Category Archives: Best Practices

Looking for Mentors and Willing to Mentor Others

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Lately, I have been thinking about the fact that I seem to be falling behind my peers on what I know and can do in the areas of web accessibility, along with front-end coding (HTML, CSS, and JavasScript (jQuery), programming, business, promoting myself and my events.  It’s finally time to start looking for mentors, along with mentoring a few people in what I know about accessibility, food, wine, etc.

About a year and a half or more ago I started a list of several categories/areas I was looking for mentors for work and in my personal life. To this list I have even  adding people’s names that I have met and think can help me in one way, or another. I’m not going to list those people here, but will list the different categories or areas I’m looking to improve on.

By writing this blog post, I will now have to start contacting people and seeing if they will be willing to help me further my career, along with improving the way I learn, teach others, present, etc. For those that are local it might be going out for food on me or a quick phone call or e-mail once a month or less if needed. For those that are not local or close (100 miles) it might work to do phone calls, Skype, and some other new modern way. I’m even willing to pay for food for them as well, so we can both do this over a good meal, which I find has worked at different conferences and after parties to learn sometimes even more than talks earlier in the day.

Below are the different areas I’m looking for mentors. Some have to do with my current work, and others are there for in the future either for starting my own accessibility company with others or working more on my event registration web application – Hold An Event.

Looking for MENTORS

  • Accessibility – I know a lot of general information, but need to work on the details and other areas I’m not the most knowledgeable in
  • JavaScript/jQuery – need to catch-up, since most places use these so much, and I have not had to do much of this type of work at my current job
  • PHP and other programming languages – need to learn more languages, so I know how to recommend changes to improve peoples or companies accessibility
  • Building web applications – help me improve Hold An Event with lessons learned
  • Running conferences – need to find ways to improve Accessibility Camp DC, BarCamp DC, along with monthly meet-up
  • Presenting and teaching – Need to improve both my style and knowledge for my talks, along with the quality of my slides/materials
  • Learn to design – to be able to improve my websites and web applications so they are simple yet appealing to others
  • Usability/UX – need to be able to build websites and applications that are usable and have a great user experience for people
  • Content Strategy – need to improve the wording and style of my writings (even this previous sentence needs work)
  • Business from an information technology standpoint – how to start thinking about getting Hold An Event into a stable form so people can start working with it, along with thinking about its future
  • Business from how to run a business – for ways to run my web applications Hold An Event once it’s closer to being rolled out to the general public
  • Marketing/Social Media – how to better publicize myself, my business, and my web application
  • Health and Fitness – if I’m going to do mentoring and be mentored I need to have more energy, which means exercising, along with better eating and sleeping habits
  • Food and Wine – always need to learn more about how to prepare food, where to go eat and find nice wines

The fun part is some of the people I have in mind as mentors fit a few of these categories which are really cool. Others on the list I’m not sure how I’m going to get in touch with them to ask for help, let alone if they can or want to mentor me.

The next step is to figure out how I’m going to ask people for help, let alone to mentor me once in a while or long term, since so many are overbooked like the rest of us with work, families, traveling, speaking, etc.

Willing to MENTOR Others

I’m also willing to help and/or mentor those that can use some of my knowledge about accessibility, food, wine, etc. So please get in touch with me if you want me to help you or maybe you only need a little bit of my time to run a few ideas by me or just to get my opinion or recommendations on how best to do something. If I can’t help you  on what you’re asking about I’m likely to be able to point you to  someone who can.

Final thoughts

So if you have any ideas on people you think that can mentor me in any of these areas or want me to mentor/help you leave a comment or get in touch with me from my website or twitter.

 

Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize Wish

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I follow the great chef Jamie Oliver on twitter (@Jamie_Oliver) and knew he had been award the 2010 TED Prize. He mentioned on his twitter account about it and then linked to his speech after wards. I opened the link in my browser and figured I would back to them.

Last night I could not sleep because I had a few things on my mind. So I noticed that my good friend Justin Thorp(@thorpus) had written on his food blog (Justin Loves Food) an article about Jamie’s prize. It was entitled “Seriously, Watch Jamie Oliver’s TED Talk About Food Education!”.  I read this post and watched Jamie’s TED prize video and the following is the comment I left on his blog.

My Response to Jamie’s TED Prize Talk

The following is my response to reading Justin’s blog post and then watching Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize wish. I felt so passionately about it I created my own blog post so more people will be able to see it an hopefully help with the problem.

I have been following Jamie Oliver for a few years on his different cooking show and have been a big fan of his style of cooking. I even watched Jamie’s series on how to improve the British school lunch system.

