Make Smarter - FOSS4G, FOSSCasts, and Beautiful HTML

First up in the maker smarter category this month has to be FOSS4G. One of these days I’ll get there in person, but in the mean time this conference is always very good about putting presentation and workshop materials online. A number of presentations are out on the web right now, with some on FOSSLC and some on BlipTV (see Paul’s post for some links on BlipTV). Some of the talks OpenGeo gave, like GeoServer in Production and Styling with SLD, are particularly good.

Next up is FOSSCasts, which “are short, free screencasts covering Linux, Unix, and Open Source software in general”. This is a relatively new podcast with 11 episodes available, and I’ve found some really useful material already. A lot of it is for the ‘nix folks, but some stuff, like going over basic usage of Apache JMeter, can be used by anybody.

CSS-Tricks created an image showing their idea of Beautiful HTML. I thought I was a pretty good HTML/CSS hacker until I started watching his podcast - needless to say I have a lot of respect for Chris. Some of his vision of beautiful HTML is HTML5 and some of it is just plain smart, but all of it makes for highly readable and minimalistic HTML code. If some part of your job intersects with web page creation I can’t recommend CSS-Tricks enough.

Finally, in the I-can’t-believe-I’ve-never-seen-this department, somewhere in the backwaters of the Internet I ran across The Hacker’s Diet: How to Loose Weight and Hair Through Stress and Poor Nutrition. It might not be as popular as the Mediterranean Diet, but it sure is a lot more entertaining.