Resources for Web Development Students @ Robin’s Blog

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Even with student discounts, when you’re going to school it’s really hard to afford all of the high-end software programs used in the web development field. There are many free alternative programs out there that you can use on your home systems. Vinterstille provides an excellent round-up of free, alternative programs with descriptions, that you can download and use instead [...]

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 [...]

Do you want to see what people are viewing and bookmarking right this minute? Checkout LiveMarks – which displays what people are bookmarking on Del.icio.us in real-time. This is another Ajax demonstration. Pretty slick!

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 [...]

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 [...]