It took a bit of time to get the parents, students, and even the lunch ladies to start realizing that real food was better for the students. Once the students started eating better they paid more attention in classes and improved their grades and all they did was improving their eating habits at school and at home.

While at TEDxMidAtlantic this last fall (2009) there was a great talk by Tony Geraci, who is a “Fresh Food Advocate” for the city of Baltimore. You really need to watch Tony talk passionately about getting kids foods that are good for them. I strongly recommend that you watch his video from TEDxMidAtlantic – http://tedxmidatlantic.com/live/#TonyGeraci

So impressed with Jamie’s idea that I’m up at 3:25 AM after watching his TED wish that I’m writing this comment to make sure I get this out to you and your followers.

I know I have a way to go myself to improving my food habits and health. By starting to do more home cooking myself and bringing my lunch to work that will help me out in the long run. Doing so will improve my health without a lot of extra effort and if I add some exercise it will make it even easier.

P.S. I even listed to Tony’s whole talk while writing this comment. Please take the time to watch both of these powerful videos.

Start with Yourself

Please watch both Jamie’s TED talk and Tony’s TEDxMidAtlantic talk, along with read all the linked articles.

Finally, please start with yourself and spend more time cooking real food as Tony says. This will make you fell better and set a good example for others and even your children if you have any.

I plan on improving my eating habits and if you see me straying please remind me of that fact.

What do you think you can do to help improve this countries obesity problem?

Need Help Deciding which Web Application to Build

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Now that the house issues have been mostly settled I can get started on building one of the many small web applications that I have been tossing around. Some of these ideas I have been thinking about for what seems like years and others just a few months.  I have a good 7 or 8 different web applications that I want to build and I’m looking for some help in determining which one(s) I should build first.

Reasons Why

I need to get other peoples opinions on which will be useful them and more importantly the general public and might in the long run I would be able to charge enough to cover my hosting costs with ads or annual fees. I know that probably all of these have been done many times over, but there are a few reasons why I want to build them and they are:

  • Learn PHP and MySQL
  • Use the newest accessibility implementations of WAI-ARIA and possibly HTML 5
  • Use microformats were applicable
  • Test newest features in screen readers – JAWS, NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA), etc. and web based browsers (Firefox 3.5, IE8, etc.)
  • Use Web Standards
  • Test abilities for user interface design (UI or UX)
  • Create 508 compliant and usable examples for others to learn from for accessibility presentations.

But most importantly to create web applications that I would like to use personally.

Important Part

Now comes the important part, which from the following list of web applications should I build? I added a short description of what they do along with different ways I could help pay the hosting cost. I even created one page prototypes just so you could see what types of information is stored in each one. The style (CSS) and layout (UI/UX) will be changing. I just took some old CSS and put these together.

  1. Online URL/bookmark storage which allow user to have X URLs/bookmarks stored online for free, charge per X items stored, set up annual fee, or show ads of some type. I started this one a while ago and stopped for some odd reason. I’m tired of having bookmarks on two home computers (MAC and PC), along with on work one. Yes, I have heard of delicious.com and ma.gnolia.com.
  2. Store individuals personal contact information and either have X individuals for free, charge per X customers, annual fee, or show ads of some type. Always looking for an address or phone number when at someone else’s house or office and would like to have it be web based.
  3. Online wine inventory – personal use hosted by me with ads for up to X entries or small annual fee for limited number, bigger ones for people with 1000s of bottles of wine. Yes, I know corkd.com is around. I started mine about the same time they (Dan Cederholm and Dan Benjamin) did, just did not have enough get up and go to get past midway with it. Once Cork’d came out I stopped for the most part. So this one is a good way completed using ASP and Microsoft Access, which only needs to be converted to PHP and MySQL.
  4. Online wine inventory – for wine stores to allow their customers to store their wine collection information and then place their (wine store) ads on website (charge monthly fee to store per customer or flat rate by amount of storage and bandwidth used).
  5. Mini adhoc conference information service (no prototype just yet), which would help groups like BarCamp create main information page about event and later at event add an online schedule of talks (allow addition of rooms, topics, speakers, etc.). Place AdSense and/or links of event sponsors on pages. I created similar conference room scheduling web application for old job so have the general idea for it already in my head of what it would need. Not sure if this one exists, but I assume it does somewhere and have not really looked if it does.
  6. RSS/XML Feed reader, which either would have X feeds free, charge per X feeds over free amount, annual fee, or show ads of some type. Created one to pull in a feeds and either display all records contained in RSS/XML, first X amount, or only display records that contained certain words or phrases. There are way to many of them around.
  7. Store multiple weather location information, which would allow you to save multiple zip codes or city/state/country combinations to keep track of home, vacation location, other friends, or families weather. Same idea for covering hosting costs as previous ideas.
  8. Technology Skills or Skill Swap repository, which would allow members to put in there different skills and then have the rights to search for others for help with questions or for projects.  Would have ability to make personal information private so as not to get spammed. Could charge fee for those just looking to find people for work or projects, charge for recruiting type ads, or just place AdSense on pages.

