I have been very busy working on CSS for a big up and coming web site and I have spent the last few nights doing some research on best practices and came across a W3C site I used when I first started coding with CSS that is very useful. There are a number of tips and howtos for the very things you think should be “easy” when laying out a page…and that your clients always want like:

indented paragraphs
odd and even coloring for rows
horizontal and vertical centering

If you are just starting out with CSS or are looking for some help with something you *think* should be simple, spend some time at the W3C Web Style Sheets CSS tips & tricks web site.

I have been busy working on an excited project that uses some pretty complicated layouts. I was originally hired to optimize and clean up the XHTML/CSS so it would work in IE 6, IE 7, Safari, and Firefox, but now am busy working on producing the clean XHTML/CSS from the start. I needed to brush up on my understanding of how z-indexes work, and I found an excellent tutorial that I wanted to share: Understanding CSS z-index.

When every hour you spend impacts your bottom line, I have learned a few tricks to working smarter.

Do not be a slave to email. When I am working on projects, email can be a continuous distraction. “I will just see what x client wants really quick” can easily turn into a mental distraction as I try and work out the issue. Worse, I will drop everything that I am working on to address the issue. In the past few months I have learned to focus on one task or a group of tasks at a time, then break, check email, and move onto the next task or group of tasks. I also pick an hour or two to just focus on answering email messages. This allows me to stay focused and get tasks completed and off my plate.
Pick a work schedule and stick to it. Start work and end work at a reasonable and consistent time. If I know I will work from 8am-4pm, I can budget my work and play time accordingly. I may not want to always work at 8am, but I know I do not want to work … [more]

Yesterday I finally broke down and bought Parallels and Windows XP to run on my MacBook Pro so I could do my CSS debugging and testing on IE 6 and IE 7 for Windows. After the ridiculously long Windows install and then security updates (74), I was pleasantly surprised with the speed and performance of Windows and IE within Parallels. I was quickly able view all my work in a Windows environment while also using my Mac browsers at the same time. This is awesome and I am quite excited to have this as an option.

If you ever need to implement drop down menus and want to use clean CSS/javascript code, check out: Son of Suckerfish Dropdown menus. I have implemented these on a few web sites now for my clients and have been very happy with the results. If you are using WordPress, you can also use to dynamically generate the drop down menus. Enjoy!

Apache’s mod_rewrite is very powerful. You can prevent hot-linking to your site’s graphics to prevent others from stealing them, redirect your from your old URL to a new URL, re-write URLs, as well as about 500 other really cool things…but today I wanted to share the syntax needed to redirect every incoming URL for a particular web site to a specific page. Why? This could come in handy when doing work on a site and you have a “Performing Updates” (in this case index.html) page. You can put the following code in your .htaccess or httpd.conf file:

# Enable rewrite engine
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

# Redirect internally all URLs to /index.html
RewriteRule .* index.html [L]

I have recently started using Tor for improved security and privacy when working out of certain locations. Not that I have much to hide but I do not want someone watching all my outgoing network traffic. Tor is also helpful if you are using a computer somewhere where they block ports (thus blocking services such as IM). I also started using Privoxy too with Tor to make my network connections even more private. If you are all curious about security and privacy, check out Tor and Privoxy.