My saviour!

Thanks to the excellent bBold blog (http://bbold.com/blog/) my sanity has been saved. Since ‘upgrading’ to Mac Office 2008 I have been driven to distraction by the slow loading time of the Office apps. This little tip has now drastically reduced the times and saved my soul! See http://bbold.com/blog/apple/speed-up-microsoft-office-2008-for-mac/

Whilst on the bBold blog I also picked up on the following which was new to me:
“IE7 is a JavaScript library to make Microsoft Internet
Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML
and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and
IE6.

See: http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/

the Escape

http://www.the-escape.co.uk/reference/ - A Hampshire design and web agency, the escape provide a few nice tools, interesting articles and a free SEO book (pdf). They also have some informative videos on http://www.youtube.com/user/escapeuk.

Jakob Nielsen

And for my second year students, still scratching their heads, wondering ‘what was that about’ after two terms. The latest AlertBox entry (what do mean you haven’t signed up yet!) should ring bells regarding a number of group’s coursework. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/bad-design.html

And if you haven’t ‘got’ Nielsen yet, read this: The web design guru that web designers love to hate - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/aug/09/guardianweeklytechnologysection.interviews

Design code rap

I just had to post this. I came across this brilliant video via http://www.unintentionallyblank.co.uk/2008/04/08/design-coding-web-standards-rap/ via http://www.molly.com/2008/04/07/design-coding-rap-for-the-rest-of-us/ . Molly’s site has the words.

I’ll be playing this at the start and end of my second year class, Web Site Design from now on. Hopefully, at the end (after two terms) they will understand it!

Enjoy!

Blue Organizer

Blue Organizer seems to be a Web 2.0 type thingy that actually works. Worth investigating if you run a blog or use social bookmarks such as del.icio.us. Take a look at:

http://www.adaptiveblue.com/quickstart.html

Ps. it would be neat if I could add items like this via Blue Organizer, but then perhaps I should be using del.icio.us rather than WordPress for this non-blog, blog?!

Semantic Web

Two excellent articles on the Semantic Web. The first gives a great (and current) overview of what is the ’semantic web’ and what is happening re. new developments. As ‘bottom uppers’ we may be also interested in the views of the second article.

Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies by Alex Iskold
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_web_patterns.php#comments-open
The semantic elephant in the room - Google will settle the “top down vs. bottom up” debate for us by Phil Bradley
http://www.overthecounterculture.com/2008/the-semantic-elephant-in-the-room-google-will-settle-the-top-down-vs-bottom-up-debate-for-us/

101 Typography Resources for Web Designers

From Vandelay Website Design, as advertised:

http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/design/typography-resources/

and while we are here: 54 Typography Resources Every Designer Should Bookmark

http://bloggingbits.com/54-typography-resources-every-designer-should-bookmark/

Personas

For those of you doing the Card Sorting assignment in Organising Information, here are two recent articles on the use of personas:

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/personas-and-the by Andrew Hinton.

http://www.greenonions.com/archives/2008/02/24/personas-good-enough-for-moses-good-enough-for-me/ by Dan Brown.

The Motive Web Design Glossary

 An excellent little glossary of web design terms, some with an excellent list of reference links and further readings. Well worth bookmarking for further reference.

http://www.motive.co.nz/glossary/index.php

25 Ways To Improve Your Site In 5 Minutes

An excellent set of ‘common sense’ points from Andrew Faulkner on http://fadtastic.net/. All my students should read, digest and ‘live by‘! The article can found at: http://fadtastic.net/2008/02/12/25-ways-to-improve-your-site-in-5-minutes/