Deborah's Weekly Web Resources Roundup: May 20, 2012
With the first online Accessibility Chat, the AccessU Summit online conference, as well as monthly meetings of Refresh Detroit and Metro Detroit WordPress Meetup last week, it was a busy week of learning.
Glad I discovered lots of great resources and new tools for my web development work. Hope you find them helpful too.
CSS
- A Precise CSS3 Color Table: From Eric Meyer, a great resource that "lists all 147 SVG-and-CSS3-defined keywords along with the equivalent RGB decimal, RGB percent, HSL, hexadecimal, and (when valid) short-hex values." Whew, that's a mouthful, but extremely useful. Thank you Eric.
- How to Center Anything with CSS: Joshua Jackson from Design Shack shows you how to horizontally center an element, center an absolutely positioned element, dead center an element, center a background image and more.
- Free Zocial Button Set: Social CSS3 Buttons: I love buttons created with CSS, less time involved in creating different sizes and colors. Vector icons, @font-face and a custom rule are used to create the buttons.
- Cycle Through Client Quotes with CSS Keyframes: An experiment in using CSS keyframes instead of JavaScript to cycle text. Interesting technique, but keep in mind Internet Explorer 10 will be the first IE version to support keyframes.
- SASS vs. LESS: Chris Coyier compares the two CSS preprocessors. Which one do you use?
HTML5
- HTML5 Adaptive Images: end of round one: Bruce Lawson encourages web professionals to get involved, read discussions and share our thoughts on adaptive images.
- The Unbearable Lightness of HTML5 – or, the priority of constituencies versus the great dictator: Read the comments on Jeffrey Zeldman's post on HTML5, WHATWG, W3C and his thoughts on the ongoing conflicts.
- Responsive Images and Web Standards At The Turning Point: A follow up from Mat Marquis to his earlier January 2012 article on responsive images, discussing issues surrounding the different proposals for managing responsive images.
Accessibility
- Glenda Sims and Karl Groves Host First Accessibility Chat (#a11ychat): My Storify post of the first online accessibility chat which focused on our favorite accessibility testing tools.
- Technology Accessibility is Improving, But Big Challenges Lie Ahead: Kel Smith of Anikto LLC discusses technology shifts, how companies and organizations have come to realize there's a market for accessible websites and products, and how accessibility improvements benefit larger groups of people.
- Post GAAD Recap and What's Next: Web developer Joe Devon reflects on the first Global Accessibility Awareness Day and shares a proposal on how to keep the momentum going.
- Are You Human? CAPTCHA Alternative Aims to Outsmart Computers, Not Humans: Writeup of our local Michigan Are You a Human? application which uses games to prove you're a person, and not a computer.
- Netflix's Video Player Gets Revamped: In addition to several new features, including a redesign of the control bar, the player now includes captions.
- WSIS 2012: Sessions on Accessibility in Education: Videos from the recent World Summit on the Information Society sharing work being done toward providing accessible education worldwide.
- Favelets for Checking Accessibility: Looking for tools for testing accessibility on websites? Jim Thatcher's favelets work in all browsers.
User Experience
- Research Yourself Into a New UX Job: Take control of your career growth, says Jessica Greco, as she shares strategies on researching companies, jobs and building your skillset.
- Designing Search: As-You-Type Suggestions: Excellent resource from UX Mag for determining when to use auto-complete, auto-suggest, and instant results in your projects.
- Stop Redesigning And Start Tuning Your Site Instead: Lou Rosenfeld recommends we stop redesigning our websites. Instead we should improve the performance of the most frequent search queries on our websites.
- 5 Valuable Skills For UX Professionals: Want to be more effective in your user experience job? Check out Jeff Sauro's recommendations on how to further your work and your career. My personal favorite is number 5.
- Taking Mobile Global: Tips for Alligning Mobile and Global Web Strategies: To ensure a successful strategy, companies need to consider mobile, languages and localized content in addition to desktop-focused websites.
WordPress
- CodePoet: From Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, Gravity Forms,Akismet, and several other companies, CodePoet is a newly relaunched resource site for anyone building or developing WordPress websites with interviews of leading WordPress designers and developers, resources and books.
- Getting Price Right: A free e-book from the new CodePoet site helps you identify what to consider in your pricing, and how to hit the sweet spot for your clients.
- WordPress Meet Responsive Web Design: Another free e-book (only 38 pages) from the CodePoet site. The book contains interviews from well-known WordPress developers/designers Chris Coyier, Sara Cannon, and Ian Stewart who share their strategies and workflows for developing responsive designs in WordPress.
- Use WordPress to Create and Archive Your Email Newsletter Online:
- Easy WP Guide WordPress Manual: If you're looking for a good WordPress guide for your clients, or yourself, this is a manual you want to check out. Available for $0.99 USD for current version, or free for previous versions, the manual is available in e-Book formats, PDF and as a Word document you can brand.
- Diary of a WordCamp: Love this post from Siobhan McKeown who attended WordCamp Netherlands. Siobhan describes what a WordCamp is, how it's organized, who should attend and then shares through words, videos, photos and slideshows the various sessions she attended.
- Calling All Contributors: Community Summit 2012: Jane Wells has put out the call to all who use WordPress to get involved. Nominate people to attend the community summit who you think add value to WordPress, via survey (which is only open for a week).
What I Found Interesting
- RESS Multi-Device Design Resources: If you want to learn more about RESS (Responsive Web Design with Server Side Components), Luke Wroblewski has compiled a comprehensive list of resources.
- 10 Excellent Online Payment Systems: Tired of PayPal? Check out these alternatives. I'm a big fan of Dwolla. At only $.25 USD for transactions over $10, it's fast, easy to set up, and my clients love it.
