Mani Sheriar, a former student and successful designer, has started a blog to accompany her beautiful site. Mani offers CSS and XHTML tips and discussion on her site designs. This is definately a site that you want to watch, I’m sure she’ll be a constant source of amazement for all of you!

For you Scott Kelby fans there is now PhotoshopTV! You can now view Photoshop tutorials on your computer or iPod at http://www.photoshopguys.com/.

I came across a couple of tips for speeding up Firefox:

Firefox Speed Tip
Speeding Up Firefox the Right Way

Do you want to share photos online, edit photos, create calendars, collaborate online, etc.? I want to is a page of handy web site utilities.

Position is Everything, a tremendous resource on CSS and standards development, has several new articles available:

CSS Hacks and IE7
In Search of the One True Layout
On Having Layout

Issue 206 is available at ALA, A List Apart. It contains another two article that are worth reading: Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign and Attack of the Zombie Copy.

The 35 sexiest designed websites you’ve forgotten - Quite an interesting collection of sites; worth a look.

Are you a Dilbert fan? Well, now Dilbert, uuuummm errrr Scott Adams, has a blog at http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/.

Yesterday I linked to Jello City, today the silly link is “It’s a Mad Mad World”; let’s see how much time you spend at CoverPop. Be sure to check out the other available coverpops in the right menu on the page. BTW, coverpops are created in Flash.

WatchFilms.com - Watch Free Movies Online. No Downloading or Registration Required.

Need some scary surprises for Halloween? Check out Wanda’s Halloween Cookbook at http://www.halloweenkitchen.com/.

Dustin Diaz has put together a very nice CSS Shorthand Guide. What’s nice about this guide is that it includes the default value for the property values so you don’t have to guess at what will display if you don’t include a value in your shorthand.

CSS Selectors, Part 3 is now available at 456 Berea Street!

Here are the first two installments for your review:

CSS 2.1 selectors, Part 2
CSS 2.1 selectors, Part 1

These are great articles for those of you who are working on the CSS unit; what am I saying, they’re great for everyone.

While I was surfing 456 Berea Street I found some other articles that you may enjoy:

Google, SEO and using CSS to hide text
Are HTML and CSS easy?
Top ten web design mistakes, 2005 edition

I love this new art medium, check out San Francisco, jello style!

I was doing a little online shopping last night and I came across a site called My Product Advisor. At the site you can compare cars, digital cameras, PDAs & Smart Phones, and TVs. This site recommends products to you based on your individual preferences.

Pagecurve.com offers lots of quick Photoshop tutorials.

If you don’t feel like using Photoshop to create a banner for your web site try bannerbreak.com to quickly create free web site banners.

When you start to market your web site, you may find this free robots.txt generator useful. Robots.txt files are used to allow and deny search engine spiders/robots.

Have you installed the Internet Explorer Developer toolbar? I have been using it for the last few weeks and it’s quite helpful. It offers a lot of the same tools as the Web Developer toolbar for Firefox. This is just a friendly reminder that these tools/extensions will really help when developing web sites. You can find additional helpful Firefox extensions here.

I wanted to bring to your attention a job search site called PageBites. PageBites.com allows you to search the Web for job openings and/or résumés. You can also post your résumé and/or job opening on our site. Ralph stopped by and posted some info on this job search site, but I’m afraid that you might miss it buried in the comments. I really liked this job search tool; RSS feeds are available for searches, the interface is clean and simple, and you can get job listings from numerous sources all in one place. You can also easily post your own resume.

MyPimp, the online calendar thing, is an online personal information manager. It offers the following organizational tools:

• Online calendar and todo list - never forget where you need to be or what you have to do
• Alerts - be reminded of important events via alerts sent directly to your cell phone or email
• Group calendars - join a group for your classes at school or create a group for a club, project team, or group of friends
• Address book - link up with friends and colleagues so you always have each other’s contact information
• Free - take advantage of our hundreds of hours of hard work!

Vertical scrolling tables from CSS Playground…Pretty slick, as are the rest of the CSS Playground demonstrations.

TJKDesign presents, One clean HTML markup, many layouts…, a demonstration of one XHTML file and numerous layouts using CSS.

Breaking the Web Wide Open! (complete story) by Marc Canter is an article that describes and discusses the current and future open technologies used on the web. I think this is worth a read.

RobotJohnny.com has some free “toyware” fonts for download. These are some fun fonts.

The Contra Costa County Library now offers a service on their web site called Business Connection. This section of their site is designed to help local entrepreneurs and the small business community connect more easily with the information they need and with each other. There are numerous resources on the site and there are free workshops. What a terrific resource!

How to write a resume offers free tips on resume writing, interviewing, and writing cover letters.

ColourMod offers color pickers in various flavors; for Mac users there is a widget (small helper application), Windows users can use a Konfabulator widget, and for all platforms there is a DHTML plugin. I downloaded and tried the Konfabulator widget and it’s very nice.

Andy Budd has posted his top 10 Macintosh freeware and shareware applications.

Making Your Resume Stand Out on Craigslist

With over 6,000 resumes posted to just the Bay Area section of Craigslist, how do your resume stand out from the rest?

Style it! When you’re posting your resume on Craigslist you can use HTML and basic inline CSS to control the look of your resume or any other posting. Here is a post that I made to Craigslist about classes http://www.craigslist.com/cls/104856274.html. While I wouldn’t recommend that you add too many images to your resume, you can bold important items, add lists, and layout the contents the way you want with tables. Note that this technique will also work on backpage.com and any other classifieds site that allows HTML in their posts.

