• Choosing Link Partners
• 5 Elements of a winning SEM strategy
• Maximize your paid advertisements with Google
• and a two part series, Tools of the Trade, Part I , and Part II

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This is not an attempt to create a mega list of tools for CSS developers; only few but really useful tools have been selected and placed under appropriate categories. If you see that a really useful tool has been missed, please feel free to share the link in comments.

Note that for a tool to be really useful, it also needs to provide easy to follow instructions and user friendly interface unless it is really straight forward. Unfortunately several tools listed in this list may not fulfill this criteria. If you are aware of another tool that is more user friendly and feature rich than one of the  listed tools, please let us know and we may replace it with an existing tool.

Layouts

• CSS Layout Generator
  This generator will create a fluid or fixed width floated column layout, with up to 3 columns and with header and footer. Values can be specified in either pixels, ems or percentages.
• Grid Designer
  Generates fixed and scalable grid layouts along with basic reset and typography.
• Layout Generators
  Generate multi-column and grid layouts with CSS techniques using %, px, or em.

CSS Frameworks

• Boks
  Boks is an Visual Editor for Blueprint CSS Framework; It allows you visually setup a grid and baseline rhythm, build and fill your layout and export all this to HTML and CSS. Boks is an Adobe AIR application, which means it will works on Windows, Mac and Linux.
• Useful Tools & Resources For Blueprint CSS Framework
• YAML Builder
  YAML Builder is an online tool for visually creating YAML-based CSS layouts.
• YUI CSS Grid Builder
• 960 Grid System – Variable Grid System
  Based on the 960 Grid System; the variable grid system is a quick way to generate an underlying CSS grid for your site.
• Grid System Generator
  The grid system generator will create fixed grid systems based on 960 Grid System in valid css / xhtml for rapid prototyping, development and production environments.

Fonts

• Typetester
  The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen.
• CSS Type Set
• TypeChart
  Lets you flip through, preview and compare web typography while retrieving the CSS
• CSS-Typoset Matrix and Code Generator
• CSStxt
  Tool for generating CSS for web typography.
• EM Calculator AIR Application
  Calculator for Vertical Rhythm in XHTML & CSS; easily convert px to em based on base font-size and line-height; Padding and margins automatically calculated
• Em Calculator
  Em Calculator is a small JavaScript tool which helps making scalable and accessible CSS design. It converts size in pixels to relative em units, which are based on a text size.
• PXtoEM

Colors

• CSS Color Editor
  CSS Color Editor allows you to replace the color scheme of your website without going through the entire CSS file. You choose your local CSS file, select new colors and then download the new CSS file with new color codes automatically replaced for you.
• Color Palette Generator
  Upload an image to generate a color palette based on the image’s primary colors. Useful for quickly grabbing a particular color within an image for inspiration.
• Color Contrast Check
  The Color Contrast Check Tool allows to specify a foreground and a background color and determine if they provide enough of a contrast “when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen”.

Sprites

• CSS Sprite Generator
  CSS Sprite Generator will combine the uploaded images into a single sprite and generate the CSS for you.
• YASC (Yet Another Sprite Creator)
  This tools is useful when all your sprite images have been created in a single file. The process is fairly straight forward: you upload this file, then visually select each individual item and specify its CSS id; once you have selected all your sprites you can generate all the required CSS  with a single click.
• SmartSprites
  SmartSprites is Java command line utility that will let you easily introduce and maintain CSS sprites in your designs. SmartSprites parses special directives you can insert into your original CSS to mark individual images to be turned into sprites. It then builds sprite images from the collected images and automatically inserts the required CSS properties into your style sheet, so that the sprites are used instead of the individual images.

Forms

• Accessible Form Builder
  Create accessible form with CSS or table layout, including all label elements simply by typing a list of fields that you need.
• Wufoo
  Wufoo is an online service that allows anybody to easily build great looking online forms. You can use Wufoo as an easy way to create good-looking, valid CSS/XHTML form markup. It allows you to use your account to design and download the markup and CSS for FREE.

UI Components

• List-o-Matic
  Create CSS-styled navigation blocks based on unordered list <li> items. Get your semantics on!
• CSS Menu Generator
  Generates horizontal, vertical & dropdown CSS menus
• ThemeRoller
  ThemeRoller allows you to design custom jQuery UI themes for tight integration in your projects.

