Computer and Web Design Resources

Home > Web Tools > November 2003 - March 2004

3/23/04 - Many students have been having trouble with tables. In particular, which attributes can be used with the <table>, <tr>, and <td> tags. This tag and attribute chart from Web Enalysis, should be printed and kept for reference. There is also a CSS properties chart that is very useful. This page focuses on only table tags and I found it particularly useful. While I was hunting around for these resources, I found this useful Page Table Code Generator.

3/22/04 - I put together a page of spyware tools. Spyware is bits of software that helps a company gather information about a user or organization. Spyware can also come in the form of cookies and registry entries. Spyware is sometimes included in freeware, shareware, and even purchased software programs. The companies that use this spyware claim that their spyware is harmless; it's just used to gather demographic information about their users for marketing. Unfortunately, some programs will not run without the spyware installed, this is a tradeoff for using the software for free. Now spyware is also being used with viruses to cause numerous problems on infected user's systems.

2/25/04 - photoSIG is a community of photographers and photography enthusiasts, ranging from amateurs to working professionals. photoSIG members may critique photos that have been submitted by other users and may also submit their own photos for review by the community. photoSIG also has a sister site called artSIG. Please note, there is some nudity on these sites. Basic membership to both of these sites is free.

2/9/04 - I read a good article at Monster on Skills You Need: What Employers Want from You. If you are planning on working in an admin/secretarial position, I would recommend that you read it. There are quite a few pertinent articles at the Admin/Support and Office Issues areas of Monster. Monster also has a other career areas that some of you might be interested in.

Free-ed.net has complete courses and tutorials for more than 120 different vocational and academic disciplines all for free! Many of these courses are actually links to other web site tutorials, but it's still a nice resource.

1/27/04 - PBase is a web site that you can use to host and share your photos. It's relatively inexpensive, just $23/year for 100mb.

1/23/04 - PHPCollab is an open-source internet-enabled collaboration tool for web project teams. I haven't used this program, but it looks like it has some strong possibilities. Since it is open-source, it's free.

1/9/04 - r7 Designer is a site full of tips on CSS, Graphics, XHTML, and general web development information. I found a link to an article on an interesting CSS underscore hack. I also found a huge list of CSS and web design resources at the University of Minnesota Duluth and an article on Liquid Layouts the Easy Way at Max Design and Two Columns with Color.

Digital Media Minute is a blog maintained by the Faculty of the Digital Media Technologies program at Malaspina University-College. There is a lot of useful web development information on their site. There are some nice Mac tips on this site also. The Nemisis Project also has a lot of useful CSS information.

1/8/04 - O*NET OnLine has a skills search that allows you to find occupational descriptions based on your qualifications. Complete a simple form and you will be presented with a list of possible career matches.

1/7/04 - I thought I would do a little self-analysis for the new year. Plus we had to take the Myers-Briggs psychological assessment last weekend in my Current Issues in Vocational Education course. While it is recommended that you take this assessment through a licensed type professional, there are many sites on the web that allow you to take similar tests. I thought I would provide you with some of these sites because you may find this information helpful in your career exploration.

The Temperament Sorter II Personality Instrument (also called the The Keirsey Temperament Sorter II) is a 70 question personality assessment. Remember, there are no right are wrong answers for this one and it is not a test! You can also find this assessment in multiple languages here.

I personally prefer the Jung Typology test on-line (this is based on Myers-Briggs and it's free). HumanMetrics has a variety of tests that might interest you. After you work out what "type" you are visit Working Out Your Type and read the information about your "type" to see if you feel the assessment is accurate. For additional information on "types" visit this site and TypeLogic. PersonalityPage.com has information on Common Careers for Personality Types (they also have information on your type and personal growth, and relationships). The Department of the Interior maintains a list personality types and jobs/careers that people might enjoy based on their type. They also maintain a list of related web sites that you might find useful.

If you would like to see how this information is used in the workplace read this interesting article on how the Myers-Briggs assessment is being used at the Axiom newsroom.

You might also consider playing the Career Interest Game. The game is designed to help you match your interests and skills with similar careers. I have a worksheet for determining your RIASEC Code.

12/16/03 - After checking out David's links I decided to see if I could find a tutorial for the fluid image. I did find a neat tutorial using a Dreamweaver MX extension for creating fluid windows. I can't wait to try this at home. :) But I digress. I did find a couple of articles that related to the topic of liquid design. Design Ireland has an article on Scalable web design. Another interesting article on image resizing is available at Web Matters.

12/4/03 - For the photographers out there Shutterfly has lots of ways to share your photography with your loved ones this holiday season. Create custom calendars, cards, frames, note cards, snapbooks, and more. Ofoto also has similar offers. For those of you who would like to make your own personal Internet greeting cards I have lots of links to Christmas and Chanukah tutorials.

I was reading the latest issue of SitePoint and there was an article about the United States Postal Service now having a card store. You can order cards, customize them and enter your recipients snail mail addresses and the post office will due the rest (for a fee of course). Pretty handy for this busy season.

