One of my fave  blogs, SmashingMagazine, featured an excellent post from Louis Lazarus yesterday – a review of best practices for design for kid’s web sites.  It’s not just that I work on sites for kids (and love that so many Disney’s sites are all over this review – yay!) but also that I have two kids under age 5 and I’m concerned about what they are looking at on the web.

The best information in this post?  His list of conventional and non-conventional best practices (Add voices to navigation rollovers, Create depth in the design, and Use Flash animation abundantly to name a few) but it’s well worth the read-through and well screen-shotted  article.

Ravelry.com has been in beta for a long time, but this growing online community of yarn-obsessed folks is incredibly strong and filled with content.  Before I procreated, I had tons of time to knit.  One year, I made custom scarves for everyone on my Christmas list, carefully picking out yarn and patterns that I thought matched each person’s style.

Now that I’ve got rugrats, I have very little time to knit along with a large yarn stash that I had been building for years.  I’ve also added to it a little bit over the past few years with the good intentions of knitting for my kids and my friend’s kids.  I have lots of half-finished things floating around: a sweater that I never did the sleeves for (can this just be a vest?), a dolly that has two legs, one arm and her head knitted but not sewn or stuffed together, and even worse, bags with patterns, needles, and the yarn … but not even cast on.  What is the most disturbing is things like the bag of baby cashmerino yarn in lilac that I purchased with every intention of making a baby blanket for my daughter Serena (who turns five in a few months).

In a quest to use this (very expensive!) yarn to still make something beautiful and useful for my daughter, I searched Ravelry.com at the recommendation of a knitting expert friend.  Enter in the name of the yarn that you have, and you will see pages upon pages of suggestions for it’s use along with photos, patterns, and details and comments from others that have made the item as well. You can limit the results of your search if they are too overwhelming, the tool that lets you search the patterns and yarns archived in the community are really excellent.

How wonderful for someone like me, who works days and is home nights with the kids to find a community of like-minded knitters to talk to, trade patterns with, and get advice on how to use my yarn stash.    Take the tour and see what Ravelry is all about.

Sometimes you just need a jumping-off point when writing – that’s especially true when writing reports for work or legal forms. Tired of rifling through billions of search results for exactly what you need? If you’re willing to pay for the right result, check out DocStore recently opened by the folks at DocStoc. Rental agreements, Web Dev agreements, NDA’s, you name it, it’s here for a minimal fee.

Content creator? There’s something you here, too. You can sell the docs you create via their online service, and be hosted in their store and benefit from their traffic. (That’s a win win!) You retain control over your work, are able to chage and control the price, description, and appearance of your documents.

I hadn’t heard of TalkShoe until my fave podcasters, the Manic Mommies, used this technology for their weekly podcast to do their first call in show, and I had to investigate. The description from the application developer’s site states it far better than I could:
“TalkShoe is a service that enables anyone to easily create, join, or listen to Live Interactive Discussions, Conversations, Podcasts and Audioblogs.” Additionally, TalkShoe has an open API so that others can easily integrate its features into their own solutions.

So if you’ve got something to say, and you’d rather say it than type it – this is the tool for you.

This tool crosses over many interests that I rant about on this blog – marketing, technology, and iPhone apps. Okay, technically it’s not an app but if you steer your iPhone web browser to http://iphone.talkshoe.com/, you’ll view a customized web page made specifically for using this service on your Apple gadget.

The uses of this service are many – you can schedule a call and have up to 250 people together at once (and you can even use your Facebook, MySpace, Meebo to post info to your friends and schedule a call directly with your friend list) or you could use this software and service to record and post your own podcast. Very tempting … luckily I don’t have any extra time in my day to do this. If you plan on pod-casting on a regular basis, there’s even a way to monetize your podcast by building a subscriber base and marketing to them with Blubrry, and the Talk Shoe Cashprogram.

