If the results of your CSS designs are inspirational, don’t let speed slow down people seeing your work!

If you notice your style sheets are getting bloated, it may be time to stop and give it the code a good make over. With the following steps and your style sheet will be in shape in no time. Fortunately, there are some great online tools out there for cleaning and optimising  your CSS for you.

Web page analyser:

• Web page analyser – Find out how long your external CSS, JS files take to load

Find redundant CSS code:

• dustmeselectors – Dust-Me Selectors is a Firefox extension (for v1.5 or later) that finds unused CSS selectors.

Learn CSS shorthand:

• CSS shorthand cheatsheet

Optimise, clean up CSS:

• CleanCSS
• Tabifier Works for both HTML and CSS

Wordpress plugins:

• CSS compress

Learn more about CSS management at 456Berea Street.

A great resource of web 2.0 trends, emerging technologies, web code, web services and what you should be checking out are on podcasts.

Great if your job involves travelling, have a short break, on have a long flight on the way back from a conference!
It’s a great way to keep in touch with whats happening on and around the web. And a different way of learning compared to getting the lowdown from friends and followers on Twitter.

For those on a limited budget for training or self learning this is an excellent way of listening to leading industry experts share their knowledge and information for free!
(more…)

Without a doubt, the best CSS / XHTML training you can give yourself is pick up any of these books to learn about front end web development.

Most of the books involve learning and adapting web pages using CSS based layouts. Some are new, some are classics. I have learnt valuable tips on working practices for CSS management, color palette selection, and also layouts using CSS3.

Books like ‘Don’t make me think, and ‘Bulletproof..’ make you question ‘Why should I do it this way..?’. Then they cover alternatives you may not have considered. Some of these books are in their Second edition, a testament to how well they are written and deservedly gaining a place on any discerning geeks bookshelf.

(more…)

Having del.icio.us‘d this, I thought it would be good to highlight the number of tools to make your management of CSS easier.

A selection of tools to help you clean up your CSS and optimize it by reducing the number of empty lines in the code. However, bear in mind, this may make it very hard to follow when doing future updates to your CSS files.

One that I found useful is the CSS Redundancy Checker for checking larger CSS files and large web sites, it looks at any redundant code and repetitive code you may have. Especially if dealing with a large site that has code from previous layouts and styles. Again cleaning up the files, making leaner and cleaner.
Check them all out at: http://mashable.com/2007/09/25/css-toolbox/

Notes of the inaugural Scottish web conference organised by Alan White

An early start from Brighton to attend a conference in Edinburgh, with an interesting title. As Edinburgh is not in the highlands, but perhaps a great subtitle of progressive enhancement to attract us southerners to make the trip across the borders.

Aim of conference: The first Scottish conference based on progressive enhancement demonstrating what we can do today for tomorrow > learning the correct methods of web development > progressive enhancement of the web.

Photo of Jeremy Keith’s Secret Fling

(more…)

Whilst I was at the Highland Fling conference yesterday (report and notes to come after Easter Break), this site had dropped the CSS and proudly showed off its naked code, part of CSS naked day.

Of course this can be done anytime, by disabling the stylesheets and images in modern browsers, or using the firefox web developer toolbar, but delegates at the conference were reminded by Brothercake that people in Australia can only get phone line that give maximum of 14.4bps connection, resulting in browsing the web with a text only browser.

(more…)