What would a writing for the web course be without some Web 2.0 readings? Tim O'Reilly's What Is Web 2.0 Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software is a good choice since he always his a good feel for how the Internet will develop. Bryan Alexander's Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? in Educause Review is a good overview as well.

Drupal 4.7 was officially released today. In anticipation, I upgraded Kairosnews to the Drupal 4.7 release candidate over the weekend and then to 4.7 stable today. As Dries describes in the official release announcement, there are lots of improvements over 4.7. Equally exciting to me, though, are the many new features that are and will become available in other contributed modules.

In Search engine optimization: beyond search keywords, Gerry McGovern makes a key point here that expresses the rhetorical situation of SEO: we should be optimizing for people who search.

Sometimes, those involved in search engine optimization lose sight of certain absolutely critical issues. The objective should not be to optimize for any particular search engine. It is to optimize for people who search. This is a subtle but essential distinction. It's easy to get obsessed with the technical aspects of Google and Yahoo!

More resources for my Writing for the Web class this fall.

• css Zen Garden Resource Guide. Good clearing house of links to resources. Since we'll be using The Zen of CSS Design in the class, students will appreciate the connection to their text.
• How C.R.A.P is Your Site Design?
• Building a Website with Photoshop and Dreamweaver. I had always wondered how people build their websites in Photoshop first (a technique also mentioned in The Zen of CSS Design).
• famfamfam's website icons. Free icons such as these are invaluable for putting the finishing touches on a website design.
• Bravenet's HTML and CSS Tutorials.
• Cameron Olthius Top Ten CSS Tutorials.

Next year, I'll be leaving Purdue to teach in Grand Valley State University's Writing Department. One of the classes I'll be teaching is Writing for the Web, so I'll be posting more resources that I find on the web which might be useful for that class. Here are the latest:

• Karl Stolley's Sustainable Web Design. Great introduction to CSS and semantic markup.
• Writing for the Web, a web text hosted at Sun Microsystems written by Jakob Nielsen.
• Proximity & Alignment and Repetition & Contrast. Nice, quick introductions to these four basic design concepts. Note the examples on the pages using Flash to show the before and after effect of implementing these principles.
• Can't forget Webmonkey and A List Apart.

Chapters 9, 10, & 11 from Steve Krug's 1st edition of Don't Make Me Think is available online. In these chapters, Krug talks specifically about usability testing.