Providing a clear study path for learning web standards is something the industry has struggled with. The gap just got a bit smaller when Opera launched the site a couple of weeks ago. It already provides a good foundation with plans to expand on the currently 23 articles into other key areas, and being licensed under the Creative Commons license means it can be used in a range of ways.

It will be useful to people who are new to learning web standards, or who are wanting to improve their understanding, and to teachers and team leaders to help train staff.

The launch of this got me thinking about what resources I found most useful when learning web standards. So here’s a list, I’m sure there’s lots more resources (which I’d love to hear about) but you can’t go too wrong with the following as a starting point.

So… where to begin?

Well if it wasn’t already obvious, first of all you better go to class and learn the Opera Web Standards Curriculum.

Then, spend some time using your favourite tool, the internet, and do a bit of browsing…

• To start with you’ll want to know – What is CSS?
• Then you’ll want to learn CSS from the ground up
• You’ll need some reminders so you might want some VisiBone HTML and CSS charts
• And then you’ll want to make your site pretty and start thinking about CSS Beauty
• Once you’ve learnt all the rules you’ll have an urge to start Breaking out the box with CSS (by Jina Bolton)
• When you become a pro you’ll want to know 53 CSS tricks you couldn’t live without
• If you like being teacher’s pet then do some extra curricular activities and go to W3Schools which has lots of free online tutorials in XHTML and CSS
• Or perhaps interact with some people face-to-face and book yourself on a training session like the Maxdesign CSS workshop.

But what will you do with all that time spent travelling to work, or relaxing whilst drinking a coffee? Of course you’ll need some books…

• To show that you really have truly mastered The Art & Science of CSS
• And you know all about The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
• Make sure you keep up to Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design
• No book collection would be complete without The Ultimate HTML reference (just released)
• And if all the above doesn’t change the way you understand and develop websites then make sure you’ve read the essential guide to Designing with web standards - after reading that you might find yourself looking for a forum where you can discuss ideas with your peers, so why not join Jeffrey Zeldman’s new facebook group.

Then to help you experiment you’ll need a few tools in your shed, so…

• *Get Firebug and dissect how people have built their sites, get inspired by it. Then make your own code and use Firebug to help you check how changes will appear on your site quickly before editing the real code.
• *Install the Web Developer toolbar for Firefox or IE developer toolbar
• I highly recommend FF Web Developer toolbar over the IE equivalent, its far more user friendly, but if you need some persuading then read all the Awesome things that Firefox’s Web Developer Extension Can Do.

*This is assuming you’ve already installed Firefox 3, don’t tell anyone if you missed Download Day 2008, just quickly install it and pretend you were part of breaking the world record.

If you like playing by the rules, do some testing:

• Don’t publish a thing without W3C validating your XHTML and CSS (which you’ll have under tools on your FF Web Developer toolbar)
• Perhaps check your colour contrasts with Juicy Studio Colour Contrast Analyser - Jez Lemon has also written a Firefox extension that goes deeper into testing the colours used on your site, its still in “experimental mode” at the moment though.

Relax

After all that hard work you might feel like your getting bogged down by complying to standards, so take some time out and relax in the CSS Zen garden.

But first, what is Twitter?

That’s a difficult question as it has many different applications and means different things to different people. Here’s a brief description that will hopefully mean something to you…

Twitter is a kind of mini blog whereby you get 140 characters to write something attention grabbing/informative/profound, or simply answer the question “What are you doing?”. Along with your short statement you might post a link to “further information” on a website, or whatever it is you’re twittering about. The messages are posted in date order, you can’t edit a post but you can delete one should you have second thoughts. You can add your website address and a short explanation of who you are to your profile, and you can upload your photo or logo and even customise the colours of your Twitter channel to your liking or to match with your organisations branding. Once you’re setup you can follow other people’s twitters and they can follow you back.

Twitter is not just about telling people what you are doing, you can connect with friends and colleagues, your piers, or politicians, and they could be from anywhere in the world. As well as individuals you can follow tweets from commercial organisations, events, emergency services, government and news corporations. A crucial part of its adoption is its convenience to fit into your everyday life, you can post and read tweets via SMS on your mobile, Instant Messaging, email, as well as via your browser.

More info: Here’s a good article which explains more about what it is: Twitter Guide Part #1: What is Twitter? And this is a great online video from Twitter CEO: Jack Dorsey Presents Twitter.

Posting news as it happens via Twitter

An application for Twitter in Local Government is to follow in number 10’s footsteps and use it as a channel for media to provide news updates as they happen. The traditional methods of communicating with the outside world have been via media releases with contact phone numbers for media comment – this still needs to exist but it’s a bit one way communicative and not really making use of what online technology has to offer.

Twitter offers an alternative method to alert and converse with the media and the community. I noticed that Downing Street were getting some questions posted by their Twitter followers and number 10 were replying via Twitter. This means that if one person asks a question everyone can see the answer, it makes the communication to the outside world more transparent and means that at least with your Twitter followers you don’t need to answer the same question twice.

More uses for Twitter

Event updates: You could use Twitter to provide real-time updates and comment at events and conferences. This could be for media and/or conference participants, or informing people of major outcomes for those that can’t attend. Its extremely quick to post and reply, and if you are not online you can do it via SMS on your mobile phone (which is handy for your busy events and media staff). People do need an account to reply to posts, but they don’t to be able to view updates so you can direct people to your Twitter page or you can stream updates from Twitter to your own website.

