MHunt Design » Web Development

Web Design Resources: December 4th

admin — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 15:42:18 +0000

My latest delicious bookmarks related to web design, development, drupal, wordpress, seo, freelance, design, typography, css, jquery and the list goes on…

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How to Create Books in Coda

admin — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:03:27 +0000

Coda allows you to add reference books under the ‘Books’ tab.

More information on adding books to Coda:

5 ways to optimize the performance and speed of your website

admin — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 04:52:37 +0000

1. Improve your performance with YSlow

http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Yslow grades the performance of your site based on 3 rulesets. The criteria includes http requests, gzip compression, javascript placement at bottom, css expressions, dns lookups, minifying css and javascript, url redirects, 404 errors and more.
With Yslow you can figure out what is holding up the page from loading up fast. I typically check under components to see if there are any 404s for files called.

2. Compress Images with Smushit

http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/smushit/

Compress images even further than saving for web in photoshop with Smushit.

3. Place Javascript at the bottom of your html document

Javascript calls at the bottom allow the page to load without having to wait until the javascript is loaded.

4. Compress CSS and JS Files

http://www.cssoptimiser.com/

http://www.cleancss.com/

http://javascriptcompressor.com/

5. Use CSS Sprites

The concept of css sprites is to combine multiple images into one and using background-position in your css to display only certain images.

See How to use CSS Sprites: http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/

Video: Exactly How to use CSS Sprites: http://net.tutsplus.com/videos/screencasts/exactly-how-to-use-css-sprites/

Dave Shea explains CSS Sprites: http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2009/01/27/sprite_optim/

How to create a custom Apple iPad/iPhone Home screen icon for your Website

How to get PHP errors to show up in MAMP

admin — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 22:55:12 +0000

If your installation of MAMP does not show php errors, you may need to change a setting in your php.ini file. You can find this file in MAMP > conf > php5 > php.ini

Look for “display_errors = Off” and change to “display_errors = On”

After that you should restart your apache and mysql servers.

Why min-width and maximum-width hacks blow up in IE6

admin — Fri, 15 May 2009 00:14:05 +0000

There are many hacks for ie6 to get the css properties min-width and maximum-width to work. Granted these hacks work. But what I can’t seem to find is a solution that doesn’t freeze the browser when you try to resize it. It’s been years and the problem sis still present. It doesn’t matter if you follow these instructions: “This important step is frequently omitted from many min/max-width tutorials, and is required to prevent Internet Explorer from freezing up and crashing.” – Perishable Press It will still crash when you follow those instructions and try to resize the window by stretching it.

Granted windows users are used to full screen, but its not always acceptable to have that instability.

Some Examples of these ie6 min-max hacks:

A Javascript Solution:


window.onload = checkAvailableWidth;
window.onresize = checkAvailableWidth;
function checkAvailableWidth(){
var container = document.getElementById("page");
container.style.width = (document.body.clientWidth < 959)? "959px" : "auto";
}

http://robertnyman.com/2007/11/13/stop-using-poor-performance-css-expressions-use-javascript-instead/

CSS Expressions:

The more common hack fom Andy Budd’s CSS mastery: http://www.cameronmoll.com/archives/000892.html

#container, #footer {
	width: expression(document.body.clientWidth < 742? "740px" : document.body.clientWidth > 1202? "1200px" : "auto");
	}

Philadelphia Web Design, WordPress and Drupal CMS Development 09-12-11 – 09-13-11