All you have to do is type in your URL and just like magic it shows you various screen sizes. You can even use them as little browsers to get the view you want. You can turn on and off the various views and move them around as you see fit for presentation.

In addition you can change the background screen and and the angle of the presentation as well.

What is even more fun is once you get the view you like you can take a screen shot and now you have a comp to show your client.

It’s a lot easier than having to take screen shots of each view and assembling each on in a device representation! Visit Techsini.com to try it out.

It can be daunting at first when you don’t know the difference in all these new terms. Don’t worry, as with everything it gets better as you keep doing it and then something else will come along

Theme: WordPress and many other blogging platforms use “themes” to describe the look of a blog. The theme can include the color scheme and the layout of elements on the blog. Changing the theme does not change the content of your blog posts.

Template: Blogger and some other blogging platforms use the term “template” to describe the look of a blog. The template can include the color scheme and the layout of elements on the blog. Changing your template does not change the content of your blog posts.

Tag: Tags are applied to WordPress (WordPress.com, Kidblog, Edublogs) blog posts to identify the key ideas or purpose of a post. Tags make it easier for people to search and find older posts on your blog. For example, if you write a post about your Revolutionary War lesson, tag it with “revolution” or “revolutionary war” so that at the end of the school year when you have 150 posts on your blog your students can quickly click on the “revolution” tag and jump to the post that have that label. It’s a lot easier to locate older posts by tag than it is to click through archives by date.

Label: Labels are applied to Blogger blog posts to identify the key ideas or purpose of a post. For example, if you write a blog post about your Revolutionary War lesson plan, label it with “revolution” or “revolutionary war” so that at the end of the school year when you have 150 posts on your blog your students can quickly click on the “revolution” label and jump to the posts that have that label. It’s a lot easier to locate older posts by label than it is to click through archives by date.

Tag Cloud and Label Cloud: Tag and Label clouds can be added to your blog’s homepage to make it easy for visitors to see the tags or labels that you use, click on one of them, and jump to a list of all of the posts that have that particular label.

Categories: In WordPress-powered blogs you can use categories for broad descriptions of posts in addition to using tags. For example, on iPadApps4School.com I use the categories “pre-K,” “elementary school,” “middle school,” and “high school.” I assign each post to a category and use tags for describing the academic topic of the post. This way if someone visits my blog looking for math apps appropriate for elementary school he or she can click on the “math” tag then click on the “elementary school” category to find all of my posts meeting that search criteria.

Embed: To display a video, slideshow, audio recording, Google Calendar, Google Map, game, and many other multimedia elements in a blog post you will use an embed code provided by service hosting that media. Embedding media into a blog post does not make you the owner of it and as long as you follow the guidelines set forth by the hosting service you are not violating copyright by embedding something you didn’t create. For example, when you find a video on YouTube that you want your students to watch you can embed it into a blog post and ask students to comment on the blog post. If the owner of that video decides to take it offline the video will no longer play through your blog post.

Embed Codes: An embed code is a piece of code, often HTML, that media hosting services like YouTube provide so that you can easily display the media that they host in your own blog posts. On some services an embed code will be clearly labeled as such next to the media you’re viewing. On other services the embed code will be one of the options that appears when you click on the “share” option. YouTube, for example, currently requires you to open the “share” menu before you see the embed code option.

Widget: A widget is a small application that you can include in the posts and or pages of your blog. A widget could be a game, a display of Tweets, a display of RSS feeds, a tag cloud, a calendar, or any other application that offers an embed code.

Gadget: Gadget is the term that Blogger uses for a widget. A gadget and a widget do the same things.

Plug-in: A plug-in (sometimes plugin) is a small application that you can add to the software that powers your blog. Unlike widgets and gadgets plug-ins operate in the background and visitors to your blog will not see them working. A plug-in can add functions to your blog such as suggesting related posts to your visitors or detecting the type of device a visitor is using to view your blog then automatically displaying the mobile or desktop version of your blog’s layout.

Post: “Post” can refer to an entry on your blog as in “a blog post.” “Post” can also be used as a verb as in “I am going to post a new entry on my blog.”

Page: A page on a blog is different than a post because a page is designed for static content. Pages are good for posting information that you want visitors to your blog to be able to quickly access. For example, my classroom blog had pages for curriculum outlines and review guides.

Permalink: Each blog post is assigned its own separate URL this is known as a permalink (permanent link). This URL is the one that you would share if you wanted someone to directly access a post rather than going to your blog’s homepage then searching for the post.

