Articles by Alex Ball

Alex has been working in web design and development for over five years, and loves learning and expanding his skill set. A fan of CSS3 and HTML5, he also enjoys going old school with HTML (table) Emails.
CSS

Use Compass In Your Sass Projects

If you have started to dive into the wonderful world of CSS preprocessors (LESS or Sass), you might have also heard of Compass. If you haven't decided on either LESS or Sass, I would make the investment and learn one, or both, of the technologies. It's well worth the time and will make your coding and development life a lot easier. Today, we're going to look at Compass, an open-source CSS authoring framework built on Sass. Similar to Sass, it is installed via the command line (Terminal in Mac OS X) and is run...
RoR

Introduction to Sass, Part II

In my last post, I introduced Sass (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets) and getting Sass set up on your machine by installing Ruby, installing Sass, watching a file and compiling via Terminal. Now, we will look at a much simpler way to get set up with Sass. CodeKit. I'll be upfront, I'm a user of CodeKit and I recommend the software to any web developer who works in Sass, LESS, Compass, JavaScript, or any other web language, however neither I nor Developer Drive has any relationship (personal or financial)...
CSS

Introduction to Sass

I recently completed a seven part series on Learning LESS, and we had a lot of commenters who requested a similar series on Sass (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets). While there is a lot of discussion out there as to whether or not LESS or Sass is better, both have their place, both accomplish the same overall goal, and both can make your life (and your coding) much simpler and easier. What is Sass? ... Sass, which stands for Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets, is a "meta-language on top of CSS that’s...

Learning LESS: Put It Into Action

We'll finish our Learning LESS series today as we talk about putting your LESS into action on your web projects. Today's post will be slightly different than previous posts, as we won't really showcase new techniques and code examples as much as we'll talk about how to use LESS, projects you can work on to jump start your LESS development and more. Blog Series Roadmap ... An Introduction Using Variables Using Mixins Using Nested Rules Using Functions Divide and Conquer Put It Into Action Coding With...

Learning LESS: Divide and Conquer

We're getting to the end of our Learning LESS series, and this is one of the posts I'm most excited about. One of the best features of LESS is how modular and organized your code can be, and how it doesn't add much weight or calls to your live sites (if you compile locally with LESS.app, CodeKit or some other compiler). Blog Series Roadmap ... An Introduction Using Variables Using Mixins Using Nested Rules Using Functions Divide and Conquer Put It Into Action Grab a cup o' joe, your favorite text editor and...

Up and Running With Custom Post Types Part 2

In part one of our post Up and Running With Custom Post Types, we covered the concept behind WordPress's Custom Post Type feature, and how to get started by creating your own custom post type. We also covered ways to keep it modular by utilizing a separate PHP file, allowing you to port the post type from theme to theme. In this post, we'll cover creating Taxonomies for your custom post types, creating custom fields and meta boxes, saving your data and using it in your WordPress themes. Let's get rollin'!...
CSS

Learning LESS: Using Functions

We continue on our journey of Learning LESS today as we take a look at Nested Rules in LESS, which will help you write extremely clean code. If you haven't read our first three posts on the topic, check out the introduction, variables, mixins and nested rules posts. Blog Series Roadmap ... An Introduction Using Variables Using Mixins Using Nested Rules Using Functions Divide and Conquer Put It Into Action Time to get our hands dirty in some LESS functions, which will likely blow your mind that it...
CSS

Learning LESS: Nested Rules

We continue on our journey of Learning LESS today as we take a look at Nested Rules in LESS, which will help you write extremely clean code. If you haven't read our first three posts on the topic, check out Learning LESS: An Introduction, Learning LESS: Variables and Learning LESS: Mixins. Blog Series Roadmap ... An Introduction Using Variables Using Mixins Using Nested Rules Using Functions Divide and Conquer Put It Into Action Now we jump into Nested Rules, a topic that can be somewhat difficult...
Load more
Home CSS Deals DesignBombs HTML HTML5 JavaScript jQuery Miscellaneous Mobile MySQL News PHP Resources Security Snippet Tools Tutorial Web Development Web Services WordPress