Blog updates and project progress: You could post blog updates in Twitter (like us) providing your subscribers with another way to keep updated and comment and to direct more traffic to your blog. Or you could post updates from a project if you don’t have a blog. If you have an online photo gallery you could post links to that during the event or as photos are made available afterwards, or to show project progress, perhaps on a new building development or arts project.

For more ways to use Twitter read: 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners

Try it out, it’s free!

There are obviously many possible uses for Twitter, and it could be a good testing platform for gauging how popular this type of tool might be with your community, other governments, and the media - even if you end up building something more customised to your needs in the future. At the end of the day if it doesn’t work out its not such a big risk as it’s easy to setup and its FREE!

Yes we’re on Twitter!

So this is my take on how you might be able to use Twitter, if anyone else has suggestions please post a comment. And of course whilst I was testing all this out I made a twitter channel for this blog: www.twitter.com/lgwebnetwork

All the blog posts are directly fed to Twitter, feel free to follow us and even ask us a question.

Dapper helps you to create RSS feeds from content you select from your website. By following some simple step-by-step instructions you can select content from 1 or multiple pages that you want to include in the RSS feed. For example you might choose a page that lists news items that include a title, a summary, and a link –you can easily select each element to create a field to include in your feed. Once you’re happy with your new feed you can make a user friendly URL which you can link from your website, and before you know it you’re providing an RSS feed.

Dapper has more options than just RSS feeds, you can output content to XML, HTML, and create Google gadgets and flash widgets to add to your website. Visit www.dapper.net to see what else you can create.

RSS feeds via Email

You could go a step further and make a browser friendly version of your feed and also give people the option of an email subscription using Feedburner. RSS feeds aren’t everyone’s cup of tea so giving people the option of email is a good way to increase your reader base.

You will need to create an account with Feedburner and enter the address of your RSS feed. Then you’ll see there are options for “publicizing your feed” one of which is email subscriptions. Feedburner gives you the option of either a link to place on your website, or a piece of code for embedding a small form in your page. You can also customise the design of the email by changing fonts and adding your organisations logo. (I used Feedburner for the RSS feeds and email subscriptions on this blog, have a look at the subscribe page.)

Feedburner allows you to collect statistics on both your RSS feed and email subscriptions, as well as allowing you to remove subscribers if you need to.

If you want to know more about RSS feeds read Six Apart’s “About Feeds”.

If you have any other suggestions or feedback on this topic please comment, I’d like to know what other applications people are using.

Here’s a little tip:

It might seem obvious but remember to subscribe to your own RSS feeds and email subscriptions. You shouldn’t rely 100% on third party applications, by subscribing yourself you’ll know what everyone else is seeing.

My day of reckoning…

Recently some of our websites were hit with an SQL injection attack which put some malicious code in parts of our site and caused Internet Explorer to crash for some people viewing those pages. We had to take down all or parts of sites and revert to the last clean backup of the sites affected.

The impact of the malicious attack had a huge impact on our workload. Up until then we had been using a very old basic system to track jobs that was originally used by our IT support. It wasn’t something I or the staff enjoyed using and it wasn’t particularly helpful. I realised I needed some much more effective job tracking software, and I needed quick.

Evaluating a new system

I was given different recommendations by several IT guys and web nerds, after changing my opinion several times I decided to spend a day downloading trial versions, watching demos, and reading through the specs of several different job tracking systems. I developed a quick checklist of features and rated them with 1 to 5 stars so that I could easily evaluate which system met my requirements best.

Unfuddle came out on top. The most important features to me were:

• Easy to use for staff to log jobs and keep updated with progress
• Very quick and simple to install and setup hosting (at a low cost)
• Allow me to easily see all jobs in the system with due dates and priorities

How it unfuddle’s your life work

Unfuddle is orientated towards use by web teams, it allows you to create projects, add milestones to a project, and then add tasks (or tickets) to each milestone or project. Although it’s an effective project management tool it works well for job tracking everyday helpdesk issues. You can customise the permissions for individual users, so that means you can keep it simple for staff to log a job so they don’t get confused by all the other functions.

You can choose to let staff see all the other jobs in the system, or not as you wish. I felt it was important to allow staff to see all the jobs that we were dealing with so that it would help them evaluate the priority of their job amongst others, and have more of an understanding of the size of our workload.

The system allows you to add comments, track your time spent on a job, and link it to other tickets if there are related issues. The person reporting the job gets updated via email of the progress of the job. You can also choose who you assign work to if you have more than one person in your team. And you can easily export all jobs to a csv file or print out the entire list of jobs in the system so your Director can see how busy you are!

What? Even more features???

Unfuddle also has a built in message board which you can allow all or some of your staff to post messages and respond to. It has a wiki which I’m thinking of using to store documentation for our CMS. And for the uber techi people out there it even has GIT repositories for source control.

See for yourself

I could go on about more features, and I know my needs might be different from other people, but if you are looking for an easy to use, inexpensive, job tracking tool that you can setup very quickly and don’t need to worry about hosting, Unfuddle is well worth considering.

Check it out: http://unfuddle.com