Strategies For Staying Educated About Interactive Media, Front-end Development, and Web Design

A lot of professions require keeping up to date with standards and trends, but for interactive media, it is almost a weekly commitment and should be a part of the job.  With interactive media, there are trends that appear every year and it is usually a good idea to follow them.  It is almost expected that people accept these trends and throw away the old ones; if you don't, you'll quickly be called outdated.  I've been there.  Within development, there are frameworks are pop up every now and then.  If you want to stay in the business, you must learn these new frameworks.  Every couple of years, the semantics of code is changed and you must learn the new tags.  Browsers are always being updated, operating systems change, platforms are introduced.  So how do you stay up to date?  Let's explore how.

Front-end Development

I've already made a post about this, but following the key players is probably one of the best ideas.  All of the big developers are on twitter and some of them have blogs.  It's important to keep up to date with these guys because some of them are the ones making changes to the markup.  Some are developing the  platforms where your future code will rest.  Others create new libraries, like jQuery for example.  However, the best thing is that you can have a one on one interaction with these internet celebrities.  More than not they will answer your questions.  Additionally, you get access to their thought process, their random ramblings, their weird lunch thoughts.  Today is a weird world; we pretty much have access to everybody's journal through twitter and blogs.  Use it and hopefully you'll get a peak into an artist's process.  Attend conferences.  Here you will have a chance to see the most up to date technologies and trends.  Attend field-specific conferences too, like front-end development conferences.

Web Design

Staying up to date with web design is pretty much on the same level as front-end development.  In order to be the best web designer, you must know how the web works.  If you don't know how stuff is made interactive, then you definitely have a disadvantage compared to other more well-rounded designers.  To stay up to date requires observing others.  Dribbble, for instance, is a great way to see what other web designers are doing.  You can take a peak into their process because a lot of the shots are works in progress.  Dribbble is also a great way to see what is trending; the most popular page is full of trendy designs, fonts, colors, and methods.  It is worth taking a lot at some agencies as well.  These are the guys making the products for the startups.  They should be making the most up to date stuff. And it usually looks good.  Attend conferences.  These conferences will be showcasing the most up to date technologies and trends.  There are conferences all over the United States, but a must is SXSW.  Attend the web design specific conferences as well; they'll have workshops and lectures.

Overall

Create.  It's that simple.  One of the best ways to keep learning is to keep working.  Keep working on your own skills, but also explore some new methods.  Experiment.  Who knows, you might stumble upon the next trendy element in design.

Twitter Gets A Familiar New Look

If you haven't noticed yet, your Twitter profile page has received a makeover.

About a month ago, Twitter announced plans to roll out a new profile page that would make profile pages represent their owner's personality even more.  If you think about it,  the old Twitter profile page was pretty bland and generic.  However, their new page is eye-catching, but it does resemble something.  Twitter perhaps received some inspiration from Facebook because the two profile pages look pretty similar now.  They both have a profile picture nested in the top left corner along with a large cover photo that stretches across the entire top of the screen.  Below all of this rests content.

The new profile page

For Twitter, this now includes best tweets, pinned tweets, and filtered tweets.  Let's check them out!

Best Tweets

Notice the size difference.  The one on the bottom is part of the new best tweet feature

If you take a look at your new profile page, you might notice that certain tweets are larger than others.    This is because they have been labeled as a best tweet.  According to Twitter, the tweets with a lot of engagement will appear larger on your profile page, which makes it easier to find the most important or interesting content.

Pinned Tweets

They sit at the top of your profile page

Have a tweet you are super proud of?  Or perhaps a celebrity interaction?  You can now pin tweets at the top of your profile page so that others can quickly see them.  Ideally, you will want to pin a typical tweet so that new followers will know what you are all about.

Filtered Tweets

Twitter understands the importance of photos and videos.  They are visually stimulating and our eyes automatically fall on pictures over text.  If you want to just look at tweets that have pictures or video, you can now filter tweets on your timeline.  Other options include view all tweets and view tweets with replies.

