I just wanted to remind you all that CSS Reboot is happening this Sunday, May 1st. If you get a chance, check out the participants listed on the site today or tomorrow. Write down your current favorites (you may even want to print the front page of their site) so you can visit their site again after May 1st to see their updated web site. Note: Some of the sites are already down in preparation for the reboot!

Here is the information about CSS Reboot that I posted a couple of weeks ago:

CSS Reboot “is a community project that brings together web professionals from all over and encourages them to collectively launch redesigns of their sites on May 1st.” You can see the participants in this exciting project here.

Maybe this would be a good excuse for me to finally style this site. For some reason I just don’t think that will happen within the next 24 hours.

Check this out! It’s an image to CSS converter. So cool!

If you don’t have an image to use here in class, use this one for now http://www.crabbytalk.com/wp-content/monstereyes.jpg

Of course I came right home and started playing with this. While I think it’s an amazing utility, I don’t forsee it being particulary useful at this time. The source code generated is huge, so it’s slow to download. That being said, I created a 2px CSS image and the quality is awesome! I couldn’t get a 2px CSS image with IE or Firefox (both crashed), but I did get the entire image done with Opera. You can see it here, but be warned, it’s a 4mb file and may crash…Download it in class where we have a high speed connection and after you’ve made sure to save all of your work.

Hehe, simply amazing!

Many of you have been working on creating your own CSS layouts. When developing these layouts you must decide whether to use floats vs. absolute or relative positioning. I thought I would post a few articles that may help with the decision making process:

456 Berea St. - Fixed or fluid width? Elastic!

InformitIT - Integrated Web Design: Position This! CSS Positioning Demystified

The CSS Library - has some great articles on positioning. I especially like the article on relative positioning. It’s really excellent and easy to understand! Another excellent article at the library is Teaching Your Floats to Swim. Finally, Box Model and the Broken Box Model is a clear explanation of the box model and the associated problems which are very important to understand when you’re working with CSS layouts. I wish that I had seen these articles last week when some of you were working on your “floated” layouts (Rebecca and Georgia, these articles are for you).

I would recommend that everyone reads Structure Your HTML and CSS which explains good coding practices when developing HTML documents and Getting Started with CSS which explains the basics of CSS. New students are learning to create what is called “inline” styles by using the style attribute now, but you will learn how to and be encouraged to use the methods discussed in this article. It’s a great primer for what is yet to come.

Andy Budd has another excellent article on his blog about the ideal web team. This article outlines the five positions/team members that Andy feels are essential to an “ideal” web team. It outlines their the team member’s typical duties and job titles. As always the comments are as good as the articles.

Joshuaink.com has an excellent analogy on the differences between print design and web design.

Jeremy Koempel, smallTransport, has an article on Design Value - (up yours) which discusses how people approach the design process.

Vitaly Friedman has pulled together a wonderful list of bookmarks for web developers. This is a page you want to be sure to bookmark!

Aardvark is a useful Firefox extension that you can use to identify block level elements (divs, h1, ul, img, p, table, td, etc.) on web pages. Right click on the page that you want to analyze and select Start Aardvark. When you move your mouse over each block level element on the page a red outline of the element will display along with the type of element and any id’s or classes associated with the element. This is a really helpful tool for learning how pages were created.

I like anything that has to do with photography and CSS. Stu Nichols, of the CSS Playground, has written a tutorial on how to turn an unordered list into a professional photograph gallery for Web Reference. I can’t wait to try this one out. Be sure to check out his site, he has so many wonderful CSS goodies there. Can I go home now so I can play?

I have encouraged you all to look into using an RSS Feed Reader to keep up with your favorite web development blogs. I have mentioned various RSS feed readers, including Bloglines, in previous posts. Betterdays has a great article on Using Bloglines (or How to keep up with dozens of blogs everyday).

I have updated my class sample site to include the New Perspectives Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 web sites. I have also removed the old HTML book solutions.

The catalystdb.sql SQL file used in tutorial09/tutorial of your Dreamweaver book (Page 489 #5) is problematic. I have written a new SQL file called catalystdb.sql that you should download and use instead of the existing file. I have also written a new SQL file for the Case Problems in tutorial 9 (pages 532-542). You should use this file caseproblemsql.sql instead of the hartdb.sql, museumdb.sql, normdb.sql, and sushidb.sql included in your Tutorial09/Cases folder. You will need to use Firefox to access these two files. Right click the links and select Save Link As and save the files in the appropriate folders (tutorial and cases).

You can also find sample sites for the HTML and XHTML book and the Flash book at my class sample site.

Mani Sheriar has a sample file on her site for the CSS Three Column Liquid Layout you may be interested in reviewing; this might be especially helpful to those of you who are working on your CSS Case Problems. If you have not been to Mani’s site yet, visit. She’s a former student, beautiful designer, and a great supporter of our program. Hummm, I think it might be time to ask her to visit again to chat with class.

For those of you who have created a WordPress blog, Matt’s Googly Site has a great article on working with the WordPress template system.

In Appendix B of your HTML/XHTML books there is an HTML Character Entities chart. The problem is that some of the codes on this chart will not validate. Evolt has an excellent Simple Character Entity Chart that should be used instead of the appendix in your book.

While I was checking the Macromedia web site for some help on a very stupid error that I made. While I was there I found a tutorial that I thought some of you who have completed the PHP Web Development with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 unit might enjoy; it’s called Building a Blog with Dreamweaver, PHP, and MySQL. This tutorial might be very helpful when you’re working on your project for the PHP and Dreamweaver unit.

I asked you yesterday to think about the sites that you’ve found most helpful while you have been in class. I know it’s tough to think of just one (ok, how about two), so here is a little food for thought:

1. What site do you visit every day or several times per week?
2. Which site makes you go wow?
3. Which site has tutorials that really made a subject “click” for you?

Please leave a comment below and include a link to your favorite site/s.