Self-importance. Entitlement. Snobbery.

Jan 30 2016Web design basics

Organizing your CSS

The larger your website or application gets, the harder it is to keep your CSS sane and easy to maintain. The trouble, of course, is that there is no One True Way. Lots of people have made recommendations on how to do this over the years. Here’s mine.

Jan 29 2016Web design basics

Building a color palette

I should start out by saying that I’m operating in near total ignorance of color theory or formal education in design. So you may think what I do here is unscientific and unrefined, at best. That said, over the years I’ve felt my way into a process I like for creating color palettes for new web and design projects.

Twice in the same week, on two different computers, I fell victim to the same egregious Mail.app memory leak. Within seconds or minutes of launching Mail, it would eat up all the available system memory, and bring the system to a grinding halt; only a hard restart would work after that. The good news, though, is that there’s a relatively straightforward workaround.

I upgraded to El Capitan last week and noticed shortly thereafter that my path was messed up; when opening up new terminal windows, the active version of ruby was the system version instead of my RVM default. On investigating, I saw that for some reason the default paths in /etc/paths (/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:…) were first in my path instead of last, as they would have been if my .zshenv and .zshrc were being sourced properly. Here’s how I fixed it.

I recently upgraded the Middleman gem in my blog installation to the latest version, v3.4.0, and found to my dismay that it no longer worked with Pow. A refactor to Middleman::PreviewServer caused Pow to throw a TypeError – PreviewServer is not a module exception. The good news is that the change was a simple one, and you’ll only need to change a single word in your config.ru file to make it work again.

Tea speaks to me of rainy afternoons and crackling fires. Of snow falling on a silent garden. Of a few quiet moments out of time, the ease of familiar movements, of being in yourself completely, at peace. It speaks of hospitality and comfort, companionship and home. Tea is more to me than just a drink.

But that is only peripherally what I’ll talk about today. I decided a little while ago that I wanted to take some of my TV-watching time and devote it to learning, specifically to improving my design sense. So I bought a bunch of design books and decided to do a little project.

I’m constantly tinkering with my environment; I’m on an endless quest to simplify and automate it as much as possible. Between my shell, my editors and my window management solution, I’ve got things running pretty smoothly now…for the most part. Recently, my brew-installed MacVim had been giving me fits—seg faults right and left. Here’s how I solved the problem.

I’ve made quite a few updates to my css3-foundation project of late. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a Compass-based CSS3/HTML5 framework I built at my last place of work for bootstrapping web development projects.

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