framework

With the rise of HTML5/Css3, a number of web designers in libraries are trying to find the best way to either move their existing sites into a more modern framework, or sometimes just figure out what the big deal is about HTML5. Luckily, there are not only a ton of great resources for reference (like the great w3c Schools info), but my new favorite HTML5 template:

HTML5 Boilerplate

This thing is the swiss army knife of HTML5/CSS3 development. It even supports add-ons, like this really interesting mobile-first extension for Boilerplate,320 and up.

If you’re just looking around for somewhere to start learning HTML5, you could do much worse than looking through Boilerplate and playing with it in your designs.

Chad Haefele, Reference Librarian for Emerging Technologies at Davis Library at UNC-Chapel Hill has released a great tool for mobilizing your website: The Mobile Site Generator. From his blog, Hidden Peanuts:

…while I’ve seen a lot of talk about mobile sites for libraries, I don’t see nearly as many actually implementing them. I think a lot of librarians are intimidated. But IUI’s code is actually so simple that I was able to automate its creation! The Mobile Site Generator will hopefully help people over the first hurdle: it creates a framework for a mobile site that you can then tweak & customize to you heart’s content.

Chad’s responsible for UNC library’s awesome mobile site, so he knows a thing or two about creating a mobile site. If you’ve been considering finding a way to mobilize your site, you could do a lot worse than take a half hour and give this a try.