While listening to the 200th Boagworld show the subject of how to get into web design/development came up. It seems to be a perpetual question, "do I go to University and get a degree or do I try and get a job and teach myself while working"?

The options now

From what was said by Chris Mills, who contributes to the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, and others a large number of the degrees and other courses available are not really up to date with current best practice. These courses are still often teaching table based layout and missing things like semantic HTML and accessibility.
This leads to students coming out at the end of a three or more year course with a large amount of debt and skills that would have been fine in 2000, but are somewhat lacking now.

Trying to get a job without higher qualifications has it's own issues, especially in the current economic climate. Web design companies tend to be small to medium sized business. They quite often don't have the time, money, culture or inclination to take on a person just out of school and let them learn on the job.
It takes a lot of resources to train up a member of staff and with the short amount of time a large number of us spend with any single employer, it can be seen as an expensive option for the agency.

Therefore you have the choice of spending up to four years doing a degree where they teach you out of date skills or you try to impress someone enough with your portfolio to employ you and hope your not just making tea for the next two years.

I have been a user of Open Source software since I went to university in 1989 and been writing my own open source software for over ten years. As such I always kept an eye on what leading figures in the Free Software Movement have to say.

As such, it was with interest that I read the headline; "RMS: De Icaza Traitor to Free Software Community", being intrigued as to what Richard Stallmanhad said this time.

As I read through the post I noticed nothing unusual to start with; Stallman's usual rantings against anything that smells of the corporate world; Software as a Service, Proprietary JavaScript, even Mono, which I personally think is a good idea.

And then he was asked a question about the Microsoft "Open Source" labs.He said that Miguel de Icaza was a "traitor to the Free Software community" and a "Microsoft apologist", and that the Microsoft "Open Source" labs are just concerned with permitting open source software to work on Windows, drawing away developers from working on free platforms like GNU/Linux.

Kiva.org is a charity website that allows individuals to provide the capital for micro loans to the working poor.

The Kiva Available Loans widget is a control designed to be used with the BlogEngine.Net blog platform. This control lists, via the Kiva API, a number of the latest loan requests that have not yet been fulfilled.

The available loans can display a developer specified number of thumbnail images. When selected, each image displays a pop up box containing details of the entrepreneur and a link to the loan details page.

Kiva Available Loans control with a basic Kiva styling.

Kiva Available Loans control with the loan description pop up displayed. The contol has a basic Kiva styling.

The Kiva Available Loans widget is released under version 2.1 of the GNU Lesser General Public License.

The latest version of the control can be downloaded here.

One of the things that has always interested me about the web, and developing sites for it, is the community aspect. This ability to build a community is not really available when writing normal application software, and although I have built my fair share of applications, it really doesn't fire my interest me in the same way as the web.

Creating a community to attract more visitors?

Since the transformation of xlevel.org.uk from the home of a few open source applications I wrote some years ago to a fully fledge blog I have been considering what it is that makes people have a connection to one certain website more than to another. So, it was with interest that I read an interesting article in the March issue of .Net magazine called "Attract visitors to your site".

In the article the author discusses a number of ways to attracting visitors, including fostering a community through allowing visitors to comment on blog posts. The interesting thing was that the example he used was actually an example of visitors voting for there to be no comments.

Recently, while working on an EPiServer CMS5 R2 website build I was required to lock down the editors rights. The project required users to only be able to edit and publish pages, not create or delete them.

Controlling an editors rights within Edit Mode, the full screen, Windows explorer like console, is not an issue. All you need to do is modify their access rights and remove Create and Delete permission from the Root folder down.

Unfortunately, the Direct On Page Editing, or DOPE, accessed on page from the right click context menu, does not seam to take any notice of this.

The standard EPiServer on page edit menu.