Alright, Microsoft. I gotta admit it. This was pretty funny.

Happy Friday, friends!

I was thinking yesterday about the first time I noticed the web.  It was 1995 and Yahoo! was still "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." At the time I was a writer, and the Internet struck me as the perfect way to talk to readers without all the fuss of contracts and editors, not to mention dead trees. It was clearly a better way to communicate.

So, lately I’ve been hearing a lot about the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields, including my own field of web development. Over the last few years it’s become something of a hot topic.  When the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology predicts a shortfall of 1 million STEM workers over the next decade, people tend to talk.

Having worked in web development for 19 years has its advantages, but there are plenty of disadvantages too. Gray hairs and wrinkles are a topic for another post. I’m talking about all that useless knowledge (table layout, anyone?) you still carry around and how you can get stuck in your ways. Of course, by “you” I mean me.

Images on the web can be a brilliant user experience enhancement. Or they can be a serious impediment to users trying to load your pages. Don’t frustrate your users with gigantic image files. With just a couple of small, free apps for your Mac, you can process images before adding them to a theme or uploading them to your site as content.