Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category
If you’re not using CSS Sprites (also known as the CSS Image Replacement Method) you should be. Many coders seem to fear this easy and basic way to use images with CSS and I’m not sure why.
The benefits of CSS Sprites are plentiful, but you (and your visitors) will benefit from this method ten-fold. For the coder it’s less slicing and cropping of images, and for the user it rids us of that annoying image loading flash when you use CSS to replace background images.
I’ll take you through some quick steps to get started with CSS Sprites.
What’s worse than spending a week coding a brand new design to realize that your site looks like a bloody mess in IE6? Luckily we have a valid way to fix these problems without having to use hacks in our CSS and destroy the completed design that looks good in all other browsers.
IE Conditionals are an easy and awesome (and valid!!) way to insert any IE specific styles* into your code. You can specify styles for just IE6, just IE7 or for both. Not only that you can specifiy styles to affect all versions of IE below any version number. (*actually these conditionals can be used for anything that you want to display to IE specifically)
I’m a big fan of polaroid’s. I love the fact that you can snap a photo and the camera will spit out a photo for you instantly. I love the style so much in the new version of CSSgirl (to be released within the next two weeks!!!) has incorporated their style in the new design. I thought I’d share how I went about creating the image and the HTML/CSS behind it!
I’ve noticed a lot of sites have a very complicated way of styling the code samples they provide, using multiple span classes and/or inline styles and many, many <br />s. Other times the site just wraps the code in a <code> attribute and doesn’t highlight the different syntaxes.
I’ve written some simple CSS styles to fix this problem. So if you are interested in having your code display as if it was in a text editor with syntax highlighting here is an easy way to do it.
The first example is a sample of CSS code and how it can look when you apply these styles (***This is not the actual styles, just an EXAMPLE):
Anyone who blogs consistently knows how hard it is to come up with fresh content all the time. And when you do, it can take hours and hours to perfect that article before it’s ready to go live.
Say you work on a post relentlessly for two or three hours one day, and a few days later you go back, make your final edits and set it up to publish next Monday. And then the Friday before you see that someone else has gone and posted their spin on the exact same idea that you worked SO hard on.
You run into a fork in the road - do I publish my article as is no amendments? Do I delete it and cry over the hours of hard work? If I publish it are people going to think that I saw XYZ’s blog post and copied the idea? Do I include a link to XYZ’s post to show camaraderie?
I’ll be honest, when I have experienced this (and it happens at least once every other week to me!) I get so angry at myself. I kick myself when I’m down. I scold myself and question why didn’t I just post it when I first had the idea. Why did I put SO much work into it, and not publish right away. Than I usually sit on the post for a few weeks before I put it live, unless I think it’s really, really good and want feedback and to share it right away. A few times I have gone back and reworked the post to be a little bit different that what XYZ published and often included a link or reference to XYZ’s post as well.
What would you do?