All of this is a lot to take in.  If you don't want to switch right away, Twitter is not pushing the switch just yet.  You can demo these new features, but they won't stick until you tell Twitter that you are ready.  With that said, all of these new features improve an already amazing web experience.  I think I'm finished talking, so if you haven't tried out the new Twitter, visit your profile page and try it out!

Twitter: Who to Follow?

Twitter is inescapable.  With 200 million active users, Twitter is one of the most successful start-up companies of all time.  Twitter also just recently joined the NY Stock Exchange.  With that many heads talking, Twitter can provide a great wealth of knowledge and resources for any subject. With that said, Twitter should be a part of every web developers toolkit and should be treated as a resource.

Informative websites and founding developers can both be found on Twitter, but for this week, we will target some important people to follow so that you can get up to date information straight from the people developing the future.  In a sense, you’ll get to see history be written in the development community.  Ok, let’s not get too geeky here.

Developer Twitter Accounts:

John Resig - @jeresig

John is the founder of jQuery, which is by far the most popular Javascript library.  John currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and is working at the Khan Academy.  Previously, he worked for Mozilla.

Eric A. Meyer - @meyerweb

Eric Meyer is best known for his writings on web standards and cascading style sheets (CSS).  He is an active writer and has published several books.  He is also extremely active on Twitter with over 23,000 tweets.

Jeffrey Way - @jeffrey_way

Jeffrey Way is an extremely active voice within the developing community.  He frequently writes at Nettuts+, where he breaks down concepts into easy to digest tutorials. He is the founder of Laracasts.

Paul Irish - @paul_irish

Paul was previously on the jQuery team for a few years, but has switched to the Google Chrome Developer relations team.  He created the HTML5 boilerplate and also created the familiar Modernizr tool.

That’s it for now, but keep it mind there are hundreds of developers actively tweeting!  On top of developers, there are also website gathering resources on Twitter such as Nettuts+. 

What is an API? A Brief Overview

If you’re new to the world of front end development, you might have heard the term “API”. API stands for “Application Programming Interface” and is something that we use all the time without knowing about it.  APIs allow for the communication between two different applications.  For example, a project can author an API that allows for other projects to pull features or data from their interface.  The original project doesn’t have to share any of their code for the features or data.

Here’s a definition from Wikipedia:

“An Application Programming Interface (API) is a particular set of rules and specifications that a software program can follow to access and make use of the services and resources provided by another particular software program that implements that API. It serves as an interface between different software programs and facilitates their interaction, similar to the way the user interface facilitates interaction between humans and computers.”

Mentioned previously, APIs are everywhere.  Let’s take a news article for example.  At the bottom of the page, articles usually have a social media bar that has links to facebook, twitter, reddit, etc. so that you can share the article on your own social media page.  All of these features are powered by APIs.  Even the comment system, which is sometimes powered by facebook comments, uses the facebook API to pull your profile name, picture, location, etc.

The LATimes uses the facebook commenting system for their news articles

What can you do with them?

If you’re a blogger or journalist, having those sharable social media buttons would be a nice touch for your content.  However, we’re not all journalists.

I think most people have a Twitter account nowadays.  Twitter has built a widget that uses their API to create a timeline for one individual.  You can then link this timeline on your webpages.  I’ve used this for several projects and it is a great way to show off tweets without having to actually go to Twitter.  Again, Twitter is using an API to share their features with another application without having to share their code for Twitter.

To access this widget, just go to your settings menu, then go to Widgets, and Create A New Widget.  

I decided to create a timeline for my master’s program:

Tweets by @EloniMedia

This is just one example of what can API can do.  I’ve also recently worked with Vimeo’s Player Embedding API to show all of my account’s videos on a web page without having to go to the actual Vimeo website.

For your next project, explore how you might possibly display something with an API rather than the normal way.