Breaking the 200+ unique visitors a day!

233 unique visitors On Wednesday I had 233 unique visitors! It’s a great feeling. That’s the best number I have got in my short blogging career so far. It’s nothing breathtaking but it really motivates me to write more quality content. Not that the CSS Debugging Tips (posting this on dzone caused it) was some masterpiece, but there are surely people that profit from reading it. So thanks everybody and off I go to write something worthy 🙂

Books I read recently

I would like to share some great books I have read recently or I am reading right now. If you have something to do with the subjects mentioned here I definitely recommend these.

PHP 5 Power Programming

PHP 5 Power Programming You think you know PHP? Maybe after reading this book you’ll change your mind. This is an extensive journey trough PHP 5 written by the people who know it best. There are a lot of useful code examples and the whole thing is quite amusing to read. The book passes 1 Million downloads so far and they estimate that 1 in 5 PHP developers have this book. Not convinced yet?

Code Complete (second edition)

Code Complete Everyone who ever touched some production code should have this one. This book covers everything from application design to naming conventions. Every page offers pragmatic insight gained through years of effective coding experience and continues to be the principal handbook of software construction success for its practitioners. Project leaders should read this book cover to cover, and then purchase a copy for each of their direct reports. You probably have at least heard of it. This is a must.

The Zen of CSS Design

Zen of CSS Design Another bestseller. For everyone who does web design. The last chapter really nails it. The CSS development of 5 designs from CSS Zen Garden is explained here step by step. I learned a lot from this one.

iBox

Ahmed Farooq saw my posts about Ligthbox and ThickBox image displaying solutions and send me an email that he develops something similar which is definitely worth mentioning.

iBox weights just 11 kb and supports image displaying and various other types of content, like HTML code. It has got a few useful configuration options that you can embed directly into the links. One big advantage is that the script is self-contained, so it would not conflict with other libraries you might include.

So if you want to say goodbye to the old school JavaScript pop-up windows, you have plenty of alternatives to choose from. Lightbox started it all, ThickBox is my personal favorite and iBox has the potential to outrun them both. Try them all and choose one that best suits your project.

Update (May 2015): Links removed, as they no longer work 🙁

CSS Debugging Tips

If you have some experience with CSS layouts you probably know the feeling of hopelessness when you are staring at some box overlapping something it shouldn’t and so on. You tried dozens of possible rules combinations that came to your mind but nothing helps.

Over time I gathered some simple techniques that help me to deal with CSS problems much easier and straightforward. If you aren’t new to web design you for sure know or use some of them.

Proper tools

First you should have the proper tools that will help you with common tasks like validating your document: Everybody knows Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox. Then there is the Web Developer Toolbar for Opera and one for Internet Explorer from the IE team too. Since you should test your pages in all of these browsers (at least on Windows platform) it’s good to have the same functionality in all of them.

Recently a browser called Swift has been released. It’s based on the WebKit rendering engine which Safari on Mac uses. This is invaluable for testing your sites on your Windows box. So go ahead, download it and start testing your pages with it too.

What can you do in your stylesheets

Let’s start with some tips. Note that you are not going to delete the actual styles for the area you are working on. You just add these to determine where exactly the problem lies. The big advantage here is that you can determine the error quickly.

Outline them all

html body #something * {
border: 1px solid Red;
}

Using the border rule with * Add a border (of your favorite color) to all the elements nested in #something. Note you are using such a specific selector that this style will overwrite all the other ones. This quickly gives you an understanding of what exactly are the sizes and positions of all the elements in the area. From my experience with this you can reveal like 80% of all the problems. Just don’t forget to remove it when fine tuning. Remember border adds to the resulting width of the element.

No margins please

html body #something * {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

This is invaluable when you think you have some padding or margin doing mess in your layout (and this is a very common problem). It resets the margins and paddings to 0 in all the elements nested in #something. If the problem does not disappear you know the margins and paddings are not the cause and you should look elsewhere.

As you can see the universal selector * is very useful. You can reset any setting like this across the desired area. With this technique you identify the rule which is causing problems in no time. Then you can take the proper action.

More Than Fest 2006

MTF 2006 Tomorrow I am leaving for More Than Fest at Ružiná, Slovakia. This will probably be the biggest metal meeting to date in this country. It will be crazy 🙂 Maybe I will make some photos with my ultra great cell phone camera. I will be there for three nights, we will sleep in a tent. Hope the weather will not disappoint us.

Regarding the bands, I am looking forward to Gamma Ray and Behemoth. I saw Gamma Ray 3 times to date and I always had a great time. Behemoth is currently one of the best known Poland metal bands. I hope we will see why.

Here comes the ThickBox

I found even better solution for displaying images than Lightbox. It’s called ThickBox, it’s build on jQuery library, together they have only 27 Kb and does a few things that Lightbox can’t. It automaticaly resizes the image based on the resolution, can display any HTML content, so it can be used not just for images. All around it’s much better.

The jQuery library alone looks promising. It’s very small and the idea behind looks fun. I am planning to use it on one of my AJAX projects. I’ll report my experiences with it.

New design is done!

I deployed the new design for my blog. I was aiming for a clean, easy on eyes and foremost usable one. I am quite happy with it. There is still some work to be done but basicaly it’s finished. How do you like it? I plan to distribute this as a WordPress theme (with a few modifications).

With the new design comes one big change — I am going to write this blog in english from now on. The goal is simple. I want my blog to be as much popular as possible.