• Organizing Wordcamp Twin Cities 2009
• Converting rocking HTML Designs into rocking WordPress Templates
• WordPress Overview for Beginners
• WordPress as a CMS

Details:

Ideal Candidates Have:

• Expert knowledge of hand-coded HTML (XHTML and DHTML inclusive), CSS and JavaScript based on web standards and best practices for code optimization, accessibility and SEO.
• Strong experience developing, testing, implementing, production ready sites in multiple markup languages.
• Proven problem solving / solution architecture experience: Displays the ability to determine the best approach to solve a problem, not necessarily always the quickest, easiest or the cheapest, but the solution that best positions Best Buy for success for the future in any project.
• Proven ability to determine the best approach/coding language/methods based on project needs as well as budgetary efficiency.
• Proven ability to speak to groups and evangelize solutions or concepts and explain them in business terms including the ability to review existing or 3rd party code and deliver feedback.
• Willingness to diversify knowledge in a small team of web developers by a continuous teaching and learning cycle between the members.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree with 5 years of experience or an Associate degree with 8 years of experience
• 5 years of advanced HTML, CSS, and JavaScript hand-coding and troubleshooting skills
• 4 years of web development experience on large, complex websites
• 3 years of one or a combination of ASP/JSP/PHP or similar web coding experience and troubleshooting skills
• Previous experience working across business lines presenting and creating web solutions

Preferred Qualifications:

• Demonstrated consultative experience

To apply
Click here: http://tinyurl.com/2g66vz

Ideal Candidates have:

• Expert knowledge of hand-coded HTML (XHTML and DHTML inclusive), CSS and JavaScript based on web standards and best practices for code optimization, accessibility and SEO.
• Ability to quickly troubleshoot HTML / CSS / ASP / JSP / PHP / JavaScript / Web Browser / Network Issues / DNS / etc. related problems.
• Proven ability to speak to groups and evangelize solutions or concepts and explain them in business terms including the ability to review existing or 3rd party code and deliver feedback.
• Willingness to diversify knowledge in a small team of web developers by a continuous teaching and learning cycle between members.

Required Education and Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree with 5+ years of experience or an Associate degree with 8+ years of experience.
• 5+ years: Advanced HTML, CSS, and JavaScript hand-coding and troubleshooting skills.
• 4+ years of web development experience on large, complex websites.
• 3+ years: ASP/JSP/PHP or similar web coding experience and troubleshooting skills.
• 2+ years: Demonstrated consultative experience architecting, proposing, and collaborating with business teams on web initiatives and applications.

Note: Candidates dependent upon WYSIWYG applications to complete their work will not be considered.

To see a full description and apply for this position, please see the job post on CareerBuilder.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/31/switched-on-apples-brash-flash-clash-rehash/

I find my mac loyalty waning as they become a bigger player in the world of consumer electronics. Has anyone noticed that Best Buy is now an Apple Authorized Reseller? I’m sure that has something to do with CompUSA closing half it’s stores, but I digress.

I was excited when I heard about the iPhone and although it’s way outside my budget and not really a necessity, I’d been thinking that an iPhone was in my future somewhere. Now that this Flash support issue has been a present for over a month and there’s some possibility it may not get resolved anytime soon, as a flash developer I’m thinking this may not be the phone for me.

Now I’d still tell you any day of the week that Apple is on so many levels, a better company then Adobe. Don’t even get me started about Microsoft. That said, I’ve got to start to consider what (from a Flash Developer’s perspective) is the best mobile device competing with the iPhone? Any thoughts?

If you managed to miss this somehow:

http://www.adobe.com/creativelicense/

Go ahead and Preorder today, but I don’t think they’ve made any promises about when it will actually arrive yet. I’d hope it will show up before Flashbelt.

They have gone as far as telling me my plan to upgrade a copy of Flash 5 that I bought off a guy for $40 on Craigslist and planned to upgrade to Flash CS3 will not work.