Aside from using this tool to promote yourself and your services from your blog or web page, you can also use it to do research and collect information. Browse the listing of shows live, and you’ll see hundreds of entries on everything from metaphysical therapy to women who do too much to a show that takes it’s political stance from Logan’s Run.

As a podcast addict, I’m loving TalkShoe – it’s a great way for me to search for new content. And maybe at some point in the future when my littlest is out of diapers, I’ll be using this service to speak to y’all instead of type.

Hate all those wasted hours sitting in a meeting room listening to people go around in circles with no agenda and no action items? Not more than me! I have work to do, unless it’s needed for the development process to have a long, drawn out discussion. I want to have meetings that are short and to the point, start with an agenda and end with a list of tasks and dates when applicable. Want to drive home to participants in meetings the importance of brevity? Check out this cool web tool, the meeting calculator. You enter in how many people are in the meeting, what the average salary is, and then start the timer and it will tick away in dollars how much you are spending on your meeting. There are a few of these floating out there in web world, some very boring, and someone even built a physical product to take to meetings and time them in this way, but this one is my favorite..

The meeting timer.

Second up has to be the PayScale’s Meeting Miser, that asks you where you’re located and you select the job titles that are in the meeting and it does the math for you.

I’m not necessarily advocating bringing this to your next meeting, but it’s definitely an interesting link to email to your co-workers as a gentle nudge of awareness, eh? It’s also just an excellent visual to keep in mind for any manager, or anyone who runs meetings, to remind yourself to expedite whenever possible and to treat everyone’s time as precious.

Oh and I wasn’t that impressed with it, and I didn’t even download it, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there is an app on the iPhone that does this as well. I’m not linking to it – if you really want to find it, go search for meeting timer in the app store.

This will be nothing new to anyone who’s been doing web development for a while, but just in case you’re new to this path I can’t neglect to provide at least one post on this blog to promote the Web Developer Toolbar. This handy, dandy (and need I say FREE) toolbar will help immensely in analyzing other people’s site structure as well as tracking down problems with your own work through the QA process.

Visit this link and download and install the toolbar. I’m usually anti-most browser toolbar add-ons (because usually, all they’re doing is adding on the ability to TRACK you better, go away big brother!) but this is the only one I have installed and I use it daily. It’s helped me out of many a bind (especially when I’m trying to figure out where in the code a problem is) which is tricky these days with everything coming from outside files and very little in-line coding. (Not complaining, just commenting!)

I could probably do a series of blog entries on all the things you can do with this toolbar, but there’s tons of that content on the developer’s site itself (check out the forums at http://chrispederick.com/forums/) so I’ll just highlight a few and you should take my word for it and download this today, visit one of your favorite sites, and start picking through the code. My favorite items?

Disabling and enablilng CSS styles on a web page.
Clearing and/or disabling cookies, this is right up there with Clearing Private Data.
Disabling images and/or enabling alt tags – I’m always concerned about providing content to people with disabilities as the internet can be the great information equalizer, but only if you enter in and then check your alt tags!
Anything in the Outline sub-nav – outlining frames, headings, links, tables – it’s a good way to see what’s you have going on.
And of course, how can I forget, anything and everything under the Tools menu, where you can validate your code.

So if you’re a coder or not, even if you’re just curious how the heck the web works, this is a worthwhile download. And yes, I said it’s FREE, however this is a great opportunity for you to support the developer community and donate to Chris Pederick so he can continue to improve this tool. You can donate to him, or for more fun, buy anything off his amazon wish list.

When I taught web dev and visual effects at UCLA Extension, I created many a cheat-sheet for development purposes. It’s been a while since I’ve needed to create these resources, but I’m always excited when someone else has done the work for me.

Today, Smashing Magazine has added a few new cheat sheets to their lovely archive of web dev info. Head on over to their site and download the CSS 3 Cheat Sheet and the HTML 5.0 Cheat Sheet that they’ve just published. Mine’s sitting on the printer now just waiting to be pinned up in my cube.