Hosted Blog: A hosted blog is one whose software is maintained by a company for its users. Services like Blogger and WordPress.com are examples of services on which you can create hosted blogs. The advantage of using a hosted service is that you don’t have to worry about installing software, software updates, server maintenance, or bandwidth capacity. The disadvantage of using a hosted service is that you don’t have access to the servers hosting your blog, the service may limit some customization options (WordPress.com in particular does this), and if the service closes you will be looking for a new place to blog.

Self-hosted Blog: A self-hosted blog is one for which you own the blogging software, you install it on a server or shared server, and you are responsible for all technical maintenance and updates. The advantage of having a self-hosted blog is that you can customize it to your heart’s content, you have access to the server(s) hosting your blog, and you can move your content from one hosting service to another if you choose. The disadvantage of a self-hosted blog is that you do have to feel somewhat comfortable installing the software on a server. Fortunately, most hosting companies have good tutorials on installing popular blogging software. Another disadvantage of self-hosting is that you are responsible for performing all updates and other maintenance tasks. This can be time consuming for new bloggers. Finally, to have a self-hosted blog you will have to buy a domain and pay a monthly or annual hosting fee for your blog.

I’ve been busy with curriculum development for my classes. For my online web design class I have a module on creative commons image searches. To help my student find free images I have compiled a pretty large list of sites. Since I think it’s a good resource I thought I would share it with the rest of the web. If you know of any good ones I have overlooked let me know!

[otw_shortcode_button href=”http://losmedanosart.com/imagesearches/” size=”medium” icon_position=”left” shape=”square” color_class=”otw-blue”]Free or mostly free stock images[/otw_shortcode_button]

This past year I have been working hard on revamping our college website. It’s a been a big undertaking and it’s not fully launched yet but the designs are approved and the templates are being converted into our new CMS (content management system) OmniUpdate.

Soon it will be a matter of migrating thousands of pages of content!!!

Why the change?

I know change is supposed to be good but I am a person who “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it!” and for a long time the site I originally designed people were happy with. It won a bunch of awards and it just worked. It worked so well in fact that the last major redesign was in 2011!

Mobilegeddon Happened a while ago

Google announced in 2015 that it would give priority to websites that are responsive (meaning coded to respond to whatever device a person is using). That pretty much dictated it… if Google doesn’t like you you’re in trouble!

Redoing any website that is as large as a college website is always a big job but even more complicated when there are roadblocks in your way like a CMS that doesn’t support a website that is designed responsively.

The Death of Adobe Contribute

For the past 15 years I have had all my clients purchase a relatively inexpensive piece of software that just worked for what it was intended. How often can one say that!? Adobe Contribute was great in that it did what the name implied, it allowed web owners to update their content.

You couldn’t create a website from scratch but you could pretty much do everything a person would want to do without writing a line a code. It was as simple as writing and email and completely what you see is what you get. That is of course if the only people you cared about were desktop users and no one who used a tablet or a smart phone. In the year of 2018 that’s just stone age thinking!

Having a website that is responsive required a little different coding practice. Adobe Contribute didn’t understand that code and rendered the What You See Is What You Get code editing useless. We could have switched to a free ever popular wordpress platform like so many others but we opted instead for a company who’s only clients are higher education clients with a knowledgable and accessible team, OmniUpdate. So far the migration process is going somewhat smoothly and I will create another post on the features of this new CMS when it’s fully implemented.

New Design

Our new design is now optimized to display well on any device, load quickly and is accessible for people with disabilities that require assistive devices.

Depending on the platform you use the menu structure will be optimized for legibility. No more pinching and zooming to try and figure out what to click.

I am really anxious to write my finishing post on this process and show all the examples and lessons learned but if I have learned anything in web design a website is a living thing and it’s never really done until it’s offline

Quick tip

Problem:

I started to compile a link list of  mostly free image stock (creative commons) websites that I knew about. I was assembling this list for my students so they had images to use on their projects without violating copyrights. As  I added them it was in no particular order. I found I was duplicating links and not able to go back later to find a specific link. You would think that in Adobe Dreamweaver there would be an easy way to sort this kind of content and every other solution I saw required javascript which I thought was a rather cumbersome approach.

Here is my the solution:

1. Copy the contents right off the webpage (ctrl+click or right click).
2. Paste the contents into Microsoft word. It keeps all the HTML formatting if you want to later copy it and paste it into your own web page.
3. Select the text again and hit the Home ribbon tab to access the paragraph styles.
4. You’ll see a button that looks like A-Z with an arrow. Click that and it will offer options to sort your list. Sort by paragraph, type: text in ascending order and you’ll have an alphabetical list!
5. Then paste it back into the web page and it retains all the links and the formatting. Yeah!