Text Wrappers

• CSS Text Wrapper
  Generates HTML/CSS to wrap content to any shape
• The Box Office
  The Box Office lets you wrap/float/contour text around freeform images using CSS for usage in HTML pages.

Analysis & Debugging

• W3C CSS Validation Service
• CSS Analyzer
  CSS Analyzer checks the validity of your CSS against the W3C’s validation service, along with a color contrast test, and a test to ensure that relevant sizes are specified in relative units of measurement.
• Firebug
  One of the post popular web developer tool – Firebug is a Firefox add-on that allows you to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. You can use Firebug Lite in IE, Opera, and Safari.

Maintenance

• Dust-Me Selectors
  Dust-Me Selectors is a Firefox extension that finds unused CSS selectors
• CssCleaner
  Windows desktop application that removes unused CSS Classes from your web application
• CSS Redundancy Checker
  Use this tool to find CSS selectors that aren’t used by any of your HTML files and may be redundant.

Optimization

• CSS Drive CSS Compressor
  Normal mode allows you to choose from three levels of compression, depending on how legible you want the compressed CSS to be versus degree of compression. You can switch to Advanced mode for greater customization.
• Robson CSS Compressor
  A good CSS Compressor still in development.
• MinifyMe – AIR Application
  Adobe AIR application that allows you pack multiple files together.

Formatting

• CleanCSS – CSS Formatter and Optimizer
  This tool comes with several options for formatting as well as optimization. It also provides ready made sets of options for various level of balances between optimization and readability.  Important feature includes ability to automatically merged the same selectors and properties.
• Styleneat
  It organizes and standardizes your CSS – selectors, sub-selectors and properties – in a structure that makes it easier to define page areas and see how they relate to each other.
• CSS Toolbox
  Free CSS Validation, CSS Formatter, CSS Compressor

Browser Specific

• Conditional-CSS
  Conditional-CSS allows you to write maintainable CSS with conditional logic to target specific CSS statements at both individual browsers and groups of browsers. Compilers for Conditional-CSS are available in PHP, C# and C.
• Litmus
  Litmus shows you exactly how your designs look on various platform, across every popular web browser.
• Web Browser CSS Support
  Detailed information about CSS support in major web browsers, allows you to pick which browser appear on the information tables.
• When Can I Use?
  Compatibility tables for features in HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other upcoming web technologies. Allows you to specify browsers, features, time period,  status, search and sorting options.
• IE7.js
  IE7 is a JavaScript library to make Microsoft Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6.

Cheat Sheets

• CSS Cheat Sheet
  The CSS cheat sheet is a one-page reference sheet, listing all selectors and properties. It includes a visual example of the box model, unit reference for CSS units and the various media types CSS makes allowance for.
• CSS Shorthand Cheat Sheet
• YUI Library: CSS Reset, Base, Fonts, and Grids
• Blueprint CSS Cheat Sheet

via List of Really Useful Tools for CSS Developers | W3Avenue .

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Problem

I needed to add the post picture stored in a custom field to my header only on the post when its called.

Information

If you guys are already familiar with wordpress in any sort of way then you will know that the single.php will handle any calls of your posts. but it also handles categories or groups of posts that are called.

Hypothesis

My hypothesis was that i could run an if statement that would test and see if it was using single.php and if it was in the specific category i want the picture applied to (in my case the only categorized with post pictures is my blog).

my statement was something like this

<php if (is_single() && in_category(‘blog’))
echo ‘content ‘;
} ?>

Solution

Although my initial hypothesis was nearly correct or at least the logic was correct it wasn’t working for some reason, the wordpress template tag for in_category was pulling no results at any time. And I believe this was because this statement was completely out of the loop being in the header and all it didn’t quite know what post it was suppose to call to be in a category or not. Any ways after trying to take a nap later that day the simple solution came to me and ended up as such.

<?php if (is_single()) {
if (!is_category()) {
echo ‘content’;
}
} ?>

Instead of testing if it’s in a category I only needed to test to see if it was displaying a category page or not, This would eliminate my border on category pages, but keep them on all my post pages, the next and last step would be to create a default image for the categories where there is no post image. Ill post on this later.

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The series will be separated into days, starting with day two… ok lets get started.

Day 2 : WordPress Admin panel.

Introduction

In our video here we quickly reviewed all the necessaries that we would be using in order to use and edit our new WordPress install. He quickly went over the WordPress file structure. The necessary changes that needed to be made to the wp-config.php file when we upload, and the location of our all important theme files.

www.example.com/wp-content/themes/theme1

Body

Moving on through the video the main bulk of this video was getting the understanding of the different template files in your wordpress theme, what they do and how they work, so lets move through a few of them.