Personally I’m most intrigued by a new flash feature that attempts to make the designer to developer workflow easier by allowing us to export tweened animation in Flash as Actionscript code…

Oh, behold the glory that is Gmail.

Anyway…

Reading through a discussion on CHI-WEB or sigia-l (I don’t remember which), I noticed a nifty little text ad on the right talking about a rapid prototyping tool. As rapid prototyping is my current fetish, I clicked on the link. It went to here:

http://www.axure.com

My jaw loosened.

As I read through the site, it dropped altogether.

This tool is custom designed to make wireframes for Web applications (and regular content sites too) that you can turn into a functional prototype in, literally, the click of a button (F5, to be precise). The basic screen where you lay your pages out is a sensible grid that makes aligning a snap. You can easily edit the properties of each object, including specifying the list of selections in a drop-down box. You can also make any item on the page into a link. And this is the best part… each item can actually have MORE THAN ONE link! So when you create your prototype, you can have a button that will display two options. For example, you could go to an error condition or a search results page. This is much easier to show than talk about, so here is the prototype of a physician directory I made in 30 minutes (including time spent learning the application). You will need to allow activex controls to see the fancy stuff I’m talking about.

Directory Prototype

I’m beginning to find the application itself more useful even than Visio. It has things we rely on like master pages, but it also has things we’ve needed badly for ages, like master objects (called “references” in the application). There are some goofy usability issues and bugs in the prototypes (e.g., the last item in a drop-down is selected by default instead of the first), but these can be worked around initially and fixed very soon, I’m sure.

So I might be all about this tool right now, but you should all go check it out for yourselves. You can download a fully functional demo from Axure.com. There’s a 30-day trial period, but really I only needed 30 minutes. : ) I’d love to hear what you all think of it.

Enjoy!

(PS: Some bad news… It is PC only, which is a crying shame. )

So, on with the MNBits…

script.aculo.us

In addition to getting me thinking about having to now get my own ‘ious’ URL, this site is a repository of some truly amazing javascript libraries. Take a look at the drag-and-drop demo. While I haven’t had a chance to play with these enough to see if there are any accessibility issues, they do look promising for a variety of tricky interface needs. Also, thse libraries will be built into the next release of Ruby on Rails.

Microformats.org

Microformats.org is a community web site put together for the sharing of simple, open data formats built upon existing web standards.

StructuredBlogging.org

Structured Blogging is a site that is focused on bringing more structural markup to blogging…namely via WordPress. One could certainly argue that this may be overkill for blogging, but it is nice to see more thought put towards storing content in a structured manner. My biggest gripe in looking at umpteen Content Management Systems last year was the total lack of structured content support. Whenever I’d ask about it, I’d get a stock answer of ‘Oh, sure…we have a press release module’. Ugh.

So, most folks may have no need for structured markup on their blogs, but many may. The simple explanation used on the site is:

Structured blogging is about making a movie review look different from a calendar entry. On the surface, it’s as simple as that – formatting blog entries around their content.

The problem is designing a site with CSS rollovers and finding that, when viewed in IE/PC, any hover of a link will cause the page to jump a few pixels to the left.

The culprit as it turns out, is due to my method of adding visual margins to my page:


body {
padding: 0% 3%;
margin: 0px;
}


The logic (in my head) being that since padding is applied*inside* the box, then naturally one should use that to give the edges of your page some white space.

Well, even though this works fine in Mozilla, this will trigger the ‘page jump’ on hover issue with IE. The solution? Simply reverse padding and margin:


body {
padding: 0px;
margin: 0% 3%;
}


Same visual result without the annoying IE problem.

Considering HTML’s stagnation and pain, this may be hard to believe fully, but I’m serious. They talk about things like Digital Signatures, tabbed/wizard interfaces, rich text editing, spreadsheets, and drag and drop, not to mention simpler stuff like date inputs, sliders, and repeatable rows.

Fun stuff. I may have to revisit my desktop-apps-are-better than web-apps position.

UPDATE: Four, yes 4, new vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer announced by Secunia today.

http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/alt/alt-text.html#howlers