Since 2005 24 Ways have been brightening up those cold, dark, panic-filled days of Advent for us web designers with ‘24 Ways To Impress Your Friends’.
That is to say some 52 (and counting) web design tips and tricks from some of the greats, and none ‘Christmasize My Logo’ nonsense!
From the 1st;
PowncePress 0.2 is out. This, I think, is a whole lot better - with a Control Pane to change usernames, number of posts and styling.
PowncePress, a sidebar widget for Wordpress to display your latest public note, is available for download. Get it here, or alternatively, check out the Wordpress Plugin Page.
Version 0.2 // 27th November 07
PowncePress 0.2 is a significant improvement on the initial version, in the sense that it does more without having to hack the code, but there is still a lot to do. Improvements include an Options panel to configure username, surrounding tags, style and number of posts
An example can be found at commanddotcom.com and blog.linfographik.com
Thanks to Jeff Hodsdon for the Pownce PHP Library.
Edit: PowncePress is currently PHP5 only, due to the library used to parse XML from Pownce. I’ll have a solution to this in the next couple of days.
CSS Reset is something I have found myself regularly explaining to fellow developers. The concept is simple:
Each browser (or browser family) applies different default values to elements - be it page margins, heading sizes or whatever, meaning that even before you begin to add style to your markup, the pages will render differently under different browsers. Granted, they will render differently using this method, but it’s best to start with a blank page.
More often than not, when I am presented with someone else’s code, and it renders differently in Internet Explorer to Firefox, it is not a browser ‘bug’ - rather the default formatting kicking in. A common example of this is Lists, where one has been used to create a vertical navigation bar, and the developer has removed the list-style and it, just by pure luck, site perfectly within it’s container. However, IE may indent this list more than Firefox, and cause it to break out of position.
Because of the cascade, the value of zero can be passed to each element, over riding the browser’s defaults. Similarly, this can be overridden, later on in the document, with your own values. For example:
/* We remove the default border from image links */
a img, :link img, :visited img {
border: 0;
}
/* We apply a 1px border to image links within a specific element */
div#gallery a img {
border: 1px solid #333;
}
For this to work you will need to either write your own, or use someone else’s reset file (recommended) and include it before your own stylesheet (either pasting it at the top of your .css file, or link-ed before your .css file within your markup).
Eric Meyer writes about this subject in greater detail, and I can’t fault his ‘Reset Reloaded‘.
One thing that disappointed me about OSX was how reliant it is on the mouse, and I’m one of those people that hates my fingers leaving the keyboard. Usingmac.com have compiled an excellent list of Mac/Photoshop keyboard shortcuts, most of which I had no idea about.
Liverpool Music Scene at Wikipedia
Five Songs is a spin-off of a short lived blog I wrote.
Each posts contains the names of five songs, each connected by some tenuous link (“Five Songs Named After Real People”, for example). It gives me an excuse to listen to more records.
For those of you that only care about this, or don’t care about this at all, I’ll try and break this out into it’s own feed.
Aaron Harnly wrote a cool plugin to give mail.app vertical panes, a la Outlook. The Letterbox plugin only works in Tiger (OSX 10.4), however a Leopard version is on it’s way.
In the meantime you might want to check out Dan Harnett’s WideMail, which does the same thing, although I’m not sure it’s as nice as I remember Letterbox being. Just something I can’t put my finger on.
Anyway, enjoy.
I’ve not really enjoyed any of the recent Apple ‘Get a Mac’ adverts, but this one is quite imaginative.
Appletell have compiled a list of fifteen interesting Leopard hints and tricks.
It is certainly worth a look.
