studionashvegas | design and social media

So am I.  I  make changes a lot live on the server (using the Web Dev Toolbar), and I have to hard-refresh every time I make a change.  Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it cuts down on valuable time that could be done… well, not refreshing a page.  There is a way; versioning your CSS file.  The upside: it makes changes go live automatically without having to clear the cache.  The downside: it’s difficult to do, because the correct way to do it is by adding v=XXX manually every time you make changes.

Unless… you can find a way to do it automatically.  And Mark Jaquith has done just that.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/style.css?v=<?php echo filemtime(TEMPLATEPATH . '/style.css'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" />

So what does the ‘filemtime’ function do?  From the PHP website:

This function returns the time when the data blocks of a file were being written to, that is, the time when the content of the file was changed.

So everytime you change the file, the new change time gets parsed in using PHP and you’re able to have a new version every time.

Thanks to Mark for this great (and really clever) tip!

Using images on a design is pretty well necessary in today’s visually stunning web.  However, while images look great, there’s no substitute for text when it comes to Search Engine Optimization.  But is there a way to get the visual effect of an image while still having the SEO benefits of text?

With CSS, there absolutely is.

(more…)

I’ve recently discovered a nice way to standardize the view I get between Internet Explorer and Firefox, which have a standard “stylesheet” built in to render websites.  The problem: both browsers use a different stylesheet, which can lead to inconsistancies between the same site on different browsers.

So, I’ve adopted a “CSS Reset” file.  What it does is basically clean the slate and neutralize the styles embedded into the browser, thus rendering IE and Firefox to a 90-99 percent similarity when viewing a page (there will always be bugs in IE’s website rendering, but for the most part pages show up fantasically).

The CSS Reset:

body,div,dl,dt,dd,ul,ol,li,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,pre,form,fieldset,input,textarea,p,blockquote,th,td {
	margin:0;
	padding:0;
}
table {
	border-collapse:collapse;
	border-spacing:0;
}
fieldset,img {
	border:0;
}
address,caption,cite,code,dfn,em,strong,th,var {
	font-style:normal;
	font-weight:normal;
}
ol,ul {
	list-style:none;
}
caption,th {
	text-align:left;
}
h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
	font-size:100%;
	font-weight:normal;
}
q:before,q:after {
	content:'';
}
abbr,acronym { border:0;
}

This is the Yahoo! UI Library Reset.css file, for those that care.