Helpful reference materials:
- Photoshop keyboard shortcuts
- Color theory quick reference poster
- Periodic table of typefaces
- Anatomy of type
- Web accessibility checklist
- TextMate shortcuts
- jQuery 1.3 cheat sheet
- WordPress help sheet
Published: December 16, 2010
Published: December 12, 2010
BrowserLab allows you to visualize your designs across popular browsers and operating systems
Published:
1. Be original
2. Don’t copy
3. Understand the legal issues surrounding blogs
4. Do some research about blogging
5. Consider your writing style
6. Think about your blog’s layout
7. Be creative
8. Think about what you’re going to title your blog posts
9. Encourage comments
10. Spread the word about your blog and new posts
11. Encourage others to guest post on your blog
12. Love your readers and give back to them
— wikiHow
Published: December 9, 2010
The nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation has just launched an amazing new tool: Universal Subtitles. As the name implies, Universal Subtitles makes it ridiculously easy to add subtitles to practically any video on the web, including any HTML5 video, FLV, YouTube, Vimeo, Blip, Dailymotion (you can add subtitles to a video without having to host it yourself, and the same subtitle file can be associated with multiple copies of the video all over the net).
Why Universal Subtitles? Well, of course they’re useful for deaf and hard-of-hearing people, but they’re also a gateway to multilingual consumption of video (as a mostly monolingual anglo, I’m extremely keen to get a chance to follow along with all the fascinating videos made all over the world). Because Universal Subtitles hosts the subtitles separate from the video, it’s easy to collaborate with others to produce translations, comic remixes (this is the world’s easiest Downfall remix generator!) and closed captions.
— Cory Doctorow @ Boing Boing
Published: December 5, 2010
Some of the topics that the instructor would like to include in this class, but alas, there just isn’t time …
Accessibility – make your web sites accessible browsers for the visually impaired and other audiences — see also 508 compliance
Audio editor programs, for recording and editing MP3’s and other types of audio files
Progressive enhancement — a set of techniques for working with JavaScript — you should know about Progressive enhancement if you are serious about working with JavaScript — has significance for Accessibility
CSS Box Model — the basis of CSS layout
E-Commerce — what is E-Commerce, how does it work, what options are available, how do I get started?
Domain names — how to register, renew, transfer, and otherwise manage domain names
— Using WHOIS
Web design for mobile devices
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
XML — Extended Markup Language — see also RSS
Cookies – cookies and JavaScript, cookies and PHP, cookies and security
Miscellaneous
Published:
Autodidacticism — self-education or self-directed learning — is nothing new, but the Internet holds the promise of taking it to the masses. Sugata Mitra, an Indian physicist whose earlier educational experiments inspired the film ‘Slumdog Millionaire,’ is convinced that, with the Internet, kids can learn by themselves so long as they are in small groups and have well-posed questions to answer. And now, Mitra’s Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLE) are going global, with testing in schools in Australia, Colombia, England and India. On their own, children can get about 30% of the knowledge required to pass exams, so to go further, Dr. Mitra supplements SOLE with e-mediators, amateur volunteers who use Skype to help kids learn online.
— Slashdot
Published:
As browser-based exploits and specifically JavaScript malware have shouldered their way to the top of the list of threats, browser vendors have been scrambling to find effective defenses to protect users. Few have been forthcoming, but Microsoft Research has developed a new tool called Zozzle that can be deployed in the browser and can detect JavaScript-based malware on the fly at a very high effectiveness rate. Zozzle is designed to perform static analysis of JavaScript code on a given site and quickly determine whether the code is malicious and includes an exploit. In order to be effective, the tool must be trained to recognize the elements that are common to malicious JavaScript, and the researchers behind it stress that it works best on de-obfuscated code.
— Slashdot
Published: December 2, 2010
Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing writes:
We’ve written before about the security vulnerability that allows websites to sniff your browsing history. A paper from UC San Diego computer science department researchers, An Empirical Study of Privacy-Violating Information Flows in JavaScript Web Applications [PDF], surveys which websites use this invasive technique against their users. YouPorn tops the list, but PerezHilton, Technorati, TheSun.co.uk, and Wired are also spying on their users’ browsing habits by exploiting this vulnerability.
— Cory Doctorow @ Boing Boing
Published: December 1, 2010
David-Michel Davies interviews Thomas Gayno, marketing manager at Google’s Creative Lab:
Davies: It’s interesting that some of these developers are pushing further into the world of artistry. In a way, coding has always been an art, but it’s a very sort of mathematical art.
Gayno: Yeah, it’s fascinating that we start seeing some of these works in contemporary art museums, such as Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns. Aaron modeled all the flights across the US to show you how the US air traffic was actually making a lot of sense. It is a beautiful, such simple and clean animation. Things like this are now paving the way for a new generation of people who could be called data artists. I’m curious to see how universities, art schools and museums will adapt themselves to that and create new programs that combine arts with computer science.
