css

Today we look at the sidebars – and how to widgetize them. This is not a big deal, but you have to understand what you are doing… as always…

Links for this episode:

• Widget Page on Autommatic.com
• “Recently Popular” Plugin
• Simple Tags Plugin

Today, we tackle the comments. I find this feature powerful, yet tedious to design / style, when creating a new theme; this is why I want to get it out of the way right now.

Note – I need to understand why the audio is so bad – will tweak a little, hopefully the next webcasts are better

Links from this episode:

• WordPress Template Hierarchy
• CSS-Based Forms: Collection of good solutions at SmashingMagazine

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• Advanced Dreamweaver 8 – How Use Cascading Style Sheets (5min.com)

Today we focus a lot on CSS; if you are familiar with it, you might just want to watch the first minutes of the webcast, where I show some bits around code organisation in WordPress (header.php and footer.php).

Links from this episode:

• The CSS-Hover hack for the Internet Explorer was created by Peter Nederlof
• The YAHOO UI reset.css
• Eric Meyer’s reset.css
• My own initial.css

After the ajax book out of this series (see my last post in this blog) I thought it might be a good idea to have a look at the HTML / CSS one – not that I don’t know HTML or CSS, but first, I might be a little rusty, and second, hey, the series looks just cool, so why not?
So, after a short period (the “amazon-waiting-period”, if you know what I mean…) the book was here – and I am not disappointed.
Although much longer than the ajax one, it provides all knowledge needed to create state-of-the-art websites, complete with XHTML and CSS – and it provides you with all the best practises around. The examples are very good, and as with the previous one, everything can be downloaded from the headfirst-website, which avoids stupid typing exercises.
Ah, speaking of exercises: Again, they are very good and not to be missed – they form integral part of the book and should, by any means, at least be tried (they are not so hard, after all).
The writing style is funny, informal, but still focused to the topics; and it’s never “too much”, but only as much info as can be coped with. Also, I found that you can stop reading at almost any page, if you feel overwhelmed by the book, so there is never a risk of getting tired by all this (sometimes newer, sometimes already known) stuff.
As mentioned above, this book is much longer than the ajax one – it has about 700 pages and almost no reference. This can be seen as the only criticism – you learn a lot, but you never have a change to look something up (“how was this again with the xyz tag?”) – instead, if you are lucky, you find something in the index or in the ToC, but that’s it.
On the other hand, this *is* a learning book and not a reference book – so why bother? There are plenty of good HTML and CSS references out there in the web (and also in writing, and the book even mentions some – at least, the O’Reilly ones…)
And there *is* a lot to learn about HTML and CSS – there are hundreds of tags, attributes, options, formattings etc. – so the book just *must* be this long.
This is finally the HTML book I wished was around when I started webdesign – it’s straight ahead, with lots of good examples (and even the very first examples look good!), so I will rate it with at least 90% – if not more. Let’s say, -5% for not having a short tag index (which would have blown the book up by some other pages), and -1% for some texts that *might* have been a little shorter – ok, this gives 94% left, still, the ONLY HTML book I would recommend at the moment.

I’ll start my book-blog with a Web2.0 book (makes kinda sense, or does it?)
When I was approached to create a website once more (I did my last back in 2001) I thought that I can’t rely on HTML, CSS and some basic PHP/MySQL any more – with all this web2.0 stuff around. So, what to do?
I went to my favourite book-store (this time, it was not amazon…), and found a book called “Head Rush Ajax“.
Well – I never read a book like this one. However many stars I would have to rate it, I would give them to this book – because it’s simply one of the best educational books I have ever encountered. Its style is fresh (but not “hey-guys-look-how-cewl-I-am”), it’s layout is terrific (but not “lets-see-how-many-pictures-I-get-on-one-page”) and the educational effects are just great. There are only 7 chapters – but you learn everything about all this web2.0 tools, starting from asynchronous requests involving JavaScript, going on to some cool DOM-stuff and ending with JSON and XML (by the way, this book opened my eyes regarding XML – I finally got the point about it.
Now, there is no reference – and sometimes, PHP and Javascript (of course, as well as CSS and HTML) is just used without further explanations (ok, sometimes there actually *are* explanations, but not as in-depth as some people might wish). But then, this book is no reference and no “teach-me-PHP-or-javascript” – it’s “teach-me-AJAX”. And that’s what it does.
I just notice that I can’t really describe the visual and textual style of this book (and it *is* still a workbook – there are exercises, but they were the first exercises in books like these I actually completed) – you might want to look at headfirstlabs.com for an impression.
As already said: n stars out of n!