Conclusion

So please do me a great favor and list the top three applications in order you think I should build them so I can get an idea of what others are thinking.

Thanks, greatly in advance for your time and effort for helping me learn new things and decide which web application to build first. I will post findings in a few weeks along with the order in which I will build them in, since a few could be bundled together to make an over arching suite of applications.

How to Set Up and Use Access Keys

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Access keys allow people to use the keyboard instead of the mouse to perform certain functions. Mostly to move from page to page or a different section of the current pages content. By using web standards you can improve peoples use of your website.

Example HTML Code

The code involved to adding access keys to your website is very simple, you just have to add one extra piece of code to the links as shown below.

<li id=”about”><a href=”about.html” ACCESSKEY=”1″ tabindex=”300″>About</li>

Internet Explorer(IE), Firefox, Opera, and Safari each have their own way of using access keys. In most web browsers, the user uses the access key by pressing “ALT“ (on PC) or “CTRL“ (on MAC) simultaneously with the appropriate character on the keyboard.

The following are the different ways to use the access key function combinations broken by PC or MAC and then browser type.

PC

  • IE – press the “ALT“ key + access key and then press the “ENTER“ key to active the action.
  • Firefox 2.0 – “ALT“ + “SHIFT“ and access key.
  • Firefox 3.0 – “ALT“ + “SHIFT“ + access key and the“ENTER” key are required. I finally personally tested Firefox 3.o on Vista Basic and sometimes you need to hit “ENTER“ and other times you don’t. (UPDATED)
  • Opera – the user presses “SHIFT“ + “ESC“ followed by the access key (without “ALT“). Doing this will display the list of access keys over the current web page.

MAC

  • Firefox 2.0 -“CTRL“ + access key.
  • Firefox 3.0 – this has been changed so that the key combination only focuses on the link, “CTRL“ + access key and an “ENTER” is required after the access key combo. I have not personally tested Firefox 3.o as of yet.
  • Opera -“SHIFT“ + “ESC“ followed by the access key (without “ALT“). Doing this will display the list of access keys over the current web page.
  • Safari – “CNTL“ + access key.

Example Key Combinations

Here is an example of three access key combinations you can use for IE:

Text sizing buttons with Small (S), Medium (M), and Large (L) options.

  • “ALT“ + “S“ to change to small text
  • “ALT“ + “M“ to change to medium text
  • “ALT“ + “L“ to change to large text
  • Finally you must click or press the “Enter “ button.

These key combinations are for IE on the PC and are used to set the text sizes that you want. You can make the text larger or smaller based on your preferences. This is what we have set up on my work website.

From some of the reading I have done I noticed that people that are creating mobile websites and applications, when doing so they are using just the numbers to make it easier for their users to navigate the website and application.

Please give these a try on your websites. I have access keys set up on my website, so please try using them with different browsers. If you have any issues please leave a comment.

Key Points Learned at PodCampDC 2008

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This blog post about PodCampDC (April 20, 2008) is way over do. I noticed it in my work in progress post list. I had started the post a long time ago and decided I would still post the few items I had listed. That I after making them into full thought and not just a short scribble of a few words.

Below are the main points I took away from the day.

When creating a podcast you should have consistent branding and highlight the program or product not the people in podcast. That way if you ever have to get new people for the show it will be less likely to die.

Justin Thorp said “You should make stuff sharable across communities”. Meaning that if you have content you need to let others be able to get at it no matter the way or where they are.

It is very important to make sure to use the same name across communities (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, blog, Mixx, Digg, etc.) so people can easily find you. When new applications/websites start up make sure to get your use name and any other user names that you are know for so other can not grab them and then start bad mouthing you or your products.

I noticed during Aaron Brazell (Technosailor.com) and Geoff Livingston’s live podcast District of Corruption some people where getting hung up on names of websites and the like. Sometimes a website may start out as one thing and then morphed into what it is today. The real important piece is the content not the name.

There were a few things that I thought could have been better and they were? Not needing two locations, meaning that I saw no point in having to get to the Spectrum Theatre an hour early just to go over to the final location after about ten minutes of announcements. The other issue had to do with having multiple five plus rooms on three different floors and having to take the stairs to get to them.

Hope these points are useful even though they are like two months over do.