Insights

There are some amazing learning resources on the web, in every area of development, design, mobile, responsive, UX, and more. Here are some of my favourites. 24 ways The advent calendar for web geeks. For twenty-four days each December they publish a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring everyone a little Christmas cheer. A List Apart Explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices. The Agile Manifesto The core ideas and principles behind agile development. CSS Tricks Nifty things you can do with CSS, like making interesting shapes, or speech bubbles, or pull-out quotes. Meyerweb.com The website and blog of Eric Meyer, CSS guru and web consultant. Boagworld The website and blog of Paul Boag, user experience guru and web consultant.

There are some amazing tools available for developers on the web, from pretty-printing your code to validating it, from colour palettes for visual impairments to tools for testing APIs. Here are some of my favourites. Stack Overflow This is the go-to site for questions and answers about coding. It has questions and answers on just about every programming language that you can think of - PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, JavaScript, jQuery, Angular, and more. And every environment you can think of - Windows, iOS, Android, and so on. And every mark-up and styling language - HTML, XML, CSS, and Sass. Stack Overflow has an awesome community of people willing to help complete strangers, which I think is amazing. I have learnt so much from reading Stack Overflow, and I haven't asked that many questions on there, because many of the common questions have already been asked and answered. User Experience This is the equivalent site to Stack Overflow for asking user experience questions (usability an...

FontAwesome is a nifty icon set that you can use anywhere that you can edit HTML. For example, you can use it in Moodle to display a symbol. Step 1. Go to edit mode and find the text region you want to edit. Step 2. Click on the first button on the toolbar (to show more buttons) Step 3. Click on the HTML edit mode button  <> Step 4. Go to  FontAwesome icons  and click on the one you want to use If your icon is purely for decorative purposes, use this code: <i class= "fa fa-tree" aria-hidden= "true" ></i> If it has a semantic meaning, use this code: <i class= "fa fa-tree" ></i> To improve web accessibility , FontAwesome recommend using aria-hidden="true" to hide icons used purely for decoration. Step 5. Paste the HTML into the Moodle text box Step 6. Turn off HTML editing (click on the HTML edit mode button  <>  again) Now you have a tree in your text box! Need to make it bigger?  Go back to HTML edit mode...