March 2011 Meeting Report: QR Codes and More

At our March 2011 meeting, we started with the announcement from the Associated Press that their stylebook will now drop the hyphen in the spelling of "email."

With that out of the way,we looked at a couple of websites to follow up on topics from prior meetings:

• 10 Useful Chrome Extensions for Web Designers from Template Monster Blog.
• CSS Sprite Generator from Project Fondue.

We then spent the bulk of the meeting talking about QR codes and showed how they can be used and how to generate them for your own purposes. The sites we looked at were:

• TechCrunch article on usage on building permits.
• Video from Rocketboom Tech on using QR codes.

We also looked at sites for actually making QR codes:

• The Google URL Shortener creates a shortened version of a URL, but it will also create a QR code. As we noticed, it appears you have to be signed in to Google in order to use the QR feature. The Workshop's code below was generated by Google.
• Quirify lets you create a text message that can be read by a QR reader.
• This article from the NY Times lists other utilities for QR codes -- note the reader comments which have additional useful information.
• If you use bit.ly to shorten URL's, QR Codes are now included on the info page for every bit.ly link, and can also be generated by appending .qrcode to any bit.ly link.

For more technical information on QR codes, see this Google article.

CSS Workshop QR

March 2011 Meeting Announcement

The next meeting of the PACS CSS Workshop will be this Saturday, March 19, at our usual 9-10 hour.

There have been a few interesting issues in the browser resets that we have been discussing at our recent meetings. This month, I want to spend a little time looking at those issues, and then wrap up the subject with a final overview.

The next topic in our website makeover series will be grids, a way to create advanced layouts on a web page. We should be able to start on that subject this month. But I also want to demonstrate a very fast-growing technology that you might have seen recently without realizing what it was. Here's a hint: Remember the late, great :CueCat?

There are some other new developments that I hope to cover briefly, so we'll see how the time goes.