Though this past week was overshadowed by news of the latest WordPress version, there was plenty of other great posts on CSS coding, HTML5 web comics, Windows 8 from a user experience perspective, and more. Hope you find the resources helpful. 

CSS

• Coding Q&A With Chris Coyier: Box-Sizing and CSS Sprites: The return of Smashing Magazine‘s Q & A with Chris Coyier answering questions on box-sizing, CSS sprites, triangles, and server-side optimization.
• Create Website Style Guide: Maintain branding and consistency on your website. We all say we’re going to document our styles, but there never seems to be time. Good reminder from the author Steve Fisher, “No one is a mind reader.” 
• CSS Hat: A Magic Button That Turns Photoshop Styles Into CSS: Photoshop plugin that looks at a Photoshop layer, analyzes the characteristics, and writes the CSS to duplicate the layer. 

HTML

• 4 Amazingly Impressive HTML5 Web Comics: Pretty amazing demo and first starts to using HTML5 features to enhance comic strips.
• The Future of HTML5 Video: Bruce Lawson of Opera summarizes where we are now with HTML5 video and what the future holds with WebVVT, full-screen video, and WebRTC. 

Accessibility

• Rich Internet App Accessibility: Ryan Hemphill and Bradley Momberg of Cengage discuss their Christmas Paradigm and how to put ARIA in practice. 
• Open letter to Opera re: Accessibility Support: With Opera 12 released, Steve Faulkner of The Paciello Group wonders why Opera still doesn’t support assistive technology, and offers his suggestions on where Opera should start first.
• Contrast-A: Looking for WCAG 2.0 compliant accessible color contrast combinations? Use this online color application. 

User Experience

• Midwest UX 2012 Conference Page on Lanyrd: Links to over 65 slideshows, notes, writeups, photos and more from the May 31 – June 2, 2012 Midwest UX 2012 conference in Columbus, Ohio. 
• User Experience Takeaways From Online Car Shopping: Lyndon Cerejo shares what user experience professionals can learn from online car shopping.
• A Primer on Responsive Design: From Content to Development: Good overview of what to consider, what it means for your content strategy, and five tips to get you or your team started in responsive design.
• Windows 8 and the Art of UX Compromise: Review of Windows 8 with a focus on the user experience issues of trying to provide both touch and keyboard interface in one system.
• Ten Books To Boost Your Experience of User Experience: If you’re looking for an excellent foundation of books on user experience, check out this list from Making Sense. I’m ordering the last book, The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems by Jef Raskin.

WordPress

• WordPress 3.4 Green: Official announcement by Matt Mullenweg of the newest version of WordPress.
• Feature Breakdown of WordPress 3.4 “Green”: Nice summary of WordPress 3.4 features by Ryan Imel of WPCandy. 
• White Label Framework: From Seth Carstens, a lightweight flexible parent theme intended for developers to quickly move from PSD to theme. 
• Meta Valuables, a WordPress Development e-book: From Clark Wimberly, code samples, tips, a name-your-price purchase model and more info than you can imagine about meta data makes this an e-book you don’t want to miss.
• Displaying Code on a WordPress Site: Some great tips, apps and plugins for easier code display from Chris Coyier.

What I Found Interesting

• Every Business Needs the Cloud, Period: It’s not hard for companies to use the web and social media better, says Matthew Guay. 
• Responsive Images: What’s the Problem and How Do We Fix It? Matt Dixon of Opera discusses the issues with responsive images, current strategies, challenges with our current tool set, and pros and cons of solutions.
• Notes to an Agency Starting Their First Responsive Web Project: Good reminders and guidelines on what to consider as you start your first responsive web project.
• Try Aviary’s Awesome New Mobile Image Editor: I’ve been using the online Aviary image editor for years. Looking forward to installing it to see what it offers beyond cropping, color saturation, image brightness, contrast and Instagram-like filters. 

Father’s Day

In honor of Father’s Day, I wanted to share this wonderful story about Dan Werner, his football coaching life, and the decision he chose when tragedy struck his family.

After attending two conferences at the end of May/beginning of June, it was good to get back to my regular schedule. This week’s roundup includes resources for responsive design, tips for WordPress developers about the upcoming 3.4 release, results of a survey from Chris Coyier about CSS preprocessors and more.

Enjoy!

