PHP is a strange and (let’s get it over with) ugly, little language. It’s not exceptionally fast. It’s not beautiful syntactically. It’s not formulated around a clear opinion. And it’s still what I write a lot of software in. The obvious question is: why? Well, It’s EVERYWHERE… There are a lot of reasons to know […]
This week’s post is pretty technical—it’s only for users of Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets (Sass). I’m leaving. Before I go, what is Sass? Sass is a CSS preprocessor—a way to write your CSS stylesheets as if you were programming them, with variables, reusable mixins, and a lot else. I can’t recommend Sass highly enough—it literally made […]
The goal: Dynamic, equal heights Sometimes you’d like to have several elements that will all be the same height, no matter what content they have inside them. In other words: This is devilishly hard with straight CSS (if you’re not using tables, which you generally shouldn’t be for layout). But it’s pretty easy with JavaScript/jQuery. […]
“What’s an API?” is one of those questions that is really powerful, important, and interesting, but hadn’t crossed my mind in a while. Programmers talk about APIs all the time, and increasingly it’s a term that non-programmers will have heard at some point. But what exactly one is is a rich and interesting question. Application […]
A few thing are true about this topic. First, you can draw (make images) with PHP. Second, only a sadist would try to replace a Photoshop-like tool with any programming interface to a drawing tool. Third, the GD image library for drawing in PHP has many drawbacks. Those drawbacks are pretty significant, though some of […]
This is a follow-up to last week’s post about the CSS default box model. It’s a more in-depth technical discussion of the problem, and it describes the awesome alternative: box-sizing: border-box. What the CSS Box Model Is The CSS box model is the set of rules that decides how a CSS element’s sizes are computed […]
SCENE: A housing development. –Thanks for coming over. Are you the foreman for Constructing Stylish Sanctuaries, LLC? –Our name’s a mouthful. Just call us “CSS” for short. –Great. Well, as you can see, I’ve just bought this brand-new plot of land. It’s just green grass now, but soon it’ll contain my home, garage, and a […]
Metric time is one of those ideas I just naturally think about from time to time. Time is such a strange system: there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 365 days in (most) years, but not every fourth, but yes if it’s a multiple of […]
The Thanksgiving holiday is tomorrow in the US, and I thought it made sense to take some time to reflect on some of my favorite tools this year. Most of these are one’s I’ve used for a while and still love intensely. Some are new, but I imagine I’ll use them for years to come. […]
More than anything else, programming is built on top of the idea of enclosed and reusable functionality. While it is possible to write a working program without the ability to enclose and reuse functionality, it would be a painful process. Programming can seem like a complex and esoteric activity, but most parts of it are […]
Somewhat jokingly, when I shared last week’s post about using Markdown to our Facebook page I threw in a line about how Markdown should destroy Microsoft Word. While I don’t really hate Word, or any other tool in Microsoft’s Office suite, I think they’re almost never the best tool for a given job. And it […]
As I professed my fervent love for Markdown last week, I’ll spare you — go read why Markdown’s great if you haven’t — but to say that Markdown is a quick way to easily create all the niceties of HTML without having to deal with all the annoying traits of actually typing out HTML. The […]
