CSS Cookbook Reader Contest

By admin

As I noted earlier, one of the hip things about being at Molly Holzschlag’s Train the Trainer was the free swag the attendees got. 

I snagged my fair share of the swag for helping out, but really can’t justify having some of the more choice elements of swag as either I don’t need it or I already had copy at the office. 

So, I decided to run a little swag giveaway contest for those readers that have picked up a copy of the CSS Cookbook.

Apologies to Dan Cederholm, but I’m going to copy his book contest he had a while back, but with give it a little twist. 

How to Enter

There are three easy steps to enter:

  1. Take a picture of you and your copy of CSS Cookbook and post it Flickr. Funny poses encouraged, but not required.
  2. Once the photograph is on the site, tag the photo with csscookbook.
  3. Then post a comment on this blog post with a link to your photograph.

How to Win

I’m going to generate a couple of random numbers and match them to the comment number for this blog post. (Note that comment numbers are generated automatically and sequentially.) If that matching blog comment has a link to flickr with a valid photograph of the CSS Cookbook, it wins.

Pictures need to be posted before 11:59pm ET by Thursday November 8th.

The Prizes

There are two prize packages, Software+Book Prize and a DVD Prize:

One Software+Book Prize winner will receive a copy of Microsoft Expression Web and a copy of Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke, edited and with a foreword by Molly, and an introduction by Dave Shea.

The DVD Prize winner will receive a copy of CSS for Designers that’s from Lynda.com which features Andy and Molly. 

I’ll be mailing out the prize packages so they can get out of the office ASAP. 

Sounds good? Best of luck!

Free Copy of Releasing CSS

By admin

Releasing CSS: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love IE7 covers designing with CSS for Microsoft’s latest and greatest: Internet Explorer 7. 

Releasing CSS

The fine publisher, O’Reilly, wants to distribute a few free copies to those who would post a review on your blog. So, if you would like a free copy and wouldn’t mind writing a Summer book report, comment on this post making sure to include your blog’s Web address. 

Many may enter, a few will get ’em. So, post a comment and good luck!

Sessions.edu Blog Post Round Up

By admin

Sessions.edu Blog Header

Here are a few of the posts I made for Sessions.edu’s blog for design students:

What are Microformats
Have you wondered what microformats are, and why we should bother with them?
The Prevalence of Slick JavaScript & Flash effects
With the prevalence of slick JavaScript and Flash effects available at a designer’s fingertips, it can be tempting to inundate a web page with trendy “coolness” at the expense of usability.
Every Element Sends a Message
When designing web sites, it’s important to keep in mind what it is you want to convey.

SXSW07: Unleashing CSS

By admin


How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love IE7
Originally uploaded by chasingfun.

It’s only the first day of SXSW Interactive 2007 and you can tell how popular this event has become over the last few years. Thankfully, I had the pleasure of talking earlier today regarding CSS and IE 7 to a sizable portion of the largest SXSW Interactive conference I’ve every seen. 

The slides from the talk, “Unleashing CSS: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love IE7″, are available as a PDF (~2MB).

In my talk, which was shortened for time, I glossed over the finer details of IE7 and some CSS tricks. If you would like to know more about the talk, please take a look at my ebook, Releasing CSS, available from O’Reilly. In the ebook I go through some of the main points I made in my talk as well as cover the basics of the new things one can do in IE7.

CSS Cookbook, Second Edition

By admin

CSS CookbookIn late 2006, my new book, the second edition of CSS Cookbook, came out by O’Reilly. While the CSS Cookbook provides hundreds of practical examples with CSS code recipes that you can use immediately to format your web pages, I’d like to point out some of the other positives from this updated edition:

  1. Expanded. Coming in at 538 pages, the second edition is almost twice as large as the first edition.
  2. Revised and Updated. The book didn’t just add more pages to the previous edition. Not one chapter went untouched in the second edition. While we added more to the book, some recipes were thrown away if it was deemed out of date (like the hybrid, HTML table layout).
  3. New Chapters. Also included are two new chapters: one chapter geared for general CSS knowledge to help the beginners and another chapter for techniques centered on images.
  4. Bears. On the cover is the Grizzly Bear. TV star Stephen Colbert states that the Grizzly Bear is one of those “godless killing machines without a soul”. Sounds like all the backup you need to squash bugs, the web development kind and any cockroaches your girlfriend finds in the bathroom.
  5. Form Elements. Web forms makes the ecommerce world go ‘round. So knowing how a form element will or won’t be affected by CSS properties becomes paramount to any Web designer. That’s why I included in the second edition an appendix dedicated to detailing how form elements were affected by CSS properties.

    Screenshots showing how 20 CSS properties on eight form elements (checkboxes, file upload elements, radio buttons, text fields, multiple options, select elements, submit buttons, and text areas) were affected by in ten modern browsers (Windows Internet Explorer 5, 5.5, 6, and 7; Mac Safari 2; Windows and Mac Firefox 1.5; Windows and Mac Netscape Navigator 7.2; and Opera 8.5).

    In all over 1,600 screen captures were taken to get this job done.due to printing costs, the entire 160 page appendix had to be reduced to make room for other parts of the book, …like chapters one through ten. 

    Thanks to the phenom known as the World Wide Web, such physical limitations are mere annoyances. Therefore O’Reilly has graciously allowed the unedited 160 page version to be downloaded from their web site.

  6. Code Download. With a book that goes through code samples like they were going out of style, the new edition organizes the code in a much more orderly fashion. Now you can find the code sample as easily as you an find the recipe in the book.
  7. Thud. It seems like there are dozens of books coming out every month all geared at helping Web designers and developers make a better Web experience. That’s why I was floored when the editors at The Designers Bookshelf honored the CSS Cookbook, Second edition, as The Web Design Book of the Year.