Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Stickybits makes QR code blocks for you that get sent to you as a stick-on. These can be attached to equipment, cards, or anything else where it makes sense to provide your contact information or URL.
New Research from ABI Highlights the Characteristics That Lead to Advancement of Technical Women. This is a summary. The full report is available as a PDF download.
A new approach to China on the Google Blog outlines their plans for dealing with the recent issues between Google and China.
Microformats Workshop is the slides by Emily Lewis from the Workshop Summits event. Outstanding presentation, excellent slides.
SitePoint Podcast #44: HTML5 is a (Beautiful) Mess is a discussion about HTML5 and related issues among Sitepoint’s Kevin Yank, Opera Software’s Bruce Lawson, author Ian Lloyd, and Kyle Weems of the CSSquirrel web comic.
whose voice do you hear? gender issues and success from apophenia is a response to Clay Shirky’s Rant About Women. Read the rant and all the comments before you read what apophenia said.
California Web Accessibility Conference in February is a Knowbility event. That means it will provide you with the best possible accessibility training available anywhere.
CSS Sprites is an online app that will take your images and generate a sprite and the code to make it work. Nice time saver.
Using Twitter to Facilitate Classroom Discussion is about a history class. How could it be used in a web dev or web design class?
The Online Education Game is Changing at eduGuru is an important article every educator should read. An excerpt:
The walled garden of higher education just took a volley from one dangerous cannon. It’s a cannon that might not knock the wall down this time, but there will certainly be successors that could. What I’m talking about is a place called StraighterLine.com. The short of it is that for $99 a month, you can take as many classes from them as you can handle, and they have guaranteed transfer credits with a number of universities.
Back to School: 10 Terrific Web Apps for Teachers from Mashable may have just what you’ve been looking for.
The image above is a Wordle, and shows you some of the things I was talking about here lately.
Below is what I did at eHow in August.
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Not professional quality on my part, but OMG, I love Screenr. This is my second attempt at a screencast, ad lib as you can tell. My first attempt I was too far from the mic.
So easy. I love Screenr. I want to marry it.
Here’s the third screencast I made.
Now that I’m finished gushing, let me tell you what Screenr is. It’s an app to create screencasts for Twitter. It’s free. In addition to instantly tweeting your screencast, you can also embed it as I did here, or upload it to YouTube.
For what I do, which is lots of explaining, this is so perfect. I’ll bet it’s perfect for what you do too. When I compare it with trying to do screencasts with a tool like SnapZ Pro (which is a good tool) this is just so much simpler. So. Much. Simpler.
You can record up to five minutes of screen grab with audio, capture whatever part of your screen you want, pause if you need to. You cannot edit. Therefore, this is not the way to made professional quality work. But it can make many simple sharing chores that don’t have to be top quality much easier.
It uses your Twitter info to set up an account for you at Screenr, where you have and RSS feed for your screencasts and can revisit any of your screencasts if you need them again.
Holy web apps, Batman, this thing rawks!
5 Things You Can Do with Aviary Screen Capture at Web Worker Daily gives a good summary of a new feature of Aviary. I’ve written about Aviary before in Updates on Aviary and An Early Look at Aviary.
In case anyone in your life or classroom needs a reminder that everything you say and do on the Internet can come back to haunt you, here’s a little morality story to that effect. Wife blows MI6 chief’s cover on Facebook. Well, hmmm, didn’t Facebook just make a big announcement about changes to their Privacy Policy—guess she missed the news.
Smashing Magazine put together a nice handout for your classroom. An HTML5 Cheat Sheet in PDF format.
What it looks like to an outsider is that many web apps are the work of lone developers. And what the developers lack is technical writing skills. Wonderful as the apps are, the support and help files are dismal.
Web apps, Twitter spinoffs, iPhone apps: they are everywhere, sprouting like bluebonnets after a long Texas rain. Everyone loves them. Developers are creating them as fast as they can in hopes of finding the magic app that will go viral and make a career.
It looks to me, an outsider, like many of these efforts are the work of lone developers. What the developers lack is technical writing skills. Wonderful as the apps are, the support and help files are dismal.
I suggest that a bit of an investment in a technical writer (someone like me who enjoys explaining things in simple terms) would help the app succeed and be adopted by more people. Does anyone agree with me, or do you think that support and help files are a waste of time and money?
Look what happened to Zappos when they decided the most important thing they had to offer was good service. Developers of web apps need to think about providing clear information about their product for their users.
Communicate for success!