Ten reasons to learn and use web standards - The title really says it all. Another wonderful article from 456 Berea Street.

Anatomy of a Document - a deconstructed, annotated XHTML document.

Rachel Andrew has an article at 24 ways on CSS Layout Starting Points - I think this is a great example of CSS layouts for beginners.

Image Map for Detailed Information - love this CSS technique!

You can find some interesting demonstrations of using CSS for Bar Graphs at Apples to Oranges.

Totally off-topic, but the New York Institute of Photography has published How to Take Great Photos of Holiday Lights. I thought it might be fun for you to try these techniques over the holidays.

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!

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.

Jakob Nielsen shares the Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005. This is a compilation of web design annoyances submitted by his readers; all of these issues deal with usability. The really nice thing about this article is that links to other articles that address the issues are provided; you’re not just left wondering how to fix or deal with these problems.

Last week we briefly discussed Web 2.0. Tim O’Reilly has an article, What Is Web 2.0? that I think all of you should read to get a clearer understanding of the term.

National Geographic offers some beautiful wallpapers for your desktop.

Liquid Sculpture has some beautiful “liquid” photo galleries. I think I might try some of these experiments at home, I like to photograph water and light.

If you have downloaded Fireworks 8 you may want to visit SolarDreamStudios for some new tutorials in order to learn the new features of the program. Maybe one of these days I’ll actually be able to download Fireworks 8 and try out the tutorials myself.

I have mentioned in previous posts that I have been having a lot of trouble with comment, trackback , and referrer spam on my blogs, especially my photo blog. The referrer reports are really worthless on tinkertech.net because the referrer spam has gotten so bad. While I thought I had blocked trackback spam on my blogs, it started flooding my sites again.

I did some research and decided to implement some WordPress plugins to help to combat the spam. The first was Spam Karma 2, an anti-spam plugin that helps to eliminate all forms of blog spam. So far so good, no more trackbacks or comment spam have gone live in my blogs. I also installed a Referrer Bouncer plugin to hopefully eliminate all of the junk in my logs. I won’t really be able to easily see if this is working until next month when I have some clear logs to view.

The biggest upgrade was the photo blog. I was using WordPress 1.5 and I had to upgrade to 1.5.3 in order to use the Spam Karma 2 plugin. So I performed the upgrade last night which completely tanked the layout. Too tired to do anything about it last night, I left it with the default WordPress theme.

This morning I got up and felt totally lazy; instead of doing a redesign on the photo blog I visited the WordPress Theme Browser and found a wonderful theme by Vladimir Simovic. I updated the header image to use my own photos and made a few tweaks to the CSS to accommodate my photos and I was done. My kind of upgrade!

I decided since I was playing with plugins that I would try out some Flickr plugins. I found this Flickr Badge plugin that allows me to display some of my recent Flickr photos in the sidebar of this blog. I like Flickr and I really like the fact that I can incorporate my Flickr photos into my sites. I’m in the process of moving my PBase galleries over to Flickr now.

Ok, the potluck food was scrumptious! I hope that you all will post your recipes in the comments below and I will add them to the recipe blog so that we can all enjoy the wonderful dishes at home. The recipe blog is here http://www.tinkertech.net/recipes/.

Not to be outdone by Google, Yahoo launches Instant Search which displays results as you type. SixApart also has an article on the new Google Blog Search.

Microsoft Max - software to create photo albums, slide shows and share your photos online.

How to Go From Introvert to Extrovert - I just really enjoyed this article. Maybe because I see a lot of myself in this one.

Mailanator - tired of spam, check out Mailanator. “Mailinator accounts are created when mail arrives for them. No signup, no personal information, and when you’re done — you can walk away — an instant solution to one way spammers get your address. It’s an anti-spam solution for everyone. Your temporary email account will be automatically deleted for you after a few hours.”

Time Tracker is an online time tracking web site. Use it to track the amount of time it takes to complete your normal daily tasks (job search, paying bills, surfing, etc.) and or use it to track web projects that you complete for clients. This will give you a great way to log how many minutes/hours are spent on a project. You may also want to look at BaseCamp, an online project management tool that’s getting a lot of buzz. There is a free version of Basecamp that allows you to manage a single project.

I have a teacher’s meeting today. I will be leaving around 3:30 p.m. and Carolyn will be subbing for the remainder of class.

Standards-schmandards has an article on Methods for measuring text readability. The article discusses the importance of writing web site content that your visitors can understand. It also offers a readability index calculator, which is a form that you can use to test the readability of your content. The article goes on to discuss how you can improve your content’s readability score and provides a lot of great resources.

ScreenGrab is a Firefox extension that allows you to take screen captures of the browser window.

For those of you who are new to class, Firefox is a web browser that we use to test all of our web pages (in addition to Internet Explorer). I would like students who have not used Firefox to review this tutorial on using Firefox. Firefox is already installed on all of the classroom computers, so you will not have to reinstall it. I would just recommend reviewing the tutorial today, try surfing the web with Firefox, and tomorrow (Thursday) I will review installing extensions, etc.

