Resources for Web Development Students @ Robin’s Blog

Photoshop Elements 4.0 releases this week. You can read more at the NY Times or at Adobe’s web site. Phong.com has a variety of Photoshop tutorials including advanced techniques like masking, patterns, and photo stitching. Have you heard about BackPack yet? With Backpack you can: Organize to do lists, notes, images, and photos Plan a personal or business trip Keep [...]

Yesterday I decided to update the look of the site. I had several concerns about the old site layout: The blue on blue was just too blue. I didn’t feel that there was enough contrast between the text and the background. A darker text color (like black) is easier to read on a white background. The old layout did not [...]

A List Apart (ALA) has a new article, CSS Swag: Multi-Column Lists, that discusses how to create multiple column ordered and unordered lists. A List Apart also has another new article, Introducing the CSS3 Multi-Column Module. I would recommend this article to students who have experimented with CSS columns and who are interested in what future implementations of CSS may [...]

The Essential Web-Dev-Bookmarks have been updated. This is a terrific resource for everyone! If you are using Firefox a lot, you may find this list of Firefox shortcut keys useful. Ever feel overwhelmed by email? Michael Angier’s article Top Ten Ways to Handle Email Overload may help. How Google Works – an easy to understand overview of how this popular [...]

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 [...]

Since many of you are now creating external style sheets, I thought I would post some CSS cheat sheets and reference materials to help you with some of the properties and values used in CSS. You may want to add these to your Del.icio.us links or print them out. I Love Jack Daniels – CSS Cheat Sheet Most Useful CSS [...]

There are several useful online search tools/services that you should familarize yourself with. These tools will help you to find a lot of content related to web development. Del.icio.us – Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking system. What exactly does that mean? Instead of using Favorites in IE or Bookmarks in Firefox, your bookmarks are stored online and available to other [...]

PC Magazine has a short article on how to upsample your images. Good techniques if you need to increase the size of a jpeg image for printing. Top 7 Tricks For Getting an Interview includes some interesting suggestions for how to get an interview. Since most of you are currently looking for employment, you may want to take a look. [...]

Supplement to Tutorial 3 – HTML and XHTML by Patrick Carey I’m frustrated with parts of the HTML and XHTML book by Patrick Carey that we are currently using in class. I could switch books, but it’s difficult to find a book that combines all of the building blocks of web design, XHTML, CSS, some JavaScript, and is comprehensive enough [...]

My copy of Bulletproof Web Design was waiting for me when I got home last night and at first glance it looks wonderful. It’s packed with CSS techniques by Dan Cederholm. The book is in color with lots of color screen captures. I’m sure that this one will be added to my list of books worth buying and I can’t [...]