November 2008
In order to support a growing number of partnerships between SAPO and Portuguese Universities, which resulted in the wide deployment of several lab.sapo Platforms, there was a need to develop a central platform that would aggregate all the content produced on the different platforms.
(…) more after the jump ›
September 2008 – October 2008
The recently established labs.sapo/ua is Portuguese Internet Giant SAPO‘s latest attempt at gaining a foothold in the Higher Education space. The lab is a physical space in the Universidade de Aveiro campus where SAPO supports the development of innovative projects in the Web and Technology fields in tight collaboration with the University itself. In order to promote the initiative building a solid Web presence was top priority. The platform to be developed needed to promote communication with the outside world and shine a light on the various ongoing projects at the lab. With this in mind, me and the rest of the team decided to develop a platform based on WordPress MU that would support an indefinite number of personal and project blogs. This platform would need to be flexible enough to be deployed nearly as-is in a number of situations, such as other Universities or other SAPO sponsored events (as is the case of labs.sapo/codebits and labs.sapo/summerbits).
If you’re into this “Web” thing, which, if you’re reading this, I imagine you are, then you probably already read a lot of blogs about it. On the off chance you don’t, here is a list of the seven best blogs currently written about Web design, development, or just the Web in general.
Sitepoint, a website filled with resources for web designers and developers, is giving away “The Art And Science of CSS” as a downloadable PDF.
All you have to do to get the freebie is to follow Sitepoint on Twitter, and in a matter of minutes, you’ll get the download link delivered to your inbox. Make haste, though, the offering only lasts for two weeks! I haven’t read the book yet, but it seems good enough – and hey, it’s free, right?
Just as the name implies, a CSS Reset is a stylesheet that lets you start your project on a real blank slate. What this means is that the styles defined in this particular stylesheet override (and effectively strip off) all the default browser styles Web Designers usually rely upon.
So why would you want to reset those styles? After all, they’re useful and save you a lot of code, don’t they? The answer is of course yes, but the problem is that different browsers have (very) different defaults, and if you trust default styles with too much you might just end up serving a very different experience for people with other browsers. Using a CSS Reset, however, you’re going to have to define some styles you probably didn’t even care about before, like strong, em or small. But believe me, it’s worth the extra work.
The CSS Reset stylesheet I’ve been using for a few projects now is the one written by Eric Meyer, CSS guru. You can download it here, and you’re encouraged to alter it to fit your needs.
