls. The album’s creator also sets up who the contributors will be.

The shared album option is rolling out today. When you upload photos to create a new photo album, look for a new button that says “Make Shared Album.” Here’s Facebook’s Help page on Shared Albums.

Useful links: Cite, code examples, carosels

On citing quotations. Again. Bruce Lawson offers some ideas to correct the problems regarding the cite element in HTML5.

Best practices for code examples. That’s not the way I’ve been doing it. Sigh.

A while back Jared Smith said just don’t use carousels, but here is a post from Access iQ about how to make them accessible. Carousels and Slideshows: accessibility for developers.