Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Anna Debenham has a very concise and clear post about using “rel” to establish relationships between people on her blog. It was a Valentine’s Day post, but the infomation is good any time of the year.
This fantastic post by Pamela Wilson on Copyblogger should be reproduced and used in every beginning web design class. It’s called The Essentials of Human Web Design.
NIcholas Zakas looks at the HTML5 and JavaScript that goes into Gmail’s attachment feature in Dissecting Gmail’s Email Attachments.
Sandy Wassmer asks, The End of Accessibility? in .net magazine.
Also at .net, Aaron Gustafson wrote Mastering Mobile Navigation.
Excellent tips from Trent Walton in When Making the Transition to Building Responsive Websites, the Hardest Part can be Getting Started.
Dig deep into CSS gradients. Good stuff and a new voice on gradients.
Great tutorial about the HTML 5 progress element over on HTML5 Doctor.
If your WordPress theme doesn’t have ARIA landmark roles built in already, Steve Faulkner tells you how to add them in about 20 minutes in Using WAI-ARIA Landmark Roles – 2013.
Being a woman in the male-dominated business world does have its disadvantages, but a growing movement towards equality in all things is helping ladies in every professional niche to be both better and better-paid at what they do, and one of the fields most notable for this growth is blogging. Women are coming to dominate the blogosphere as visitors realize that they’re unique wit and wisdom offer a fantastic take on nearly any topic, making that sector one of the fastest growing for female entrepreneurs.
Meet women in your niche for the purpose of both friendship and professional development by checking out any of these four female blogging meetups for 2013:
If you’re a female blogger who will attend only a single industry event in 2013, the Blissdom Conference is an easy choice! Promising to be the premier destination for women on the web yet again this year, Blissdom will offer three days of speeches, panels, workshops, and the best networking opportunities that you’ll ever come across.
Besides its structure, Blissdom also provides an electric atmosphere of energy and creativity given the hundreds, or even thousands, of unique minds in attendance, giving you the opportunity to make alliances, gain inspiration, and learn new techniques in a setting that is fully conducive to making you better at what you do. No matter which aspects of the event you take advantage of, you’re guaranteed to leave refreshed, rebooted, and ready to tackle the web with renewed vigor!
When and Where: This year’s Blissdom Conference will take place at the Gaylord Texan hotel in Dallas, Texas, from March 21-23, 2013, bringing together ladies involved in a wide array of disciplines to share their blogging expertise.
Whether you’re a lone blogger or a burgeoning web guru, your business needs every edge it can get when it comes to taking over the internet and being truly successful, and what better way to learn the secrets of success than by hearing directly from women who have made it happen for themselves?
The 2013 Women Business Owners Conference will bring together ladies from a wide variety of businesses, online and offline, in order to allow each to share their stories in the interest of giving everyone in attendance a leg up on their competition. Jam-packed into a single day, this low-cost event presents a fantastic opportunity to take your business-savvy to a new level, helping you to tackle your blogging endeavors from a fresh perspective once you return to your desk.
When and Where: Take in this one-day event by heading over to the Anaheim Marriott Hotel in Anaheim, California on March 22, 2013.
Another of the premier industry events for female bloggers is the aptly named BlogHer conference, a gathering of women from every niche and every level of success that aims to help each to achieve new goals. You’ll take part in technical workshops and networking events, learning from some of the most prominent ladies in the business and allowing yourself to leave with a fresh mindset and new toolkit in the pursuit of your own personal success.
When and Where: If you needed an excuse to visit the exciting metropolis of Chicago, Illinois, now you’ve got it; BlogHer ’13 will take place in the Windy City from July 25-27, 2013.
Creativity is the name of the game at the Snap! Conference, with each aspect of the event helping to make you a better and more interesting blogger with its three days of dreaming, planning, and learning to implement. Instead of a rigid schedule alone, Snap! provides a place for bloggers to share their thoughts and ideas, inspiring one another all the while, and leading to each attendee becoming a more well-rounded and engaging writer.
When and Where: Visit the unique town of Salt Lake City, Utah, from April 18-20, 2013, in order to take part in this year’s Snap! Conference!
Writer Jessy Troy is the creativity blogger behind TekSocial.
