Friday, December 29, 2006

Google For Educators

You'll find a teacher's guide to Google products, including basic information about each tool, examples of how educators are using them, and lesson ideas. You'll also find lesson plans and videos from Discovery Education focusing on two of the most popular teaching tools: Google Earth and Google SketchUp.

Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft join forces on sitemaps

That sound you hear? It's the sound of a million webmasters shouting for joy. I certainly didn't see it coming, but Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google have entered an agreement to support a single, unified sitemap protocol, which webmasters can use to give all three companies' search engines a complete listing of their site's pages. Microsoft's Live Search Blog, the Yahoo! Search Blog, and Google's Webmaster Central Blog all have announcements about the unified effort, and the companies have launched sitemaps.org to promote the protocol. The protocol itself has been released under the Creative Commons license and other search engines have been invited to use it as well.

From Download Squad

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Combat Spam Mail!

We all know that spam mail is a big problem and an annoying one. One way to combat is is to look at how you have your email addresses posted on your web site(s). If you have them as normal mailto: links, you are opening your users up to spam, spam, and more spam.

Once you are on those spam mailing lists, it is very difficult to be removed from them!

One way to help combat the problem is to change the way your email addresses are listed on your sites. Ours are obfuscated or done in javascripts. If you check out our staff page and view the source, you will see that I have obfuscated not only the email address in the mailto: link, but also the text part of that link. It's been that way for a few years now.

This article will give you some great information on how to hide your email addresses on your sites.

Your email administrator is working very hard to combat the spam problem, but he also needs the help of the users and web admins.

Never click "Unsubscribe Here" in a spam email. Now they KNOW you exist! Also, don't register for anything using your email address. Get a Google or Yahoo email address that is disposable. I have 3 that I use just for this purpose. If I start getting too much spam at one, I just close it up and open a new one.

Just a few hints ... but make sure you change the way your email addresses are posted on your web site. You can always contact me for help with this too.

Tale of an iPod and a High School

Merritt Secondary School is going high tech. When MSS vice principal Darren Coates received an I-pod for Christmas last year he didn’t know it would eventually change the way his students learned. Now, what started as a bit of an experiment by one teacher, is spreading across the school. “It’s a way to hijack a technology they use and put educational material on it,” he explains. “It’s a great way to get students interested.” Using the I-pod in class started out small but soon grew in popularity. He started with pod casts of Quirks and Quarks to grab the students’ attention. As interest grew he saw there was a lot of potential in using the technology in class.

2006

The Year in Review....done in photos and sound. Some will make you laugh, some will make you smile...and some will devastate you.

Earth Facts

101 Amazing Facts about the Earth! While you are at this site, check out some of the other pages.

Database Design

Nice article about basic database design. Remember Jeff will be demo'ing databases on web sites at our April meeting.

future Computer Interaction

I've seen this video before but it is just phenomenal

Friday, December 22, 2006

Happy Holidays!


Just a wish for a very Happy and Healthy Holiday Season to all of you. I will be on vacation next week but still posting here. Have a peaceful and safe holiday time with your families.

Regards,
Pat

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Annual Holiday Reunion @ DPI

Annual Holiday Reunion - Tiger Butter

Ok, so it's not web design or even software....but it looks luscious!

Friday, December 15, 2006

Photoshop CS3 Beta!!!

A Quick Look at the New Features in Photoshop CS3, Public Beta Preview "Anytime Adobe (or anybody for that matter) messes with the interface for a product, it sends chills down the spine of many users. However, in CS3 the changes can be as minor or major as you want because this is probably the most customizable interface for Photoshop yet."

mon.itor.us

mon.itor.us - FREE website monitoring

Just came across this site and it looks interesting. Free reports and monitoring of your site sent to your email address....Need to look into it a bit more.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Known issues - Internet Explorer 7

Internet Explorer 7

You may want to check this site out. I, for one, am NOT upgrading to IE7. I have it on a test machine but not on a production one. Too many complaints about it at this point...

Photo-Realistic at SixThings

Rapid Fire #1: Photo-Realistic at SixThings: "A demonstration of realism"

A Fireworks blog..this is great stuff!

Monday, December 11, 2006

CSSORT

CSSORT - A Method for Sorting your CSS files

This site claims to clean up your CSS. Just copy and paste, select how you want it to be sorted for you...and it does it. Uses Ajax to sort your code.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Friday, December 08, 2006

Question?

I am looking for a program that will convert MPEG2 files to any other format suitable for using in iMovie or importing in to Quicktime.

Any ideas? Thanks!

Patina's Treasures - Screen Savers

Patina's Treasures - Screen Savers:
Free Screensavers for the PC. I don't know the quality so, if you use any, PLEASE let us know! Sometimes the real gems have been found in freeware.


AppDelete: Mac

AppDelete
Even though it is unbelieveably easy to delete a program you installed on a Mac, this utility makes it even easier! Just drag the application to the icon and all traces are gone. Sorry, Windows users, you still have to contend with registries and all that other stuff!