Toluu : CSS-Tricks

CSS-Tricks

Tips, Tricks, and Techniques on using Cascading Style Sheets.

This is not a “framework” or anything, I was just screwing around with typography and getting things to line up according to a strict horizontal and vertical grid. It is inspired by the Compose to a Vertical Rhythm article by Richard Rutter a few years ago, except uses unitless line height.

font: 10px/2 "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Sans-Serif;

I thought the results were very pleasing. If you have a site heavy on text content, I think paying fine-grained attention to the underlying grid is important.

The Last Links of Interest - Other Great Places for LinksYesterday

I’ve done 62 Tuesday “Links of Interest” posts over the past 18 months or so. it’s been fun and a good way to share links, but I’m letting you know this will be the last one. It’s not because I don’t like sharing links, it’s because me doing it here is just a little redundant to link sharing I do elsewhere and it’s starting to feel a bit too much like “filler” content. I look forward to saving myself a little time every week to spend on something else.

Also, there are plenty of other sites that specialize in the stream of links thing, which can ultimately deliver links to interesting stuff in a more timely manner. One of these sites is my own Script & Style, which I will continue to be the main source I contribute links to.

If you are a total link junkie and need more, here are a couple of other sites that specialize in a stream of design related links.

Quick note: There is one 125×125 advertising spot that has opened up on CSS-Tricks. This is the first time there has been an opening in a long time, probably 6-8 months. You can pick one up at

PHP for Beginners: Building Your First Simple CMSJanuary 5

The Magic of PHP + MySQL

It’s safe to say that nearly every website that’s up-to-date these days is using some form of content management system (CMS). While there are a ton of great free options that provide us with a CMS to power a website (Wordpress, Drupal, etc.), it doesn’t hurt to peek under the hood and get a feel for how these systems work.

To get our feet wet as back-end developers, we’ll be creating a simple PHP class that will:

Create a database
Connect to a database
Display a form with two fields
Save the form data in the database
Display the saved data from the database

View Demo Download Files

This class is intended to give you a feel for how PHP and MySQL interact together, and to show the basics of a CMS. I’ll be skipping explanations of some of the very basic programming stuff, so if at any point you feel lost, head on over to w3schools.com and give yourself a crash-course in PHP. I’ll try not to lose anyone, though, I promise.

Building the Class

Launch: Are My Sites Up?January 2

Hey folks! Me and Richard have just launched a new site I think many of you will find useful. It’s called Are My Sites Up? - I bet you can guess what it does =)

Monitor ALL your sites

The idea is that many of us are responsible for maintaining a number of websites. Business, personal, or otherwise. We simply don’t have the time to go visiting every one of them every day, let alone every few minutes. So what if one of them goes down? There are all kinds of reasons it could happen, and you’d never know! That is, until you get a phone call from an angry customer or client. Wouldn’t you rather say “Yep! I saw that, I’m working to resolve the issue now” rather than “Oh, really?”

It’s FREE

There are a couple of other services out there that do website monitoring. In my experience they are either complicated, cost money, or both. In one other case, it is simple and free, but it is too simple, and would make managing a number of sites kind of a pain. Are My Sites Up? is totally free and easy to use.

It WORKS

We’ve been using the system for a little while now and it’s been working like a charm. We let in some early testers (thanks guys!) earlier this week and it’s been working well for them too. There is

New Screencast: Skinning phpBBJanuary 1

Creating a completely custom theme for the popular forums software phpBB would be a monster job. Fortunately, to get up and running quickly, we can simply wrap a default installation of phpBB into the skin of an existing site pretty easily. We do just that in this screencast, and work out the kinks that pop up.