I wanted to share a CSS and webcomponent layout that I’ve been pretty happy with in a few projects. With webcomponents now widely supported, I was able to remove one of the last bit of inline scripts I had left in docket converting it to a webcomponent. The layout offers a layout with a 250px sidebar and content area.

A project I’m working on requires displaying small data driven sparkline charts. The data is a basic set of data showing activity over time.

Myself and the rest of the CakePHP team recently embarked on a journey to refresh and redesign the CakePHP website and brand. I wanted to delve into my process and thinking around the changes.

The cakephp.org website has been around for quite sometime. Its previous incarnation served the project amazingly well.

While working on tweaking a notification box design, I wanted to include the element’s heading in a folded ribbon element. I also wanted to avoid using any images and just use CSS. Mostly to try my hand at using generated content and some CSS that I don’t normally get to use.

Its been a few weeks of working in the evenings but its pretty much done. I’ve been wanting to do this redesign for a while now. 2 years ago when I built the version of this domain you’ve all come to know, I attempted to create a design that was different from other programming blogs, and fused my interests in both design and programming. I feel it turned out well.

Creating meaningful semantic HTML identifiers is something I always aim to do in my markup. I also thought this was something that other designers did as well. This past week I’ve found out just how wrong I was in that assumption.

I like many webdevelopers build a lot of forms. Forms are the bread and butter of web applications, and while making forms is getting easier for developers, users often still have a hard time with them. In these circumstances it is necessary to give them a help above and beyond ‘password’.

Indicating to the user which fields are required is something that increases usuability, helping the user fill out the form more effectively and efficiently. These visual cues have absolutely nothing to do with the structure of the document, and would best be handled by CSS.

All versions of Internet Explorer from 5.5 forward support CSS expressions. If you are not familiar with CSS expressions in IE, they are a powerful and non-standard way commonly used to plug the gaping and vast holes in IE’s CSS support.

I’ve been a bit out of the loop due to the awesome weather we’ve been having in toronto as of late. I’ve just read through Jonathan Snook’s article about CSS resets and how he doesn’t use them and while I can totally understand his position and how he is okay with browser variances and typographic quirks.

GeSHi or the Generic Syntax Highlighter is a simple yet powerful syntax highlighter for many languages. Implemented in many CMS. When I wanted syntax highlighting for my postings I decided to implement GeSHi. I wanted to share my implementation of GeSHi as a CakePHP helper.