As described in our video if we go to APPEARANCE | EDITOR we will be able to see all the template files included in the wordpress theme currently activated.

If we start by importance usualy index.php would come to mind in a wordpress site. We can see there’s no doctypes or much html data in our file at all, but rather many simple php requests to header and footer and sidebar etc.. These are essentially statements that calls in those files from you directory. So header.

In our header.php we find our doctypes and titles tags and start of our html elements. This is loaded at the top of every page or post that calls get_header(). Pretty easy to understand.

Similarly our files typically end with out get_footer() call and our footer.php contains all the closing tags for information contained within our document.

Single.php – used for individual post pages.

404.php – used when a page within your wordpress blog cannot be found.

Sidebar -  calls widgets and other custom information into the 1 or more sidebars in your wordpress theme.

Conclusion

After looking through and familiarizing yourself with the themes directory withing your wordpress install you should be able to identify the different files and what they more or less accomplish. With this basic knowledge we will be able to simply identify where and what files we need to be editing in the future while we move on to developing our own theme, in the new few videos.

If you’re having problems understand the videos or information please comment and we will see if we can help you out.

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Automatically Retrieve The First Image From Posts On Your Home Page

The problem . Many WordPress users use custom fields to display a thumbnail on their blog home page. Of course, this is a nice solution, but how about automatically retrieving the first image from a post and using it as a thumbnail?

The solution . This hack is quite easy to implement:

1. Open the functions.php file in your theme.
2. Paste this code in. Don’t forget to specify a default image on line 10 in case a post of yours does not have an image.function catch_that_image {
   global $post, $posts;
   $first_img = ”;
   ob_start;
   ob_end_clean;
   $output = preg_match_all’//i’, $post->post_content, $matches;
   $first_img = $matches [1] [0];
   ifempty$first_img{ //Defines a default image
   $first_img = "/images/default.jpg";
   }
   return $first_img;
3. Save the functions.php file.
4. On your blog home page index.php, call the function this way to get the URL of the first image from the post:

<?php echo catch_that_image() ?>

Code explanation . The function uses the global variable $post to parse the post’s content with a regular expression. If an image is found, its URL is returned by the function. If not, the default image URL is returned.

via 10 Exceptional WordPress Hacks | Developer’s Toolbox | Smashing Magazine .

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First SEO Quake found at seoquake.com

Seo quake is both for Firefox and IE, and its primary function in is to help quantitatively define the information presented on a website or page being viewed. The main feature I would point you guys too is the keyword density ability, basically it can read through your pages and find out how many times a word or group of words appears on your site. VERY HANDY if your going for SEO optimizations this is a must, try and get your good key words between 5-20 density for maximum effect on your home page.

Next we have the all powerful Developers toolbar from Chris Derick

The toolbar can be downloaded from addons.mozilla.org

Developers tool bar is a multifunction toolbar allowing users to view style information, edit css, outline styles, edit their browsers width and height and so much more. Just with those key features makes the developers toolbar the #1 Firefox extension any kind of web personnel should have. Being able to specifically target a browsers width and height is something I think we all have had to do at a specific time, and with 2 clicks boom you can view the site in that exact resolution.

Being able to edit css on the fly even on another website and save it off also a helpful or potentially a time saving feature. and of course most praised feature in my opinion is the ability to highlight hovered objects, and see their css roots. See what div, what class and what id they came from, makes editing your styles that must faster.

Umm lets see, Colorzilla downloadable over there colorzilla.com !!

Colorzilla is simple, it places an icon down in the lower left hand corner status bar and  you just select it to get an eye dropper in Firefox, thus allowing you to retrieve any color on the firefox screen. Oh its sOo handy.

Finally we have Firebug available addons.mozilla.org

Firebug has some similarities with the developers toolbar but its a lot more complex. In other words it can be used to help diagnose css related issues and help you dig deep to find what id or class your having trouble with, but where this thing has shined for me in the past is with the development of dynamic sites, the ability to track what files are specifically slowing down the loading or display of my site.

My list of Firefox plug-in’s again are

• SEO quake
• Developers toolbar
• Colorzilla
• Firebug
• and of course Firefox is the browser.

Do you  have your own plug-in you think should be included in this, feel free to comment and let everyone know about it.

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