For this post I used a combination of HTML tables, images, and inline styles. Here are some tips on how to create your own stylish Craigslist ad:

1. Copy your resume into your favorite HTML editor.
2. Use tables to layout your data. Tables will allow you to align the text just the way you want it.
3. Add images, unordered lists, and other formatting using HTML tags (do not use XHTML) to your resume.
4. If you want to include images in your post, you must use an absolute link to the image, i.e., http://pclab.cccoe.k12.ca.us/ruralcomm_dwt/graphics/logo.gif and the image must be uploaded to your web host. You will have to upload your image to a host that supports hotlinking. I have a list of hosts here @ crabbytalk.com or if you have an AOL account you can use your hosting space there.
5. Inline styles can be applied to table, td, and other tags to control background colors, list-style-types, fonts, borders and other elements.
6. Test your page in IE and Firefox. When you’re done testing, copy the table that you created.
7. Do not include the openingand closing HTML, head, title, and body tags. Paste the table code into your Craigslist post.

Here is a sample of code that I used to style the class advertisement. View the source code in your browser.

Very exciting news today; our main office has authorized an adjustment of our classroom hours. The new classes will be 12:15-4:15 p.m. and 4:15-6:15 p.m, both classes will meet Monday-Friday. I think the new hours will give more people an opportunity to attend our program; these new time slots should work better for people who are working, in dedicated job search, or who have family commitments. Please help me to spread the word about our new program times; if you belong to a job search or community group, this post contains all of the information about our classes.

Vitaly Friedman presents 20 Best License-Free Official Fonts, an excellent round-up of 20 of the best license-free fonts.

About.com offers Top 10 Places to Find Free Images For Your Blogs

Future-proof your CSS with Conditional Comments from Bruce Lawson explains how to use conditional comments rather than CSS hacks to correctly display your pages in all browsers.

CSS 2.1 selectors, Part 2 is now available. If you missed the first installment, read CSS 2.1 selectors, Part 1 first. Since so many of you are working on the CSS unit now, these would be great articles for you to review.

W3C Compliance and SEO - learn why W3C compliance can improve your search engine ranking.

Here is a terrific list of web related cheat sheets, be sure to bookmark this!

Web 2.0 is about… a very good, easy to understand, article by Kevin Yank of SitePoint.

Brainstorms and Raves has been a favorite site of mine for many years. Recently the article Behind the Scenes with Apache’s .htaccess was posted. This article provides a clean explanation of the .htaccess file and a lot of 3rd party resources. Excellent resource!

The list of Absolutely Free Software - Best Free Web Applications has been updated. It includes wonderful, free software applications.

Neevia Document Converter eXpress makes it possible for anyone to instantly convert their files to PDF or Image without the need of installing special software.

Free AOL? Yes, it’s true, much of the AOL popular content that was once available to members only is now available to the rest of the world. Not only is the content going free, Google and Comcast want a piece of AOL.

Some of you have mentioned to me that the current class forum is difficult to navigate. I tend to agree, the forum itself seems to be a bit clumsy. Currently we are using a content management system called Xoops. I decided to test some of the different content management systems to see if another platform would meet our needs. I setup a Mambo site and I am not sure that the forum module is any easier to navigate (but I do like the administrative interface…very easy). I then decided to try Nuke Evolution, a content management system based on the popular PHPNuke and I think this is the forum we may use. The reason that I think this might be a better choice for the classroom is because the forum uses the popular PHPBB.

You can try out the “beta” forum at http://forum.robinsblog.com/index.php. This really is a “beta” site since both the Nuke Evolution application and the site layout are both still being tested and perfected. Please take a look at the forum and let me know what you think about the navigation and ease of use.

Edit: 10/17/05 - The beta forum is giving me trouble (is that why they call it beta?) This is on hold until I can figure out the problem or a more stable version of the software is released.

The nice thing about using content management systems is that they offer a lot of great features for communities. You can add your own recommended links, news articles, downloads, write reviews of software, hardware, book reviews, and web sites, and create your own class journal. There are a lot more modules that I can add to the site, but lets see how you like it first, so visit today. If you like it, we can move the forum posts from the old site to the new site.

More beta news from around the web.

Yahoo now offers Yahoo Podcasts Beta; use this tool to browse or search for podcasts. The site highlights new, noteworthy, and popular podcasts as well. Listeners can rate and review the podcasts. You don’t need special software to listen, so you should be able to check out some of the technology podcasts in class (there is also food podcasts). there is even a tutorial for creating your own podcast!

When CSS hacks begin to fail. The IEBlog requests a Call to action: The demise of CSS hacks and broken pages. If you have been using any of the following hacks in your sites you may want to read this article:

html > body - http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=ChildHack
* html - http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=StarHtmlHack
head:first-child + body - http://centricle.com/ref/css/filters/tests/owen/
head + body - http://www.dithered.com/css_filters/css_only/head_adjacent_sibling_body.html
body > element - http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=ChildHack

It seems that in testing the beta of IE7 many sites are failing because of hacks. Surprise, surprise. Besides CSS and IE7 you will also learn about the new browser features that look pretty good. Microsoft also has a “Team RSS” Blog that you may want to check out.

CSSTidy optimizes your CSS documents. It will convert color names to hex values (shorthand if possible), duplicate properties are merged, unnecessary white space is removed, missing semicolons are added, incorrect newlines in strings are fixed, missing units are added, bad colors (and color names) are fixed. I would recommend that you keep a copy of your original CSS document on your hard drive for regular editing, when you are ready to upload, make a copy and run it thru CSSTidy and upload the optimized version. I suggest this because optimized documents are not as easy to read because all extra whitespace is removed.

Remember the Milk - get organized, manage all of your todo lists.