HTML can feel unwieldy and inefficient to edit. There are lots of great tools and alternate syntaxes that make this easier… but who wants to set up a whole framework and all the dependancies that come with that just to be more efficient. With a basic Vim command and the surround plugin you can greatly increase your productivity traversing and manipulating tags.
Say, for instance, you have:
I recently competed in UnmatchedStyle’s CSSOff competition where frontend developers each took a crack at marking up the same Photoshop document. Submissions are to be judged based on a list of parameters including: semantics, resource optimization, legacy browser support and general code cleanliness. We were encouraged to use HTML5 and tasked to support browsers as old as IE6. Here are some observations I made during and since the competition.
Susy looks to be a very nice tool for making cleanly marked-up grid-based sites. It’s one of the many new compass plugins that are floating about these days. It doesn’t claim to be an out of the box layout, and that’s what makes it such a strong candidate for a real life solution.
I was frustrated with the lack of a way to easily make nice tabs quickly for practicing guitar, so I spent a couple of hours thinking about a nice way to mark up chords as html. I decided to share what I came up with so far in this demo.
Currently, the plan is to write a compass plugin fairly soon to make it easy for anyone to display chords and tabs. I’ll share more of the process as I go along. I’d love any feedback you have on my approach.
I really want to like SASS, I have tried to pick it up a couple of times. Granted, each time I have played with it thus far, has been a fairly short interval. My most recent forray with it underscored why I think it hasn’t quite stuck with me yet. My markup/coding conventions seem to inherently solve most of the issues that SASS tackles.
I just finished the first day of a three day course I’m taking on WPF. I have looked at it briefly from time to time, but this is the first real attempt at picking up the skill. If you’re not familiar with WPF it is a relatively new way of writing user interfaces for .NET apps. I’m hoping that with a stronger understanding WPF, I’ll be better equipped to both design desktop apps.
I recently resolved a server performance issue. Here’s a recap of what I went through in hopes you find it useful. I’m running Ubuntu on the smallest Rackspace Cloud Server available (too much foreshadow?). The server has 256MB of ram and it’s sole purpose is to run Drupal on Apache. I have set up a few servers in the past, but I do not claim to be an expert. This recent problem had me stumped for a while.
I have been using Drupal for projects here and there for 5 years. Really, once I found Drupal I haven’t looked back… much. At the time I was using Mambo, and there was no easy way (or, at least I didn’t know how) to override modules to make completely table-less layouts. This coupling of markup and functionality drove me to look elsewhere. I love Wordpress, and would recommend it for anyone wanting to set up a blog. However, if you are need a customizable platform for handling different kinds of content, I found it lacking in a handful of places.
On multiple occasions the topic of “Where to start” with web design has come up. There are many blogs out there covering the topic of web design/ frontend development, here is a good start to creating the ultimate web design bookshelf.
I just attended a Social Media Club Meeting where David Hinds gave a lecture titled “How to Grow Vibrant Virtual Communities”. Hinds has definitely spent some time thinking about social behavior on the web and some of the things he said really got me thinking. I’m not sure how often he presents, but if you get an opportunity to hear what he has to say on the subject, I would recommend giving him your ear (especially if you are new to the subject). Just be sure to think critically.