There are many queer-owned businesses in Ontario, which need your support all year round, not just during Pride Month. Here are some of the ones I have personally interacted with.
(more…)Author: Yvonne Aburrow
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Indigenous Businesses in Ontario
There are quite a lot of Indigenous businesses in the local area, selling a variety of products including art, paints, make-up, food, and more.
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Indigenous History Month
June is Indigenous History Month in Canada. A time to reflect and act on the history of interactions between settlers and Indigenous people.
More and more Canadians want to learn the truth about the destruction of the cultures and languages of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, and the theft of their lands.
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Pride Month is Here!
In the current climate of anti-trans legislation, cutbacks on DEI efforts, and more, we need Pride more than ever. Not just splashing a rainbow on your company logo, but meaningful efforts to be inclusive and support 2SLGBTQIA employees, colleagues, customers, and suppliers.
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About the Carnelian
Several people have asked me, “What’s a carnelian? How did you choose the name?” So here’s the story.
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Plain English
Plain English, sometimes referred to as plain language, is a way of writing clearly and simply to convey information. It is especially important for websites, whether they are government or business. It is necessary because not everyone reading your writing has English as their first language, and if you are explaining something complicated, it helps everyone to understand.
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Getting the Tone Right
Writing for the web requires a different style of writing than other formats. You need to be succinct, but also clear. Getting the tone right (not too formal, not too informal) is important.
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Responsive Websites
A responsive website is one that you can view equally well on a mobile or desktop device. The font size and layout should be readable without zooming, panning, or scrolling horizontally.
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Styling your Website
Since the invention of the web, styling on websites has improved in leaps and bounds. You can have gradients, rounded corners, overlapping elements, drop-shadow, scalable and responsive content, and much more. This is all made possible by CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
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Land Acknowledgements
In many parts of the world, the majority of the population of a country or region is not indigenous to that area. This is true for Canada, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand, for example. In these countries, it is customary to acknowledge that we are living and working on Indigenous lands.
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Personal Pronouns
Many people are confused by the topic of pronouns. A pronoun is the particle of speech that you use to refer to someone instead of using their name. The fact that someone uses a pronoun does not tell you anything about them beyond their pronoun; they may be transgender, cisgender, or nonbinary.
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Agile Methodologies
The key benefit of agile approaches to software development is being able to respond to changing customer requirements and feedback from user testing. It also means that you can roll out a system that meets the basic requirements and then refine it incrementally over time.
The most well-known agile methodology is Scrum, but other systems exist, including Kanban, Smart/ADP, Scrum-ban, and Agile Unified Process. In this article, I will compare the different methodologies.
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Organizing your Content
When you are building or updating your website, you need to think about what your target audience will expect to see.
There are various ways to find out what they will expect; you can ask a group of people who are likely to use your site what they would expect to see; you can look at other websites offering a similar product or service; or you can experiment with different ways of presenting your information and see which is the most effective.
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User Stories and Personas
A user story is a way of describing a website or product feature in relation to the person who will use it, how they will use it, and why it is useful.
User stories usually follow the format “as a [role], I want to do [task], so that I can achieve [goal]”. This can also be written “as who, I want what, so that why”.
The role, the task, and the goal are all equally important, and a user story is incomplete without all three being present.
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Migrating to TypeScript
When a company hires a new developer, it can take up to six months for them to get fully up to speed on the company’s codebase.
One way to make this process less painful for the developer, and less expensive for the company, is to use a strongly-typed language like TypeScript.
A product manager commented to me that he had noticed that developing with TypeScript is faster.
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