Last time I checked, I had 12,000+ tweets on Twitter, where I’m @vdebolt. It took me several years to achieve that number – watching my grandkids tweet, they could do 12,000 a day – but I’m just a few-a-day kinda gal. I was thinking about the various ways I use Twitter in a day or a week. Here are five ways.
I’m required by a couple of my jobs (BlogHer Tech Section Editor and Web Standards Sherpa Community Manager) to tweet about whatever new content is ready for outreach and promotion.This is a triple treat most of the time, with a tweet, a Facebook status update, and a Google+ mention.
I consider writing for my blogs to be part of my work day, so I tweet about what I write here when it’s something original. I seldom tweet useful links posts. I have another blog that I keep up on a regular basis as part of my “work day” but I seldom tweet about it. That blog is First 50 Words. It’s a writing practice blog and I don’t tweet the daily prompt because I haven’t found that many people are interested in them.
Are you aware of the number of bloggers who do not include a contact email anywhere on their blog? It’s epidemic. I often contact people via Twitter to ask them for their email address, especially if I want to feature them in a post on BlogHer.
Casual conversations about weather, TV shows, books, or what some boneheaded politician just said are frequent subjects of my tweets. Or I reply to someone else’s conversational tweet with a remark that I hope will get a conversation going.
In the vein of conversation, I often tweet or retweet strictly local information about my city and state.
I sometimes comment on my personal life: where I’m going, what I’m doing, what I’m cooking or where I’m eating, how I’m feeling. I don’t do much of this because it’s boring, but I think people need to be a little open about them selves, even in a public forum. Not completely open, but open enough to seem real.
I’m not sure I have a brand, but if I did it would be something like “Web Teacher is that site that shares all sorts of useful stuff about web design and web education.” So I tweet a lot of links to stories written by others that tie in with what I do here. Supporting myself by supporting my community might be another way to state it.
I tweet and retweet things that support women. Not that I don’t support men – see item 3 – but I love to point out the technical achievements, great writing, great presentations, and other accomplishments of women in general. (That’s probably why I like working for BlogHer so much. I get to do things in support of women every single day.)
Liberal is a term that applies to me, so I tweet things in support of the liberal agenda and of various liberal causes.
I know some celeb with a gazillion followers doesn’t care what I think, but Twitter has opened up a channel that lets everyone comment on everything. So I send Scott Simon tweets about his latest turn of phrase on NPR or tell Eliza Dushku that I mentioned her in a blog post about Swipp. I don’t consider these tweets in the conversation category, because I don’t expect a response. Sometimes I retweet celebrities if they say something I think people will want to know, for example when Dana Delany announces you can finally get China Beach in a boxed set of DVDs, I consider that worth broadcasting with a RT.
These 5 kinds of tweets are a consistent pattern with me. I hope the people who follow me on Twitter find at least one of these five topics of interest to them. Do you have a Twitter pattern? What are your topics?
The current recommendation on longdesc. Things have changed in the screen reader world.
If you follow any women in tech on Twitter you are probably aware of the horror story told by Sarah Parmenter recently. It prompted several others to speak up as well. Here’s a place to start to find links to all their stories: Harassment of Women in Tech Never Ends.
The other day I mentioned a post at CSS Tricks about whether lists in nav elements were a good idea. Chris got a lot of comments and has a second post sharing his conclusions about the question: Wrapup of Navigation in Lists.
Stubbornella announced the CSSConf – The Selection Process will judge your proposals according to this plan:
The most important part is that we have eliminated all identifying details when we are evaluating the quality of your proposals. We won’t see your name, your company, or whether you have spoken before or are brand new to speaking.
This gives everyone an equal opportunity. Kudos to the team at CSSConf for doing it right.
Mari Huertas worked on the Obama election tech team was just one of many women on the team, some of whom she names in not a beard. Yet when the media reported on this wonderous technology team who helped elect a President, women were absent from the story and hairy bearded men were emphasized.
Yet some articles skipped mentioning women almost entirely. Rolling Stone named one; Mother Jones listed zero before backpedaling under scrutiny and adding a handful at the bottom of the article.
Raspberries to the media for not recognizing who holds up half the sky.