design

Why can't I have a waffle?

Or, What does "scale" really mean?

If you interact with technical people, you will inevitably hear the word scale. They will say something like, "it doesn't scale well", or, "we need to make sure that this can scale up". Maybe you aren't sure what this means, but you nodded your head anyway. Well, let me tell you what they are talking about.

Button, button, where is the button?

Creating a Rollover Button without Javascript

JavaScript rollover buttons have been a common feature on the web for a long time now, but they do have some drawbacks. In the article below I will describe a way to make some neat looking rollover techniques with just XHTML and CSS. They aren't perfect for every situation, but they are an interesting alternative.

Why not just use MM_swapImage()?

Macromedia's (now Adobe's) ubiquitous JavaScript functions for rollovers are effective but they do have a few disadvantages:

Drupal, Firefox and the Mysterious Grey Line

Ever since I started making custom themes for Drupal, I kept running into a strange problem. If my theme or my content included a table, when I looked at it in Firefox the table would have a thin grey line on the top. I finally figured out what was causing this and I would like to share it with you.

If you want to skip the lecture, you can click here for the solution.

New Drupal "blueprint" Template for iRolo.net

Update 2008-08-22: This page has received a large amount of traffic from people looking for implementations of the Blueprint CSS theme project. Here are some links to help out those people:

<pre /> Doesn't Do Style

While making the first article in the "Mistakes I've Made" series. I immediately came across the fodder for the next. I was trying to create CSS for my code examples and discovered that using <pre /> just won't cut it anymore.

Internet Explorer Speaks American

This is the first in a series of short articles called "Mistakes I've Made". In this series I plan to give examples of mistakes, misunderstandings, and problems I've encountered while coding. Maybe they will keep you from going through the same frustration.

I came across this "mistake" while making the new CSS for this site. Apparently, Internet Explorer only speaks American English. Here is the code I created:

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