"I'm making some big shifts in my work in the coming months (read: focusing my energies rather than what's become the scattershot of freelance writing). I'm thrilled to say that this will mean more time for Hack Education, thanks in no small part to a research and writing project I'll be undertaking for Mozilla.

It's part of the organization's larger learning and literacy efforts, and my piece will involve researching practices and pedagogies and interviewing teachers, learners, technologists about tools for teaching programming for the Web. Specifically (or rather, conceptually), I'm asking the question: Do we need a "'Scratch' for HTML5?" All my findings and conversations will be written up here on this blog."

I have made a new Favicon generator, Faviconist. Since most favicons are just a letter with some colour theme, I found it crazy to have to open up a photo editor every time I wanted a new favicon. Or alternatively, it’s easy enough to convert an image with ImageMagick, but most images don’t scale down nicely to a tiny icon! So the aim here is not an editor as such, but a true “favicon generator”.

Good news: very powerful free testing tools are available for Web designers today. Some are more user-friendly than others, and some have significantly better user interfaces. Don’t expect much (if any) support with these tools. But if you’d rather not spend extra money on testing, some great options are here as well.

As we can find on Wikipedia, “Form refers to the shape, visual appearance, or configuration of an object.” And here I believe that this is also the perfect explanation… forms in web design are a way to gather information, but they must also take on a “form” or an appealing visual appearance in order to be effective. So we decided to gather some fresh examples of websites that have well designed forms. From registration to contact and login forms, you will see some very inspiring examples.

Before this moment, our relationship to Delicious had been that of a tick to an elephant. We were a niche site and in the course of eighteen months had siphoned off about six thousand users from our massive competitor, a pace I was was very happy with and hoped to sustain through 2011. But now the Senior Vice President for Bad Decisions at Yahoo had decided to give us a little help.

“No Flickr, you have it wrong. I don’t need to install anything. I just need to use a different site to host my video which properly supports modern web technologies.”

Today we’re releasing an update to one of those features, which I’ve been calling “Emphasis”: paragraph-specific anchor links and the ability to highlight text in articles and blog posts.

Potentially useful resources.

Gawker, like Twitter before it, built their new site to be totally dependent on JavaScript, even down to the page URLs. The JavaScript failed to load, so no content appeared, and every URL on the page was broken. In terms of site brittleness, Gawker’s new implementation got turned up to 11.

The dawn of the web has frequently been compared to the invention of the printing press. But the web has also destroyed one of the greatest features of nearly every press since Gutenberg: the ability to publish pleasing type.

The printing press gave us type that was clearer and easier to read than that produced from a typewriter, because the typesetter had additional tools at his disposal—and knew how to use them. The web has cost us some of those tools.

If you’re new to programming (or new to programming in a particular language) you might be looking for an IDE — that’s an integrated development environment, the handy, dandy piece of software that acts as text editor, debugger and compiler all in one sometimes-bloated but generally useful package.

The Tweet Button is a small widget which allows users to easily share your website with their followers. This page is for developers and users who wish to build their own Tweet Buttons. If you are looking for a quick way to build a Tweet Button for your website you can visit our Tweet Button Goodies Page.

A List Apart publishes articles written for working web professionals, but we appreciate the predicament of new web designers and builders who aren't sure where to begin. As we promised in our primer for readers new to ALA, we've collected a set of starting points for the next generation of people who make websites.

I wrote some words and borrowed some pictures about my time at #dConstruct: http://tumblr.com/xrihmo3p8

text editor | file transfer | svn | css | terminal | books | more = whoah.

Best-selling author, designer, and web standards godfather Jeffrey Zeldman has once again updated his classic, industry-shaking guidebook. Substantially revised in collaboration with Ethan Marcotte, this third edition to the foundational web standards text covers improvements and challenges in the changing environment of standards-based design.

Welcome to HTML Dog, the web designer's resource for everything HTML and CSS, the most common technologies used in making web pages.

Interesting take on the standards vs. Flash debate. Instead of decrying either option, support the other (a more positive move) but make it your mission to be agnostic and to look at technology last during the creative process. (NB: Forrester espouse the POST method: People, Objectives, Strategy, then Technology. This seems obvious to me, but we have all seen misused technology for its own sake.)

Fantastic all-purpose bookmarklet. "Like a command line for your browser!"

"You've always wanted to learn how to build software yourself—or just whip up an occasional script—but never knew where to start. Luckily, the web is full of free resources that can turn you into a programmer in no time."