And add the Smashing Magazine site to your links list if you haven’t been there before, it’s a great resource for all things web dev.

I found a fascinating article in my inbox today from SearchInsider, titled “Grandma via YouTube,” which focused on the theory that the younger you expose a person to technology, the more likely their brain is to adapt to it and actually function differently. This theory, based on studies from Mark Prensky (creator of more than 50 software games for learning) and Gary Small (an expert on the brain), identifies something I’ve always thought about myself.

I was raised in the ’70’s, but my dad was a computer engineer and I was the only kid on my block with a personal computer in 1977. He sat me down and taught me how to program in Basic, and how to use this gigantic boxy thing that took up most of our garage. Remember, this was back in the day of green and black monitors, letter quality paper fed printers and no mouse. I was six and writing programs, and I have always felt that this early start understanding and using computers made me different. I had an atari but also used it for development and only rarely put in the Adventure or Space Invaders cartridges. I pursued a career in television and film, but have always come back to working in the technology industry because it just comes so easy to me. In the 80’s, I joked that I often thought I WAS a computer, and had searched for a SCSI port on me. I guess now, I’d be looking for firewire?

Needless to say, even without these studies, I recognized that my early start helped me enormously. When I procreated I headed immediately to the apple store and bought my brand new babe a mac. She’s four now, and actively spends time learning on the web on the sites I allow her to visit – Disney, Noggin, Getty Games, among others where she enjoys playing games and doesn’t realize that it’s teaching her to read along the way. My 2 year old son watches her, and will be even more adept as he gets a head start learning from her. (This seems to be having the same effect with potty training, but that’s another blog post probably not for THIS blog.)

I’m going to spend some time pouring through both Prensky and Small’s web sites and see what else I can learn from them and put into practice with my youngin’s. I want my kid’s brains as comfortable with technology as possible, since I know the world that they’ll be living in will be closer to the Jetsons than I ever imagined.

I read my blogs through the web or via my iPhone’s Newsstand application (very cool way to read blogs, by the way) but just because that’s how I do it doesn’t meant that there aren’t other ways. And in the world of web programming, you need to think of how every user might be accessing your content. For those users that are lugging around a Kindle, Amazon recently introduced a way to get your blog into their system of downloadable content.

Is this cool or what?

Now, it will take a teeny bit of tinkering with your blog’s RSS feed and atom page to make this work, but once it is setup, it’s pretty darn cool. I just added myself to Amazon’s wonderous selection of blogs, though I doubt anyone would pay the $1.99 fee that Amazon charges for monthly instant downloads of my posts to their Kindle. If my Mom had a Kindle, then maybe. As blog author, you get 30% of the fees.

Who would pay for blog content that you can get free to come streaming directly into your Kindle? Someone who only has a kindle and does a lot of traveling, for one. Either way, it’s another lovely access point for the small business person to get into cool current technology. Thumbs up!

While searching for a free e-book on healthy frugal recipes, I came across this sweet pdf search engine located conveniently at http://www.pdf-search-engine.com/. I am keen on using the web for free educational opportunities, and that’s not just when I plop my daughter in front of the Noggin site.

There’s a huge resource of pdf content out there, and whatever you’re desired topic is, there’s bound to be hundreds of e-books on it.  I searched for "best practices email marketing" and came up with several great e-books that I downloaded for later reading, and there were more than ten pages of results that I am not even halfway done digging into.  I also searched for pdfs on flash programming, learning chinese, and how to plan a birthday party and was not disappointed on any of my searches. 

Now it is up to you to pay attention to who the creator of the pdf file is, because this pdf file could have been created by a large marketing company, or some 8-year-old who can use microsoft word and print to pdf.   Look for pdfs from reputable organizations or institutions.

What’s cool about this engine is you can preview the file before you download, the equivalent of flipping through a few pages of a book at the mini-mall.  

Don’t know something?  Hit up http://www.pdf-search-engine.com/ and you’ll soon be informed.