Resources for Web Development Students @ Robin’s Blog

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 [...]

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 [...]

Ten Easy Ways to Improve Your Resume – Katharine Hansen offers ten tips for improving your resume. You may also be interested in reading this post made on Craigslist on Tips for applying to a job from Craigslist – Good tips for making your cover letter stand out from the rest. 25 Words That Can Hurt Your Résumé may also [...]

Another weekend just flew by! While I was working on the classroom site this weekend I found a few resources that I thought you might find useful: Active Meter – tracks web site visitor statistics. There is a free, invisible version of this statistical service and you can track multiple sites. This service is very similar to StatCounter, but the [...]

Next Up: Google Office? An interesting article on the possible joint venture of Sun and Google. Treehouse, an online developer’s magazine, is now available. This first issue is free to all! (This is a 50+ page PDF file, please do not print it in the classroom.) If you have an iPod, you may want to check out some of the [...]

As I’ve mentioned in class, I’m working on recruiting more students for the program. I’ve posted ads at Craigslist, Contra Costa Times Online, Backpage, SF Guardian, Bay Area Classifieds, and SFGate. I have not received the overwhelming response that I had hoped for, but it’s still early in the game. I got to thinking about Google Maps and the Local [...]

Yesterday I mentioned that Rachel Andrew has a new book available at SitePoint titled Build Your Own Standards Compliant Website Using Dreamweaver 8. I just wanted to let you all know that you can download a sample chapter of this book at SitePoint, it’s 130+ pages. Please don’t print this in class; if you would like to read this in [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]