Many students have asked about learning Office 2007. We now have Office 2007 installed on 14 workstations in the classroom (all HP workstations). I think it’s a great idea to get familar with the new Office 2007 interface, but I still recommend that students learn Office 2003 first. Office 2003 is still the most commonly used Office Suite in industry and I think it would be much harder to learn Office 2007 and then try to learn the 2003 version.

We have not selected the books that we will be using in class for the new Office 2007 series, we anticipate that we will select books during April and May. Since so many of you are anxious to start learning the new suite I can recommend some books that I have ordered from Amazon.

I’ve been a fan of the Missing Manual series for a long time. This easy to understand, reference series is packed full of useful information. In addition to the regular Missing Manual series, the Starter series gives step-by-step instructions and visual cues that and get you up and running with an application rather quickly. Here are the Starter books for Office 2007.

Word 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual

Excel 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual

PowerPoint 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual

Access 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual

For students who are interested in a more comprehensive look at the Office 2007 applications, take a look at the regular Missing Manual reference series.

Word 2007 The Missing Manual

Excel 2007 The Missing Manual

PowerPoint 2007 The Missing Manual

Access 2007 The Missing Manual

If you’re looking for a book that will cover multiple Office 2007 applications try Office 2007 All in One by Sams. This book gives an overview of the new Office 2007 features and an introduction to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote.

You can download a free 60 day trial of Office 2007 at Microsoft.com.

For those of you who would like to learn more about the evolution of Microsoft Office read Beyond Menus and Toolbars in Microsoft Office.

Yesterday in class I mentioned the new CSS unit using CSS: The Missing Manual. This will be a required book for all new students entering the program and an optional book for students who are currently enrolled.

I have to say that this is an outstanding book on CSS. It is an excellent introduction to CSS and also a great read for those who are experienced with CSS. The techniques discussed are very current and it even discusses issues with Internet Explorer 7. One of the things that I really like about the book is that as it demonstrates techniques it also discusses the pitfalls and solutions in different browsers, especially Internet Explorer 6 and earlier versions. The book is also filled with hands-on tutorials for practical experience.

I have started to develop the assignment sheet for this book; it’s available at http://www.jobskillsnow.com/webdes/cssmissing.htm

We will be selling the book in class, meanwhile you can order CSS: The Missing Manual via Amazon for $23.09.

Also, many students have asked about Flash/USB drives for storing class work. Flash/USB drives are available at any store that sells electronics and you can also find them at Amazon. These are very portable devices that allow you to store and transfer small and large files from one workstation to another. They’re quite handy and very easy to use; much easier than having to burn CDs of your classroom work. Some students even use these drives to store and run software programs that they like to use in class.

Got a new computer for Christmas? Are you worried about all the spyware horror stories you’ve read? You should be. I’ve heard varying numbers, but it’s said that putting an unprotected computer on a high-speed connection results in getting infected within a few minutes. I just read that the time is getting longer, but that’s not much comfort. By all means you should have a router if you’re on a high speed connection. A router provides some protection, but is only the beginning. Ok, now the new machine is booted up the first time and ready to go. It’s on the net. In this order, here’s what to do.

read the rest of the article @ http://blogs.zdnet.com/Spyware/index.php?p=733

These desktop wallpapers are stunning!

http://www.joejoe.biz/joejoe/walls/index.php?spgmFilters=

Christmas Globe

A Christmas Story in 30 seconds as told by bunnies

Both of these links use Flash and both have sound.

If you enjoy the bunnies visit http://www.angryalien.com/

Yesterday I encouraged you all to read the article Fixing Browsers: Bugs and Hacks by Lorelle VanFossen. Lorelle was kind enough to share another article she wrote, Views of a Web Page. In this article, Lorelle describes in wonderful detail the testing process used when building a web page. The article discusses developing and testing for various screen sizes, handhelds, variable font sizes, print, browsers, search engines, color blindness and visual impairments. Taking Your Camera on the Road puts into practice everything that we have discussed in class about accessibility. Thank you Lorelle for sharing your amazing resource with us!

Once you digest Views of a Web Page, take some time to explore the rest of Lorelle and Brent’s site, Taking Your Camera on the Road (you may want to grab a cup of coffee, you may be there for hours as the information is so diverse). Lorelle and Brent have spent 10 years on the road photographing and documenting their journey; the photographs are exquisite and the stories are inspirational, educational, and gut wrenching. For those of you who love photography, don’t miss the learning section!

Welcome new students! We all hope that you will enjoy the program. There are a couple of articles that I would like you to read today:

• Important Notes for Students Starting the XHTML Book
• HTML Character Entities

Now for some goodies from around the web:

Tracy shared a great resource with me for used books, Abebooks. The prices are terrific and you can get many of the textbooks we use in class at this site. Thanks, Tracy!

Brainbench is offering another couple of days of free testing. At Brainbench you can take a variety of technical exams to see how you’re doing with your progress in class.

I know that some of you have started or plan to start your own small business. About.com lists the Top 10 Most Practical Blogs for Entrepreneurs

Web Creme showcases some outstanding and unique web sites. Definitely worth taking a look at some of the sites for inspiration.

And of course a few interesting CSS Articles:

Image floats, without the text wrap! - a technique for using floats and keeping the content from floating around the image or div.

CSS is not hard to learn - if you recognise it for what it is - a great article worth a read for anyone working with CSS.

The CSS Zen Garden has some new designs including one by Mani Sheriar, a former student! You can visit Mani’s blog here http://www.manisheriar.com/blog/.

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.

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.