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Register For Fall 2008 Classes Now!

July 29th, 2008 Becky Peters

Registration for the September 2008 session is now open at LVS Online ~ Where Learning Is Fun!

12 NEW Classes, over 100 Classes in All!

With 12 new classes being offered this session, LVS has over 100 classes on its roster. From Instructor-led to Self-study, LVS covers a wide range of subjects. And don’t forget the FREE Windows and Vista classes!

To check out the courses you would like to take, a complete list is given at LVS Course Schedule.

Intructor-led Classes in a Virtual Setting

If you’ve never participated in a virtual classroom setting, you’ll find LVS the perfect choice for initiation into the online learning environment. Administrators and instructors alike understand what it’s like to be a first-time enrollee and work with you to overcome any concerns you may have.

Each instructor-led course has its own virtual classroom accessible to enrolled students with a forum-type message board used to post assignments, ask questions, and interact with the instructor as well as the other students who signed up for that class. Instructors maintain a friendly, fun, and energetic setting in which to learn.

Instructor-led classes begin August 30th so head on over to LVS Online Classes to enroll now.

Build a Website

LVS offers a 3-part website coding series that takes you from “I don’t know anything about X/HTML & CSS” to “WOW – I can create a valid website” in no time at all and you’ll have a great time doing it, too.

If web site coding is something you’ve always wanted to learn, now is the time. Get started by registering for the introductory-level course Build Your Web Site I today!

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Snippy is a Great Little Addition to a Coder’s Toolkit

June 25th, 2008 Becky Peters

Over the years I’ve tried a lot of screen capture utilities — some TSR, some not.  I’ve always ended up back at “print screen” and pasting it into a full-blown app for editing… until now.  I heard about Snippy from a friend and have fallen in love with it!  It’s just a nice, basic utility to let you capture exactly what you want to capture from the screen with little or no bells and whistles to muck things up.

It makes documenting things for clients a snap! “-)

1.  Click on Snippy
2.  Select Area to Capture
3.  [Magic Happens]
4.  Right click on Snippy and Save
5.  Repeat as necessary

Hypothetically you can paste directly into a document instead of saving the image like I do, but I prefer to get all the images at once and then fool around with placement in the target document.

Here’s a review from Appsource.com (a PCMag Network Site):

“Snippy is a tiny application, only about 84KB, that will help make taking screenshots much easier. Sure, you can just press print-screen and paste the image into paint, but that doesn’t let you take shots of only part of your screen, or let you freehand what you need to take a shot of and exclude what you don’t need. When you use Snippy, you get a cursor that lets you draw around what you want a screenshot of. When you let go of the mouse, the image is stored in the clipboard, ready to be pasted into any document of your choice. If you hold down shift when you click Snippy, you get a target cursor that will take rectangular shots of whatever you select.”

“The best part about Snippy is that it’s lightweight and portable. It doesn’t require an installation, and the executable can be stored on a USB drive or copied from computer to computer easily. Best of all, it’s free.”

[Source: http://www.appscout.com/2007/04/snippy_makes_screenshots_easy.php]

And here’s some info from the Author of Snippy:

“Simply save the Snippy executable in some convenient location on your hard-drive. We also recommend that you add a shortcut to your Startup folder so that Snippy starts up automatically when you turn on your computer.”

“Snippy works only with Windows XP.”

[Source: http://www.bhelpuri.net/Snippy/]

Download Snippy here: http://www.bhelpuri.net/Snippy/SnippyDownload.htm (Note: Download starts immediately; for more info read the Source page link above.]

Posted in Coder's Toolbox | 2 Comments »

YouTube Movies and Valid (X)HTML – Part 3 of 3

June 18th, 2008 Becky Peters

This is the final entry in a series of 3 articles designed to help you embed a YouTube movie while maintaining (X)HTML standards compliance, then customizing the display of the movie and finally, providing alternate content for visitors unable to view the movie. This article is a reprint of the series first published on stylehack.com.

In this article we’ll add alternate content to the code that was modified in the first two articles. The purpose of providing alternate content is to allow for accessibility and/or for visitors whose browser is not configured to display a movie.

What is Alternate Content?

Alternate content is simply text or other content (for instance, an image) provided as an alternate representation of the object embedded within the page.

1. It is placed between the <object> </object> tag set, after any <param> elements and before the </object> tag.
2. There is no tag set or attribute label related to this content, it is placed directing into the <object> tag set just like placing content in a <p> tag set!
3. The alternate content is what will be displayed in the browser when your visitor does not have the capability to view the object being called by the <object> element.

You can use an image, add a link, even use other elements in the alternate content… anything that is valid under (X)HTML coding guidelines. It’s actually a nice touch to use all of the above – an image, a link and text – for maximum accessibility.

Read the rest of this article »

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YouTube Movies and Valid (X)HTML – Part 2 of 3

June 11th, 2008 Becky Peters

This is the second in a series of 3 articles designed to help you embed a YouTube movie while maintaining (X)HTML standards compliance, then customizing the display of the movie and finally, providing alternate content for visitors unable to view the movie. This article is a reprint of the series first published on stylehack.com.

In this article we’ll apply all that you learned in the first article to embed a movie, this time with code that has been modified using the customization option(s) available on YouTube.

Customization Options via YouTube

If you recall from the first article in this series, when you are on the movie’s YouTube page you have two options for obtaining embedding code — to simply grab the embedding code for the default player (addressed in Part 1 of this series), or to customize the player before you grab the embedding code. Let’s grab some customized code and convert it to valid XHTML code.

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Posted in (X)HTML Tricks & Tips, Validation Tips | No Comments »

YouTube Movies and Valid (X)HTML – Part 1 of 3

June 4th, 2008 Becky Peters

This is the first of a series of 3 articles designed to help you embed a YouTube movie while maintaining (X)HTML standards compliance, then customizing the display of the movie and finally, providing alternate content for visitors unable to view the movie. This article is a reprint of the series first published on stylehack.com.

Web 2.0 is in full swing (cough cough) and with it come many opportunities to display someone else’s content in our sites or blogs. And most of those opportunies even offer us the code necessary to do so. However, as is typical with much that you find on the web, the code provided by the object’s author is rarely 100% (X)HTML standards compliant.

Most of the code you find out on the web uses the <embed> element, which is deprecated in (X)HTML. So we need to be able to replace that element and its attributes with the appropriate <object> and <param> elements.

How is that accomplished? The short answer is by moving some (or all) of the <embed> attributes to the <object> and <param> elements! Let’s see how that works by concentrating on how to make the code to embed a YouTube movie standards compliant.

Getting the Code to Insert a YouTube Movie

The code for embedding a movie is different from the code used on YouTube pages and from the code that you receive in email when someone uses the “Email this movie” functon. So where do you get the code sample you need to embed a YouTube movie?

The best place is directly from YouTube, of course! However you come across the movie — whether embedded in a web page, sent to you as a link in email, via Google’s video search feature, or by simply visiting and browsing the YouTube site — you should always follow that movie to its official page on the YouTube site.

Read the rest of this article »

Posted in (X)HTML Tricks & Tips, Validation Tips | 3 Comments »