WordPress and other CMS’ like it have taught us well that not every site needs to be dynamic. In fact, it can be hell on the server. So, just about every decent coder out there has taken a stab at making a static site generator. This is a good thing. If they keep this up, we may one day have one that’s user-friendly. For now, they are decidedly developer-centric, and somewhat experimental. At this stage, they are fascinating. Today’s offering is the appropriately named Middleman, and it’s built...
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...
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)...
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...
Ruby on Rails became a popular web application framework because of how easy it promotes the rapid prototyping methodology used by web developers in rapid development. Of course, being an open source project also helped Ruby on Rails establish itself as one of the most popular web development tools as well. New developers often get caught up working with PHP over Ruby on Rails because so many applications are built using the PHP language like WordPress, Joomla, Wikipedia and others. Because of its...