Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
HTML5 Tutorials and Techniques that will keep you busy is a big collection of tutorials to get you going with HTML5.
The WHATWG has released HTML5 – Edition for Web Developers that promises plain language and ease of use.
A Showcase of Free Facebook Icons for Designers and Bloggers. Nice icons, if you’re in need.
The Story of Electronics is a video from the people who created The Story of Stuff. What are you doing about the mountain of electronics in your house?
6 free online books about web accessibility listed by Jitendra should be helpful to educators and students. Jitendra’s blog is brand new and looks promising so far.
How a Science Journalist Created a Data Visualization to Show the Magnitude of the Haiti Earthquake at ReadWriteHack shows an image with impact that is clear in its purpose instantly. Maybe some of the people who are so busy making the infographics I complained about should try out data visualization instead.
Creating Without Ulterior Motives at Skelliewag seems profound to me. Yes, I read Copyblogger and ProBlogger and all those guys who talk about making big money with a blog, but it never touches me, never moves me to try. What Skellie said is the reason, my reason, for blogging.
I kind of hate infographics. Seems like everybody who owns a copy of Photoshop thinks they should make one and tweet about it. I’ve looked at a lot of them lately. Is it a fad?
Of the ones I’ve seen, maybe 3 were effective and the rest were impossible. Translated, here’s what I mean by impossible:
A nice, clear paragraph would make more sense than some of the infographics I’ve seen.
Can you mention some good examples?
Instagram is a photography app for iPhone. Mashable recently wrote Is Instagram the Next Distribution Opportunity for News Media?, which included an interview with Andy Carvin, a senior strategist at National Public Radio (NPR).
Carvin talked about how NPR is using Instagram to connect with photographers. There’s an NPR Tumblr blog where photos from people around the world are displayed, some of them coming in via Instagram.
After the Mashable article appeared, @rafatali claimed on Twitter that creating a distribution scheme based on Instragram was lame. Carvin countered that NPR was looking to connect with great photos and photographers, and kicking the tires of Instagram was a way to get there.
@rafatali: What’s so lame about it? We’re just kicking the tires and seeing if we can gin up anything interesting there. cc @mathewi
Andy Carvin
acarvin
Mashable likes Instagram. When they first reviewed it, Jennifer Van Grove called it a genius idea. She said it turned photos into social works of art.
I like Instagram, too. I was so struck by it that I included it in this post: New Tech Toys for your Blog or Browser and iPhone. I’m not convinced that an iPhone app is ready to create a new media distribution channel, but I’m open to conversion, particularly if the app gets ported to Android and BlackBerry soon.
Instagram is a free iPhone app that uses filters to make your photos more artistic. Use it to take a photo, run it through any of the eleven current filters, and send it to any or all of Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, Tumblr, Foursquare and Flickr with one click. In The words “free” and “amazing” are together way too rarely for my tastes, Metalia praised Instagram’s “easy-ass interface and gorgeous filters.”
Here’s a fern that sits behind my desk. I used the Toaster filter on the photo. Seconds after I took it, you could see it on Twitter, Flickr and Instagram on the web. Anyone who saw it on Instagram’s web page could tweet it or share it on Facebook.
But Instagram is a phone app, so the real action takes place there, not on a web page. In the app, you can see popular photos, as in this screen shot.
While in the app, you can view all your photos, find friends and look at their photos, or follow people. Users can comment on photos within Instagram. It sounds a little like Flickr, doesn’t it? But this is all done through your phone, where Flickr often exhibits high quality camera-based photos.
For bloggers with Posterous or Tumblr blogs, Instagram is be a no-brainer method of getting photos posted. Right now that only applies to iPhone users. Blurbed is using it on a Tumblr blog. It isn’t restricted to Posterous and Tumblr. Notes from the Trenches is using it on her blog. And My Little Life is using it on a Blogger blog.
There are two missing bits in this app, which I think will be coming eventually with the app’s increasing popularity. The first missing piece is making the app available on Adroid and BlackBerry.
The other missing piece is to let users of WordPress, Blogger, and other blogging tools post the images directly to those blogs, too. It’s a two step process for those blog platforms now. For example, the screen shot of popular Instagram photos is one I took and sent to Flickr with Instagram so I could use it here. Once it was on Flickr, I grabbed the HTML to post it here. Two steps aren’t horribly taxing, but one easy step will mean wider adoption for the app.
For those of you who’ve already tried it, tell us what you think of the app. For those who have not, do you plan to try it?
Cross-posted on BlogHer.
Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator is one of the ColorZilla tools. It’s online as an app. It creates a pure CSS gradient using a Photoshop-like interface and provides cross browser code. The other ColorZilla tools are downloadable and include a color picker, an eyedropper, Firebug and more.
Disabilities Act may be expanded to Net and Beyond at SFGate only talks about the cost of extending accessibility to places like the Net and movie theaters and not the good such a move would accomplish. The fact is that every change made in the name of accessibility benefits everyone, not just the community of disabled Americans. Accessible is better for everyone, more options are better for everyone, clarity is better for everyone.
HTML5 Right here, Right now is an hour long talk by Tantek Çelik at a Yahoo! conference.
Find free images online! is a good resource list of many sites that provide free images. Seems like students always need images to create web sites for class projects, here’s a great list of places to send them to look.
Periodic table of HTML5 elements is handy. Lists every element in the spec, defines it, and lets you search for an example use in the wild. Nice. Note: This is a new version of the Periodic Table of HTML5, posted in 2014 by Robert Mening.
Here’s an Xtranormal video by patob2000 that is a chat between Personal Learning Environment ( PLE ) and Learning Management System ( LMS ). Which character are you?
Helpful Blogging Links: How Can I Move My TypePad Blog to WordPress has resources for those who are wondering what to do now that TypePad has sold.
How to Capture Good Photos with your Camera Phone. In recent years I see more and more people at events with only the camera in a phone to record it. Here’s help for doing it well.
Google is celebrating its 12th birthday today. It started in 1997. I was watching a season 3 Buffy the Vampire Slayer from 1998 the other day, wondering how the story would change if Giles could Google all that arcane stuff he’s always looking up. By the time I get through season 7 (gotta love Netflix), it will be 2002 in Buffy’s world. Can I expect to see Google in Giles future? Can you remember how different your life was from 1998 to 2002? And from 2002 to now? Phenomenal changes.
See also: Make Movies with Xtranormal.
I saw a movie made using xtranormal.com and couldn’t resist trying it out myself. Registration was easy. The free options are few. If you wanted to turn out something really powerful, you’d have to pay to do it.
I did make a free movie just for fun. It was easy to do. Here’s my first movie.
There may not be one in a paid movie, but there is a second <object> included in the embed code of a free movie. It looks really ungainly to me, don’t know why they sized it like that, but I’m leaving it as is. It contains a script to collect stats. It would be a simple modification to remove that second <object>, but I decided to leave it there so you could see what you get out of the box with a free movie.
The machine generated voice couldn’t read Dreamweaver correctly, but it did fine with two words: dream weaver. The voice seemed to make sense of the content and phrasing. For example, the phrase “the catch is” was treated with intelligence. I found that impressive.