CSS

• Setting Breakpoints in Your Responsive Design: How do you set your breakpoints? Based on device resolution or some other method? 
• What Is Your Preferred CSS Preprocessor?: Chris Coyier surveyed followers of his CSS Tricks blog on whether they had used a CSS preprocessor (54%), what CSS preprocessor they use (LESS won hands-down), and more. 
• Build a Super Easy CSS Slider With Thumbnails: Using CSS transitions and z-index, Joshua Johnson walks us through creating a CSS slider with no JavaScript. Note there’s no support for keyboard navigation nor IE9.
• Principles of Writing Consistent, Idiomatic CSS: Well-known author of many articles about CSS (and Twitter engineer) Nicolas Gallagher provides a style guide for writing and maintaining CSS. While I don’t agree with all of his suggestions, I found some great tips in his guide.

HTML

• Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 revisited review: MacWorld takes a look at how to create responsive layouts using Dreamweaver CS6.
• 40 Useful HTML5 Tutorials, Techniques and Examples: Thanks to OneExtraPixel for compiling a great list of HTML5 resources for portfolios, forms, grid systems, and more.

Accessibility

• Closed-Captioned Video Examples: My friend Meryl Evans provides examples of the various videos posted online with explanation of their impact on people who are hard of hearing or are deaf.
• Your Business and Online Accessibility – #captionTHIS: If you’re a business or organization posting videos online, and aren’t including captions, you’re at risk for missing a proportion of your customers.  
• Third Annual Accessibility Summit: Save the date! September 25, 2012 is the third annual Accessibility Summit online conference. Organized by Environments for Humans, the Accessibility Summit brings together leaders in the accessibility field for a day long event. 
• Publishers Must Embrace EPUB 3’s Accessibility Features | BEA 2012: With the new EPUB 3 format standard, publishers need to redesign their workflow to  incorporate accessibility features during the publication process.
• NVDA 2012.2 Released: The new version of NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access) is now distributed as one package. New features include built-in installer, automatic updates, support for Windows 8 Metro style apps, and bug fixes. 

User Experience

• The Wide Lens of UX Design: Nathaniel Boehm points out the risk of a project being successful depends on many partners, for example, marketing, support, and engineering, which have varying amounts of confidence in their own work. What happens to the success of a project when you multiply the confidence levels of each partner? The result is surprising.
• So What Is UX Worth?:
  

  you don’t hire a UX design firm to make things look pretty; you hire UX experts to improve your bottom line.

• Mobile UI Patterns: This collection of mobile user experience patterns, including maps, navigation, lists, and more, is a great resource you want to bookmark.
• User Stories Are Better Than PRDs (Product Requirement Documents): Rather than handing off a long product requirement document, Teresa Torres recommends writing short user stories with clearly defined actors, defined actions, and user benefits.
• Web 3.0: The Real-Time Web: Web 3.0 is coming. And for many interactions on websites, it’s already here. 
• Design Patterns: When Breaking The Rules Is OK: While we have become accustomed to using well-known design patterns, Rian van der Merwe argues our design patterns need to shift to accomodate changes in technology. Check comments for a good discussion. 

 

WordPress

• The New York Times Develops a WordPress Collaboration Plugin for Editors: If you know about accepting/rejecting changes in Microsoft Word using Track Changes, this plugin will be very familiar to you. Great plugin to proofread and edit others’ posts while collaborating on the same post.
• WordPress 3.4 Field Guide for Developers: If you’re a WordPress developer, check out this guide for details on the API changes, custom headers to backgrounds, live previews, localization/internationalization, and more. 
• Front-End Author Listing And User Search For WordPress: Ever wanted to list all the authors on your WordPress site? This Smashing Magazine post will walk you through the steps. 
• Create a Professional Restaurant Website in Minutes Using WP Plugins and PHP Scripts: I missed this post last week while I was at conferences. Excellent collection of plugins and scripts to create menus, set up a reservation system, invoicing, and more.
• Spring Cleaning: Tips for Tidying Up Your WordPress Websites: A month’s worth of posts on how to clean up your WordPress site, including tips on security, organization, content publishing, and maintenance.

What I Found Interesting

• 33 Digital Skills Every 21st Century Teacher Should Have: While the title says this post is for teachers, this is a great collection of resources for anyone using the web. Love the reference to eight free tools for creating infographics. 
• Williams College Commencement Speech by Atul Gawande: An inspiring story about an 87 year-old woman who lost sight in her left eye and reminder that:
  

  … you will take risks, and you will have failures. But it’s what happens afterward that is defining.

• 52 Cool Facts and Stats About Social Media (2012 edition): Did you know 30% of Twitter users have incomes over $100K? Or that “student” is the number 1 occupation of Google+ users? Me neither.
• 12 Breeds of Clients and How to Work with Them: Excellent description of the different types of clients you’ll meet in your work. How many have you discovered?