Visible Tweets

Jump into the twitterstream and explore your favorite topic on Twitter in a visual way at http://www.visualtweets.com. This could be an effective attention-getting method when introducing a new topic class or beginning a presentation.

The Social Media Count

Check out the Social Media Count for a visual look at the growth of social media.

CSS Property Review

Announcing a new resource on the Web Development & Design Foundations textbook companion site: CSS Property Review.

Use this Ajax application to review your knowledge of CSS properties:

• Begin typing the name of a CSS property in the text box.
• As you type, a list of suggested CSS property names will be displayed.
• When you type a complete CSS property name, a description of the property is shown.

Web Design Best Practices Checklist (redux)

Another article in Smashing Magazine includes a link to the Web Design Best Practices Checklist. Check out Cameron Chapman's 6/29/09 article, 45 Incredibly Useful Checklists and Questionnaires.

OWEA - Open Web Education Alliance

The new W3C incubator group, The Open Web Education Alliance (OWEA), is expected to have a significant positive impact promoting web standards and best practices to the realm of web education. OWEA's mission of OWEA is to bring together companies, schools, and organizations involved in shaping the education of Web professionals to explore the issues around the topic of Web development education and create solutions for improvement.

Web Design Best Practices Checklist

Smashing Magazine included a link to the Web Design Best Practices Checklist in Cameron Chapman's May 14, 2008 article, Non Profit Website Design: Examples and Best Practices.

WolframAlpha — Beyond Search Engines

Check out WolframAlpha (http://wolframalpha.com) — a computational knowlege engine.

The rather lofty goal of WolframAlpha's developers is to "make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone"! They're collecting objective data, implementing models, methods, and algorithms, with the final aim to "build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries."

A video overview is available at
http://www75.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

Zeldman Explains "What are web standards and why are they important?

Jeffrey Zeldman, one of the founders of The Web Standards Project, discusses how the movement for web standards began, why it succeeded, his thoughts on design, accessibility, validation, and more...

My fav quote is Zeldman's take on design, "..design, like everything in life is about understanding what the problems are, solving those problems, and there's always trade offs."