Another interesting item... try typing your home number into the Google search box at http://www.google.com. You might be surprised to find your home address and personal information in the results. This information even includes a map to your house. If you would like to remove your phone number from the listing visit this Google page.

11/20/03 - Here is a cute Thanksgiving greeting.

11/17/03 - Clear a Foggy Day - I had read a tutorial for Photoshop in MacAddict on how to remove fog from photos in the December 2003. Unfortunately, this tutorial was not available on their site. I did find a tutorial at Comfortably Numb that utilizes a simpler technique to achieve the same effect.

11/14/03 - David and I are thinking alike again. He sent me a link to Position Is Everything today, a site that I was visiting last night. The site "explains some obtuse CSS bugs in modern browsers, provides demo examples of interesting CSS behaviors, and shows how to 'make it work' without using tables for layout purposes". In particular, David shared this article on Flowing and Positioning: Two Page Models.

I found a site that I don't think I've visited in the past, it's called HTMLSource. The site is laid out nicely, it's easy to navigate, and it's full of goodies on design, HTML, promotion, optimization, CSS, Perl, JavaScript and more. Ross Shannon has done a really nice job with this site, it's very informative.

TheFixor is a very useful site for web developers. I started with the CSS resource page and then I check out the rest of the site. There are so many resources at this site that it's a must bookmark! Wow!

11/13/03 - PhotographyBlog is a web blog devoted to Photography. Mark Goldstein posts the latest photography news, reviews, and opinions. Users can comment on the latest happenings. This site also offers photography challenges.

Blogrolling.com is a service that allows you to manage lists of links on your personal web site/blog. You can enter the links that you want to appear on your web site into a form on the blogrolling site and decide the layout of the links (alphabetically, random, etc.). You then receive a snippet of code that you add to your site and the link list magically appears on your pages. The really cool thing about this service is that you can add a link to your links toolbar (View > Toolbars > Links) in Internet Explorer that allows you to easily add favorites to your web site while you're surfing the Internet. This site makes link management a snap! Unfortunately, we cannot view this site in the classroom because of our firewall so be sure to check it out at home.

11/12/03 - David sent me a link to a site that has instructions for installing multiple versions of IE on your Windows 2000 or XP machine . He also shared a link to NetDiver which is a site that has a lot of useful development information and links to interesting sites. Grab a cup of coffee or your favorite beverage before visiting this site.

There are a few articles over at SitePoint worth reading. Practical Web Design - Top 15 META Tag Tricks, Great Homepages Really Suck, 21st Century Web Design Essentials, and Practical Web Design - Speed Up Your Site.

11/10/03 - I revamped my personal photo site this weekend. I tested it in IE6, Opera 6 & 7, Mozilla, Netscape 6 and even Web TV on a PC. I got the bugs worked out and was pretty happy with the overall look. I decided that I would come into work early today to check it on the Mac. It looked good in Netscape, Safari, and Opera. The colors were good and the fonts were readable. Then I viewed it in IE 5.2 and the entire site was messed up, it scrolled to the right for what seemed like forever. I fixed the very obvious layout issue, but tomorrow I will come in early again to try to troubleshoot the problem. For the time being I thought I would share a few IE Mac bug sites with you:

CSS Bugs in IE5.x MAC
Quirksmode - IE5 MAC - Here I find out that IE 5.2 is a "Bug ridden crash prone piece of junk" :(
Cascading Style Sheets Solutions and Articles

If I can't find the solution to my IE Mac issue, then I might post a Q over at CSS-Discuss.org.

While I was hunting around for solutions to my layout issues, I came across e107.org and they had these cool CSS Tricked-Out Menus.

In my search for answers to my Mac layout issue, I thought I would check my user statistics to see how many of my visitors use Macs. I found that 2% are Macintosh users, but I could not identify what percentage of those used IE 5.2. I visited Browser News and took a look at their stats, but again I could not determine what percentage of Mac users use IE5.2. So then I took a look at an article over at MacEdition that shows that their users use Safari for browsing by an overwhelming share. So now I wonder if I should even stress out about this layout issue?

If you would like to see more interesting Internet usage stats, visit Cyber Atlas.

11/7/03 - A List Apart has recently undergone a facelift and there are lots of new articles for your reading pleasure. ALA is a magazine “For people who make websites”.

11/6/03 - CSS Layout Techniques for Fun and Profit at glish.com is a catalog of useful cross-browser CSS techniques. While visiting this site I found a link to a tutorial on Advanced CSS Layouts: Step by Step where the folks at WebReference.com take you step by step through the process they used to convert their popular web site to CSS. Web Page Reconstruction with CSS is another article on converting existing pages to CSS layout. There are also some other good articles at Digital Web Magazine that you may want to review. The Beauty of Style is a contest site that is similar to the CSS Zen Garden.

11/5/03 - CSS Tips includes Cascading Style Sheet tips and tricks. It also has a very handy shorthand paired color chart. CSS Zen Garden is a wonderful example of CSS Skinning. Be sure to sample the different skins available along the right-hand side of the page.

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