I’ve been quite busy with some other webbie things lately. That is by no means an excuse for not blogging here. I don’t write here much because I really can’t be arsed…I often find writing quite difficult. This is one of those times.

That is why what’s coming next may shock you…I’ve created two new blogs!

Photos

While in London I purchased a lovely new camera and have been happily snapping away. Thanks to flickr keeping all the shots in order is relatively simple. I do however find it a little (and only a very very little) frustrating that one can’t ‘favorite’ ones own photos in flickr. I’m finding that with the new equipment I’m ending up with quite a few shots that I particularly like. This is why I now have a photo blog. It’s a place for me to catalog the shots that I love. I’ll try to post 5 photos a week…weather permitting. I find it a lot easier to take a photo and upload it than to think of something to write about for this blog.
Have a look, leave a comment, take more photos!

Food

Along with all the photos there is also a lot of food! We love cooking! (Me particularly.) So Manda came up with a lovely idea - a dairy-free recipe blog. It’s Kai Time is a collection of of the recipes we use a lot. We’ve added star ratings so you-all can see how much we love each meal.

Have a look, leave a comment, cook more food!

• Prototype Dissected - snook.ca
  This is a visual representation of the prototype javascript library. It shows every method and property that is available in the latest version (1.5.0)
  (tags: javascript)
• Welcome to iRows - iRows
  Manage your data online, access it anywhere, anytime. Share your data with friends, family or the entire world. Display your data on any web site, change it here, and all sites change automatically, Compute, chart, and analyze your data online
  (tags: ajax webservices)

• Nz :: ZoomIn Maps
  With Zoom In you can discover things around you and explore interesting new places. This is just like google maps but for NZ
  (tags: ajax javascript new-zealand)

During the past 9 months or so I’ve been lucky enough to build quite a few CSS based websites. I learned quite a few things during these builds - from cool layout techniques to PNG24 IE hacks (dont ask). One thing I noticed during each of these builds was that I kept going back to previous builds to reuse bits of code I’d written before. That got tired real quick - so I decided to create a very basic yet robust CSS ‘framework’ (for lack of a better word).

So without further ado…here we go:

Three CSS Includes

My method uses 3 main style sheets per website. These should be included using the normal <link /> element.


<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="sitename" href="/css/style.css" media="screen" />


<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="sitename" href="/css/print.css" media="print" />


<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="sitename" href="/css/iehacks.css" />
< ![endif]-->


IEHACKS.CSS

The iehacks.css file is included using IE Conditional Comments. This is to ensure that the sites are future proofed (with the eminent release of IE7 this is quite important from a hacks management point of view). There should never be any IE hacks in the style.css file. This file should contain only valid css designed for compliant browsers.

PRINT.CSS

The print.css file will contain CSS used only for the printing of the website. Typically this file will hide the nav, BG images and any other non-printable stuff. Due to the very cool media=”print” attribute/value pair on the link element making PHP print versions of sites/pages is a thing of the past.

STYLE.CSS

The style.css file contains includes to other very generic CSS files as well as site specific CSS. A typical style.css file contains the following sections:

• Global Reset
  This is a seperate CSS file that removes the default padding and margins from all elements and applies a standard relative margin to li’s; p’s; blockquotes, etc.
• General Class styles
  This is a seperate CSS file containing generic classes like .center; .red; .bold, etc
• Forms
  This is a seperate file that contains styling used on all forms (NOTE: I generally do forms in one way, so I tend to resuse this CSS everywhere.)
• Accessibility goodies
  This is a seperate CSS file containing CSS that hides the accessibility elements from the visual design.
• Default Styles
  Inline CSS to control colours, sizes, etc of elements.
• The Look and Feel
  Inline CSS for the layout, position of elements

I would typically add my site specific CSS directly into the style.css file thus keeping the seperate CSS files as generic as possible. For your conveniance I’ve provided a zip file with all the CSS files included. This is very basic CSS so don’t expect this to be all the code you’ll ever need.

• -Eco-Organics-
  Organic fruit & veg delivery
  (tags: food organic delivery)
• Naturally Organic Limited Ltd. Categories
  Random Selection of Seasonal Produce
  (tags: food organic delivery)
• www.boxfresh.co.nz
  The home of organic delivery
  (tags: food organic delivery)