Rob and I are feeling settled in our new home, but we’re exhausted. We still have a few things to finish up at the old house (yard work, etc.) and I have some boxes in this gargare to empty, but otherwise we’re done. Eventually, we want to do some painting and I will put up some photos/artwork on the walls, but for right now the walls are pretty bare. We didn’t have a garage sale, it was just too much; we opted to donate to Goodwill instead.

If you would like to see photos of the new house I’ve setup a gallery here http://www.robinsblog.com/gallery/index.php?cat=2

A Really, Really, Really Good Introduction to XML - a new XML article from SitePoint.

ColourLovers - a place to view, rate and review some lovely colours & palettes.
A Study of Website Navigation Methods - a case study of an effective approach to finding an optimal design solution.

10 Steps to a Hugely Successful Web 2.0 Company - worth a read.

GoogleTalk - Google’s instant messaging/voice client.

StopDesign is now making his photo gallery templates available to the general public. In order to use these templates you must have an MT, Movable Type, blog installed.

Painting in Photoshop - The Basics - an introduction to painting with Photoshop. This tutorial covers a lot of basic techniques like layers, palettes, and basic settings.

Get Cooking with Photoshop and CSS - 3 Low-fat Recipes - a tutorial by Corrie Haffly on how to combine Photoshop and CSS to create a great looking site!

CSS Tests - a variety of CSS example/test pages.

GooRSS would you like to search Google for informative sites with RSS feeds on a particular subject? Now you can with GooRSS.

10 Tips to Great Photos - PicturesMatter have these and other great photography tips.

Drunkey Love has a variety of icons for your web site.

PhotoshopSupport.com has a new tutorial on styling your Blogger Blog with Photoshop. Jennifer has also included a lot of great resources that you are sure to find useful! If you haven’t setup your own Blogger blog, try it out, it’s free! I have a tutorial for creating a Blogger blog at Tinkertech.net.

Granneman.com shares his 37 installed Firefox extensions. Speaking of Firefox extensions, how about the View formatted source (format source extension). It displays formatted and color-coded source and optional CSS information for each element. You can see exactly which CSS rules match for an element.

Kottke.org has an excellent discussion on the future of the web.

ColorBlender is a free online tool for color matching and palette design.

Have you updated your firewall, virus protection, and spyware protection lately? It’s important to update these programs often. Just having the software installed on your systems doesn’t protect you; you need to be sure to update the database definitions on a regular basis.

How To Be Productive Working From Home - great tips to be more productive when you’re working from home. About Going Solo is also important to read if you plan to start your own web business.

Google Maps EZ - would you like to add Google Maps to your site, but you don’t know how? Try Google Maps EZ.

Domains Bot - type a word that you would like to include in your domain name and you will be presented with a list of domain name ideas that are available for purchase.

The World’s Worst Web Site - a demonstration of the most common mistakes made by new web developers.

How NOT to Build a Successful Online Business - an excellent article on building a successful online business. I think that you will find a lot of good articles at Steve Pavlina . com’s personal development blog.

Colorblind Web Page Filter - use this filter to see what your site will look like to people who are colorblind. This will help you to discover problems in your use of color in your site design.

9 JavaScripts you had better not miss!

The Horizontal Looper/Repeat Region PHP Dreamweaver Extension - As mentioned in class! This would be one to bookmark for students who have completed the PHP/Dreamweaver book, it will create horizontal repeating regions that loop down the page.

Between boxes, I will continue to update this blog over the next month. I will be monitoring the forum for the next week, so if you really get stuck on one of your assignments, post a message on the forum.

I’ll also let you know the exact dates and times of the garage sale; all I know right now is that it will be sometime over the weekend of the 20th.

Have a terrific August!

IEBlog has an article Standards and CSS in IE - in a nutshell, little has been done to support standards and CSS in Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1. There is however an impressive list of “fixes” for Beta 2, so we shall see. For additional information on the update, head over to MezzoBlue. While you’re over at Mezzoblue, check out the book link list from the book The Zen of CSS Design. Lots of wonderful samples and resources.

Speaking of good books, one of my favorite, easy to understand, books on XHTML and CSS is Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook. Dan Cederholm, of SimpleBits, has authored a second book, Bulletproof Web Design : Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS which I cannot wait to order (unfortunately, I must wait until I know where I will be living in the next week or so).

Forbes.com has released the Best of the Web - Summer 2005 - Blogs that Matter. Why so much attention to blogs? Well, it’s estimated that there is one new blog created every second! They’re easy to create, maintain, and publish with. Check out my Blogger tutorial if you would like to create your own online blog quickly and easily. If you would like a little more of a challenge, try the WordPress tutorial.

Digital Web Magazine has a fresh issue which includes an article on Color theory for the color blind. If you haven’t already, I would recommend that you take a look at the variety of topics that DWM has to offer, there should be something there for everyone.

The CSS Playground is now known as CSS PLaY - There is an interesting demonstration, a definition list bar chart, you may want to check out.

Web Design From Scratch has a couple of informative articles: Imagery - a discussion of imagery that adds value to a site and Colour - a discussion of proper color usage on a site. Actually, this site has a lot of content that students in our course would benefit from.

It is time to start recruiting for the fall session of class. If you know anyone who lives in the bay area and would be interested in learning web page design or Microsoft Office please have them call 925-942-3436.

If you belong to any groups that you could share our brochures with or post this short message on a group message board (EU, etc.) , I would appreciate it!

The ROP does no extensive advertising for the adult programs; please help us to promote the program by spreading the word!

Thank you!

I Love Jack Daniels has a new JavaScript cheatsheet.

A while back we had discussed creating HTML email in class. there is a new article on Optimizing CSS presentation in HTML emails.

I would like to remind all of you that are working on projects that we have a free BrowserCam account that you can use to test your sites. I will demo this service and give you the username and password this afternoon in class.

If you are planning on building a non-profit web site, you may want to read the article Digital Images for Nonprofits, Courtesy of Flickr and Creative Commons.