Hot Blog!

Let's make it official. The Department of Computing Science at the U of A is blogging through a redesign, based on advice from the HighEdWebDev conference.

Blog: www.cs.ualberta.ca/~clc13/redesign/

Wish me luck!

Stock photographs

Free:
stock.xchange
www.sxc.hu

morgueFile
www.morguefile.com

On the cheap, pay-per-photo:
iStockphoto
www.istockphoto.com

Testing, testing, 1... 2... 3...

Our favourite tools and why we love them...

Website developer's toolbar for Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application
=firefox&category=Developer%20Tools&numpg=10&id=60
Comes with the W3C validator and the Cynthia report for speed.

Fangs screen reader emulator for Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application
=firefox&category=Developer%20Tools&numpg=10&id=402
Read, rather than listen to, screen reader assistive technology.

HTML validator for Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application
=firefox&category=Developer%20Tools&numpg=10&id=249

WAI checklist:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/full-checklist.html

Sloppy:
http://www.dallaway.com/sloppy/
Sloppy simulates various dail-up speeds. Check out how slow your page really is.

JAWS (for Windows):
http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_products/
JAWS_HQ.asp#Downloads
Try the 40 minute demo to listen to your page.

Colour blindness tester:
http://colorfilter.wickline.org/

Colour contrast analyser (for Windows):
http://www.visionaustralia.org.au/info.aspx?page=628

Colleges and Universities using non-classroom podcasts

http://dan-karleen-aacrao-sem-podcast-talk.blogspot.com/
2005/11/list-of-colleges-and-universities-with.html

Gnosh

www.gnosh.org

What is Web 2.0

i really like o'reilly's explanation of the concepts and the examples he gives.

What Is Web 2.0
Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/
09/30/what-is-web-20.html

Our blog has RSS, btw

We can subscribe to our own blog. Wow!
It's the wave of the present.

Our feed is at:
http://collectivemontage.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Millenial children, Canadian style

First there was the Baby Boom. Then came the Baby Bust. And now we have the Baby Boom Echo.

For those of us interested in the Millenial or Baby Boom Echo generation (kids born 1980+) in Canada, David Foote (author of Boom, Bust and Echo and professor of economics at U of T) writes about the Echo and higher education in Ontario.

We are part of the Baby Bust (a massive decrease in births in the 70s), while our current students for the past 5 years are the Millenials/Echo (the children of the Baby Boomers and the reason the minivan was so popular in the 80s).

Baby boom meets baby bust, by David Foote:
www.footwork.com/globe11.html

ALA: Redesign vs. Realign

Good designers redesign, great designers realign...

For those of us coming to the middle of a realign, this article is gorgeous:
www.alistapart.com/articles/redesignrealign/