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I’ve been a long-time admirer of the [Head First](http://www.headfirstlabs.com/index.php) series of books since the dim and distant days of [Head First EJB](http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596005719/). I have quite a collection of these books myself and often recommend them to students who want to do some self-directed learning, say to learn [Java](http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596009205/) or [HTML and CSS](http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101978/). Every book starts by explaining the pedagogical principles (developed by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates) behind the books and these principles are [enumerated](http://www....

On the theme of mobile web accessibility (#thereisawebappforthat) I did some more exploration of the BBC’s mobile (http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile) web site and discovered that there is a mobile version of iPlayer at http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer which streams video in MP4 format suitable for the iPhone. Thus, I’d have to regrade the BBC’s mobile accessibility to A+ … providing that you enter the site from the root URL. In the spirit of research, and because I teach some of this stuff, I dug a little deeper and discovered that if you visit the BBC with a conventional browser, the pages are returned using the XHTML 1....

Interesting follow-up to yesterday’s mobile web accessibility post (#thereisawebappforthat). When demonstrating mobile web page accessibility to my wife, I went direct to the BBC web site (http://www.bbc.co.uk). Interestingly, this page recognizes that I was using a mobile device and switched to a presentation suitable for a mobile (See http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/web/ for a live demo). Clicking through from here gets you to the news site http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/ and this is accessible to mobiles. The question is then why doesn’t a link to http://www....

There should be a web app for that! Earlier today I tweeted A bit disappointed to be finding that major media outlets like the BBC make apps instead of making website mobile browser compatible. After that outburst I felt some explanation was called for. I also felt a campaign coming on. So here goes. The Explanation If you have an internet enabled smart phone, then you almost certainly have a mobile web browser....

I’m thinking that I need to optimize my social network sharing strategy. Ideally, I’d like to reach the maximum number of people with the minimum effort and I think that I may have too many channels. There is also some duplication that I want to eliminate. To achieve my aims, I think that I first need to analyze my sharing habits and who sees what I share. This might take several posts to untangle....