Journalists should go to more conferences that aren’t tailored to journalists. While we’re focusing on getting developer resources in the newsroom and trying to get the support infrastructure to do data and design experiments, there are web designers out there in the world who don’t have to ask these questions and are instead focusing on the right tools to actually get things done. At least that was the takeaway for me this weekend at my first non-journalism-specific conference in ages: the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit. Hundreds of developers and designers joined for the weekend to talk about the open source platform Drupal and tools to maximize Drupal’s usage. Here’s a list of the top tools I discovered around CSS3, responsive design and rapid prototyping.  continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Journalists, what are some of your New Year’s resolutions? If one of them happens to be “learn to code”, then search engine titan Google has you covered with Google Code University.

There are many reasons that journalists should learn how to code. Like we’ve stated before here on 10,000 Words, coding skills are an essential part of working in a new media environment. A knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript gives you the tools you need to create your own website, and can make you a valuable resource for any news organization. Not only that, several journalism fellowships and trainee programs are looking for journalists with programming knowledge. You can have the skills to apply for an opportunity to receive funding for your own cutting edge journalism projects.

Google Code University (GCU) does not require any registration, and materials are free to use. In Web Programming, for example, there are lectures, videos, and contributed course content to teach users how to create interactive web applications that go beyond your basic static web page.

Here are just a few of the courses GCU offers:

• Python
• C++
• Java
• CSS, HTML and JavaScript
• HTML5
• Web Security
• Algorithms
• Android Application Development
• Introduction to Databases and MySQL

Computer science educators are also welcome to submit their own coursework for inclusion within GCU. All courses will be placed under a Creative Commons license which will allow for people to reuse and modify the courses for their own curriculum as necessary. And if you’re looking for more curriculum to peruse or get stuck on a particular term, GCU also includes a search feature via Google Directory that includes lectures, assignments, papers and videos from schools like Harvard University, Duke University, and Carnegie Mellon University.

GCU is a part of Google Code’s education resources, which also include Google DocType and the popular HTML5 Rocks website. To get started today, visit http://code.google.com/edu.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

While there are mobile devices which can run Flash, using Flash should be avoided for both mobile sites and applications. For video, recent studies show that HTML 5 outperforms Flash on mobile devices.

Yesterday, Adobe announced that they will be ceasing development of the mobile version of Flash Player for mobile browsers in order to continue their focus on HTML5. This is huge news for any organization which uses Flash for mobile websites to deliver multimedia content or interactive graphics.

According to Adobe VP Danny Winokur, “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.” While these are strong words from Adobe, it’s important to note that any organization that begins to transition its Flash content to HTML5 must keep two important thoughts in mind.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.