I’ve explained before how to use CSS Sprites for changing images, so I won’t go into too many more details on how to accomplish this, but to recreate this for your own site you will need to create one sprite for your normal tab, hovered and current/active tab. That’s three sets of tabs in one file.

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Aardvark is a simple little Firefox plugin that when activated (right click and choose “Start Aardvark”) lets you highlight each elements on the page with a red border - not only that, a tab appears on the border with the element and id/class that is associated with it.

This plugin is critical for me (along with Firebug) when diagnosing layout problems.
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I was inspired to write this after seeing the funny Technorati maintenance page this morning:

Maintenance pages are important for many reasons, but one of the most important reasons is to make people remember to come back. If someone is visiting your site for the first time and you are currently working on your site and have placed it in maintenance mode typically you will replace your index with a page explaining the downtime and encouraging users to check back later (giving a specific time frame is good practice).
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I’m going to show two ways to create this effect using Photoshop (or the graphic editor of your choice) and HTML/CSS. There are other ways to create this effect using just CSS - but I really am not a big fan of it because it creates a lot more empty divs than this method. Yes if images are off you will lose this effect - but I’m willing to sacrifice that.

Like I said I’m going to demonstrate two ways to accomplish this. The first is using just a flat rounded corner image with no other effects. The second will have a box with a drop shadow, border and gradient. :) So let’s start easy!

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So the simple way to do this is as follows:
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I’m talking about free gradients, patterns, brushes, layer styles and more that you can download and add on to Photoshop.
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The benefits of CSS Sprites are plentiful, but you (and your visitors) will benefit from this method ten-fold. For the coder it’s less slicing and cropping of images, and for the user it rids us of that annoying image loading flash when you use CSS to replace background images.

I’ll take you through some quick steps to get started with CSS Sprites.

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IE Conditionals are an easy and awesome (and valid!!) way to insert any IE specific styles* into your code. You can specify styles for just IE6, just IE7 or for both. Not only that you can specifiy styles to affect all versions of IE below any version number. (*actually these conditionals can be used for anything that you want to display to IE specifically)
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So just because I feel bad I’ll throw out another (scaled down) sneak peak of the new design:

I’ve written some simple CSS styles to fix this problem. So if you are interested in having your code display as if it was in a text editor with syntax highlighting here is an easy way to do it.

The first example is a sample of CSS code and how it can look when you apply these styles (***This is not the actual styles, just an EXAMPLE):

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Say you work on a post relentlessly for two or three hours one day, and a few days later you go back, make your final edits and set it up to publish next Monday. And then the Friday before you see that someone else has gone and posted their spin on the exact same idea that you worked SO hard on.

You run into a fork in the road - do I publish my article as is no amendments? Do I delete it and cry over the hours of hard work? If I publish it are people going to think that I saw XYZ’s blog post and copied the idea? Do I include a link to XYZ’s post to show camaraderie?

I’ll be honest, when I have experienced this (and it happens at least once every other week to me!) I get so angry at myself. I kick myself when I’m down. I scold myself and question why didn’t I just post it when I first had the idea. Why did I put SO much work into it, and not publish right away. Than I usually sit on the post for a few weeks before I put it live, unless I think it’s really, really good and want feedback and to share it right away. A few times I have gone back and reworked the post to be a little bit different that what XYZ published and often included a link or reference to XYZ’s post as well.

What would you do?

So what do we really want in our Content Management Systems?

For myself I would love to see the following capabilities:

• Sweet templating system (a la Wordpress)
• Comments (preferably threaded, with an easy way to distinguish admins)
• Statistics built in (post views, exit points, referrers, # of subscriptions
• Kick ass spam management
• Easy image uploading (multiple images) - (haven’t used WP 2.5 yet to test their version of this)
• Category systems that allow you to better organize categories.
• Better back-end user interface (no winners: Movable Type, Wordpress, Joomla, Expression Engine, Textpattern, etc all fail in some points)
• Better draft and published posts editing panels
• Better documentation
• Multiple blog/site support

So, what do you want and/or need of your CMS? What doesn’t it do right now that you wish it did? What does it do, but you wish it did better?

