CSS-Tricks Chronicle VII

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I don’t think I mentioned this here yet, so: I redesigned my personal site. It’s nothing mindblowing, it’s just some simple boxes with words in them. I’m happy to have shed my old site which was full of old junk. I’d be happy to have you read it, but the posts will be personal and rarely about web stuff or tech. I will be bringing comments back on it as soon as I can.

The most interesting fact about it: Other than one declaration of font-family, I used no typographic CSS at all. The user-agent stylesheet in browsers has a reasonable set of defaults for text elements and I just went with it.


I started using Divvy and it’s been super helpful. It’s just a tiny little menu bar app for Mac that allows you to position windows based on a grid you set up. I’m pretty messy with my open windows, and I’m often fiddling with them to get a useful arrangement. Usually, that’s browser-on-the-left and sublime-on-the-right. Divvy allows me to get into that setup in just a few commands. It’s the little things, right?


As I’ve written about, I absolutely love the idea of working in public. It’s super cool that Daniel Mall and team will be doing it with the Reading is Fundamental website.


I was on the SassCast with Dale Sande recently.

Speaking of Sass, as I’m rewatching and writing notes for the last of the videos in The Lodge, it occurs to much how much Sass is in all those videos. If you’re looking to dig into learning Sass and what it’s like on real world projects, you could do worse than watching the videos there.


Speaking of The Lodge, I recently spoke with a member who lived in New Zealand. Apparently the internet is quite slow there, and it would take an incredibly long time to download all the videos. I agreed to send them little USB drives with the videos on them. If anyone else is in that position, let me know and I can do the same for you. I need to charge $150 for it though, as the drives of that size are a bit expensive and requires me doing some work.


I made this kinda neat “stairway” style navigation. It’s probably a little obnoxious for general use but it could work in some contexts. I used to blog stuff like this after I built it, tutorial style. I should get back to that.


As I type I’m right in the middle of a big multi-leg trip. I was in New York for the first time for FOWD which went very well. I got to be the keynote on the first day! I loved Zoe Gillenwater’s talk about future layout specs. Carl did a great job keynoting the second day. I sadly missed Darcy Clarke‘s talk but he does have some videos of us hanging out that should never make it to the internet.

I got to visit Vimeo’s office while I was there thanks to Joe.


My travels this year are far from over. Next I’m headed to Baton Rouge to visit Richard, who I’ve been nerdfriends with since long before CSS-Tricks was even a thing.

Then I head to Salt Lake City for a day to give a workshop for Deseret Digital, who backed me on Kickstarter to the level of a personal workshop. Then back home for a few days before flying to Philly to do another one of those. Then Hawaii for the conferences there, then back to Wisconsin again for the holidays.

It has been and will be a lot of fun, but I’m sensing the travel burnout coming and I’ve purposely been very protective of 2013 – keeping it as absolutely free from commitment as possible. I’m at my best during long periods of simple home living.