Elf Sternberg
Done, and gets things smart.
Archive for the ‘Design’ Category
There are moments when the lightbulb goes off in your head with the power of a thousand white-hot suns. For me, it happened while I was reading the WordPress Database Schema back to back with Henri Bergius’s highly influentials (well, it was a Hell of an influence on me, at any rate) Decoupling Content Management. Take a close [...]
I have to say that I’m really disappointed with .net magazine this month. .Net is a popular magazine for web designer and developers, and frequently has great articles and tutorials. For someone in my class of developer it’s not always that useful, but there’s always one or two tutorials worth perusing– and reading the tutorials [...]
I read today about a recall of birth control pills. The detail that caught my attention was this: Blister packs of the birth control pills were rotated 180 degrees, which reverses the weekly tablet distribution. This packaging error could cause women to take pills in the incorrect order and could lead to unintended pregnancy. I suspect this [...]
I was having a discussion the other day with a PHP developer, helping him architect a gamification layer for a website he owned. He had this ridiculously broad table of everything the user could earn, and I winced and said, “What if you want to add a new badge?” He hemmed and hawed and allowed [...]
One of the things I like to use with CSS is percentages. Often, this goes a bit over the top; right now, I have a two column layout that looks something like this: .leftcolumn { float: left; width: 22.340425%; margin-right: 1.06382%; overflow: hidden; } .rightcolumn { float: left; width: 76.59574%; margin-right: 0; } Which is [...]
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- Tags: css, drag, drop, droptarget, jquery, width
28Apr
LessCSS color controls, mixins, and absolutely consistent gradients with CSS3
Posted by Elf Sternberg as Design, web development
I love LessCSS, because it allows me to write CSS as code, with consistent thinking throughout. Today, I’m going to show you how to have button-shaped anchors with consistent gradients throughout your page, using the color scheme you’ve initially chosen. LessCSS allows you to have parameterized mixins, small blocks of CSS that you can easily [...]
I learned an important lesson today: never put on hold a book from the library that’s already listed on the shelves. Just go get it. If it’s on hold, they’ll take it off the shelves and put it “into the system,” which means you won’t actually be able to get it for 24 hours. I [...]
Recently, I had the pleasure of attending another of those Seattle Django meet-ups. This one was a potpourri event, just people talking about what they knew and how they knew it. I revealed that I’d written my first aggregator, and that seemed to be an impressive statement. Apparently Django Aggregators (database conditionals that perform sub-selected summarizing or [...]
And while we’re on the topic of helping users discover the rest of your website, I can’t help but recommend Lisa and Jonathan Price’s Hot Text, a fabulous book thick with examples on how to shorten, tighten, punch-up, clarify and atomize your documentation so that it’s easier to use and re-use in different contexts such [...]
I love being able to combine one of my favorite design techniques with my latest infatuation. It makes my hair tingle. “Gamification,” as any buzzword-compliant high-priced consultant will tell you, is the process of adding game mechanics to a website in the desperate hope that trivial reward mechanisms– badges, stickers, and made-up titles straight out [...]
Recent Entries
- Querying Splunk with Clojure
- Returning to Coffeescript, and having a good time
- An "Ah-hah!" moment
- Post-Project Blues
- Latest project: Tumble, a parser/renderer for a Tumblr-like templating language
- I gave a lightning talk!
- A Wordpress Plug-In: Illustrated Recent Posts
- Projects I will never finish.
- Making peace with your partner, when you share an office
- GitHub is the new resume, and you don't have to be a God of Programming for it to work
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