Whether your looking for a color scheme to base your design on or you need a little help picking out complimentary colors the generators, articles, color wheels and more below will assist and inspire your color creativity.

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While the above in part is true, there is an integral difference between someone who is a flat out BAD coder and one who is just a bit on the lazy side. If you’re looking to hire a coder there is a few key ways to tell the difference.

How to spot a bad coder vs. lazy coder

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So, what’s your flaw? What do you think you need to work on? What elements in your design/code process do you wish you could do just a little bit better? And once you’ve defined that problem, how do you think you can make it better?

For each side of the web development process I want to improve one thing. From the design side, I want to broaden my “color imagination” and on the coding side I want to improve the readability of my source code for myself and other users.

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So, yesterday morning I logged onto my computer, opened up my twhirl to see who’s been updating their twitters, and found out I had been disconnected. Ok, no problem. Typed in my login information, tried again. I received an error, #2032, with the accompanying message “Sorry, could not log you in to twitter with that username and password.” Tried various times throughout the day with no success. This morning I received the same problem. I checked my connection, reset my password, rebooted and uninstalled/reinstalled twhirl. No go.

So, I went to the twhirl website, and searched their trac (help ticket center). And I found this ticket, chronicling users with similar problems. Low and behold I found my answer rather quickly after a simple search.

The problem was caused by Internet Explorer! Twhirl uses IE as a proxy to connect, and apparently somehow my IE changed itself to the “work offline” mode, causing twhirl not to connect.

So twhirl users if you suddenly receive this error message and your sure that your password is correct open up IE, goto the File menu and make sure that the “Work Offline” (located right above Close) item is NOT checked.

And let’s hope in future versions of twhirl their error reporting will be a little more intelligent so that it can detect that you are not connected and print that error message instead of saying the username/password isn’t correct.

Extreme asian lady boys and hot asian luv. Methinks we have some very bored young men this morning who are interested in asian tranny porn…

Well, actually google trends are always interesting…

So I have designed several CSSgirl versions since the end of 2006. And now almost two years later (!) I have finally ALMOST finished the new design, and I’m going to share a small sneak peak.

The new CSSgirl is slated to debut May 1st. I know! That’s insane and probably not going to happen, but I will work my hardest to push it out, but I will not neglect anything this time, like with this design.

I’m downloading my copy right now, and while I’m a little bit hesitant, will be uploading it ASAP.

But, really, as silly as it may sound, I’m most excited about the new WordPress.org design. I don’t even know where to start about how vast an improvement this is over the previous design, which like WordPress, was very simple, very sparse. The new version isn’t guady, isn’t overbearing, but just is the perfect fit for WordPress. Simple and elegant. I believe that Happy Cog was the firm behind the new design of both WordPress.org and the new WordPress administration panel. Thanks to Jamie for pointing out that Matt Thomas was the one who worked on the design for the .org site! I swear I read that Happy Cog and Wordpress were working together on the WP site, but I was wrong!

Old Wordpress.org	New Wordpress.org

The things I can’t wait to test are the multi-file uploading (great for blogs who’s posts often contain several photos/images), tag management, galleries!, and of course the much talked about new administration panel. Well, I’m too excited to wait much longer, so I’m going to install and hope I don’t kill my blog :P

These three were my entries:

I wish I could find more contests and challenges like this so I can really exercise my creativity and push myself!

PS: I would have posted this in a timely matter a week ago, but unfortunately my Wordpress wasn’t working correctly due to an update by my host. Thankfully we’re back to normal, and finally using the most recent WP release!

Nothing new. Haven’t updated nor changed anything. Haven’t tried to publish anything until this Sunday. Last article was on the 9th.

Any ideas out there?

It started out great. You were there for me when I needed you. You provided me with experiences so memorable and fun… but I’m sorry… this just isn’t going to work… I thought this little list might help you out in your next RSS relationship.

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I’m back to work, and have some really great posts drafted up that hopefully will be as useful as the 34 Insanely Useful Wordpress Plugins for Admins

And bonus? I have an exciting new project I will be launching in the next month or two that I hope everyone will enjoy! Stay tuned for that.