Best of the Web: April 2012

Without further ado, a collection of six of the pages I’ve found while browsing around the web this month…

• I’ve always liked the game Hangman.  It’s a game that we each learned to play as a kid, and I still play it when I have a few spare moments (usually on the bus) with an app on my phone.  The strategy I always learned to use was to guess vowels first, then move onto common consonants such as “S” and “T”.  After those guesses, you should have enough letters in the word to be able to make an educated guess from there.  Lifehacker however, has found a better strategy to hangman that is quite interesting.
• My colleague Dudley Story has created a great guide to using HTML 5 for form validation.  I’ve been using HTML 5 form fields in the sites I’m building for months now, but learned a few new tricks from Dudley’s post.  This guide sums up everything you need to know to feel confident in putting away your Javascript validation library and handing the task over to HTML.
• As video becomes more and more prevalent on the web for business, there are more and more video marketing and video SEO articles and tutorials cropping up.  Reel SEO is a site that is dedicated to all things online video.  For the video industry and all online video and video marketing, they have great material that covers everything you need, and the site is being constantly updated with great new content.
• Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is gaining in popularity quite quickly as it gets rolled out to new Android devices.  Many Android users have said that ICS is the best version of Android to date (I haven’t installed it on my Galaxy S II yet to be able to comment).  The question that is asked about any new mobile OS is can it compete with Apple’s iOS?  Gadget Master has posted list of 10 Reasons why Android 4.0 is better than Apple’s iOS.  There are some great points in this article that highlight some of the best features of Android, and what makes it different than iOS.
• PHP 5.4 was released in March, and one of the new features is a built-in web server.  When I heard about this, I was immediately intrigued and I found an in depth article on how to use the new server functionality.
• Matt Cutts – head of Google’s web spam team has been doing “30 day challenges” for the last year or so now.  A 30 day challenge is where Matt tries to do something he’s never done before and has always wanted to do, for 30 days.  Biking to work, cutting out sugar, etc.  I think this is a great idea.  In March 2011, Matt did a TED Talk on his 30 day challenge idea.  If you are interested, check out the video.