Google now has a new Blog search engine. I think you will find this very useful when you’re looking for web development information since so much of the current discussion appears in blogs. I am happy to report that one of my sites finally comes up #1 on a search; if you search for hermit crabs, crabbytalk.com is number 1! The little things that make me happy. There is some Goggle Blog search help if you need it.

XHTML Character Entity Reference - 252 allowed entities in HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0.

This gave me a chuckle, The modern rules of advertising? Probably because Rob does walk on the freshly cleaned carpets or floors with his dirty work boots.

I have been putting off purchasing Photoshop CS2 at home, mainly because of the price; I just can’t stand the thought of shelling out that kind of money. Maybe if I hadn’t just started making outrageous mortgage payments I would be more like my old self and just drop the dough for my love of photography, but I can’t. I have been using the 30 day trial version of Photoshop Elements recently to see if that might meet my needs for photo editing. I have been happy with Elements and I think it’s an excellent program for people who want to edit thier photos. For me, I find myself missing many of the features (like Curves) that I have grown used to using in my workflow. That being said, I think that any of you who may be looking for a less expensive, Photoshop alternative, would be very pleased with Photoshop Elements. You can check out the features and download a trial version here. After downloading your trial, try out some of the tutorials at Photoshop Elements User.

Killer Buzz Flocks to New Browser - will you flock to this too?

How To Nail A Sexy Layout - Part One, Skeletize, Visualize, and Nakedize - Steps to building a sexy, standards based layout.

23 Photo Sharing - a new, free photo sharing site.

The Aging Process - Most people want to make themselves look younger, but Worth1000 has a Photoshop tutorial on making yourself or someone else age. If you enjoy working with Photoshop, I would recommend checking out Worth1000, there are lots of tutorials, forums, tips, and contests.

Digital Web Magazine has a good article, 10 Reasons Clients Don’t Care About Accessibility. Digital Web Magazine is an excellent resource for students attending this program; there are a lot of easy to understand and relevant articles about web design.

Rose had asked about a cheat sheet of sorts on the difference between elements, tabs, attributes, and values, etc. My favorite article on this is Alt Tags at Autistic Cuckoo.

Oh, I like this! Dr. Grammar has a listing of frequently asked questions.

Macromedia Studio 8 is now shipping. The free trial versions can be found here. We MAY have some money in the budget to upgrade to Macromedia Studio 8 or Adobe Creative Suite 2. I plan to look at all of the new trial versions of the programs to see the differences between the new programs and the old. I am already leaning towards upgrading the Macromedia Suite because that is the primary software package that we use in the classroom, but I would like to get your opinions. You can learn more about both of the suites at the following web sites:

http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/newfeatures.html
http://www.macromedia.com/software/studio/?promoid=BSOT

I have setup a poll on the forum so you can vote on your upgrade choice and I would appreciate student feedback in the comments below. You can find the poll here http://www.robinsblog.com/xoops/modules/xoopspoll/index.php?poll_id=2

Remember, no class on Friday, 09/09/05. Enjoy the long weekend! It might be a perfect day to get out and do some photography or play some golf.

Lifehacker has an article on setting up your own home web server. I haven’t tried this out yet, but it looks easy to follow.

Seth Godin is offering a free (for now) ebook, “Who’s There? Seth Godin’s Incomplete Guide to Blogs and the New Web“. Learn “how to make your ideas spread far and wide and with more impact” or read it just to understand more about blogging and the tremendous impact it has on the Internet. Seth Godin is also the author of Knock Knock, ” a short take on how to use the new online marketing tools to make any website work more effectively”.

Think long and hard before you purchase a domain, you don’t want this to happen to you: Hilarious Domain Name Mispronouncings. DomainRookie has a lot of great resources if you’re in the market to purchase a domain name. While reading, I learned about Domainsbot, where you can type in a word and it will suggest domain names and list their availability.

The CSS Zen Garden has revamped its design list. You can see thumbnails of all of the offical designs. You can learn more about the improved archives in this post by Dave Shea. There are new designs at the Garden as well. There is also an informative discussion on Digital SLR Pointers at Mezzoblue.

Some of the new students will begin the XHTML book soon, review these notes before you begin the book. New students will use HomeSite to code their XHTML documents, you can learn more about HomeSite by searching this blog for homesite.

I’m a bit late on this news, Macromedia announced Studio 8 while I was on vacation. It includes upgrades for Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash. Looks like Studio will also include FlashPaper which allows users to convert files into web-ready Flash documents or PDF files. This upgrade should ship mid September. If you recently purchased Studio MX 2004 then you may be eligible for a free upgrade; contact the software vendor you purchased the software from to find out more. Once the software is released we will request an upgrade for the classroom; there is no promise that we will get it with the current state of the California budget.

I’m trying out a new service from gvisit.com. You can track visitors to your website using Google Maps. You can see the visitor map for my site here. I hope I get some visitors!

Creating Online Gallery has free stock images for personal or commercial use.

MacDevCenter.com has the Top Ten Digital Photography Tips.

FamFamFam has lots of icons for you to use in your projects.