CSS

I’ve spent a lot of hours over the past few weeks redoing the Caravan Beads website. Most of the structural work is done, I’m happy to say, so soon I’ll be able to concentrate on adding content and stop trying to brute force CSS into my aged brain.

My father, who died when I was 16, was an early-generation computer programmer. He was also a masters-level chess and bridge player and had the kind of brain that could program computers in machine language. At least I guess that’s what it was: he routinely brought home huge printouts that consisted solely of 011011010010110 kinds of stuff. Greek to me but he understood it. Wish he’d lived to see the modern computer age. The machines he used were pre-transistor dinosaurs that filled a building.

Anyway, I definitely did not inherit his skills. So the past few weeks have been moderately painful and I wouldn’t even rank myself as a CSS kindergardener yet. Fortunately there are lots of great websites one can learn from. Here are a couple of the ones I found useful:

For examples of liquid layouts that behave well when scaled up and down in size, Matthew James Taylor’s site was a good place to start.

For sheer amazing feats of CSS magic, Stu Nichols’ CSSPlay site is the place to visit.

And a couple of days ago I found this collection of CSS tools. Have only had time to glance at them but looks like a great resource. There are a bunch of other collections also. Just google “css tools” and you’ll have too many places to visit.

I’ve also gotten a lot of use out of BBEdit, CSSEdit, and a new program, Coda.