As 2013 quickly approaches I can’t help but wonder where 2012 went. Actually this past year was quite an eventful one. One not so focused on the computer — if you take the regularity in which I have blogged since June as indication. But for the purposes of this post, and its home on this blog, I’ll keep this relevant.
With the first half of this year fully involved with my volunteer gig at the Fluid Project, and building Fluid Studios specifically, I was pretty overwhelmed at times. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Or looking back on it now, it wasn’t. I learned a few valuable lessons. Most important of which was how lacking my CSS skill set was, and in some cases still is, in terms of thoroughness. And testing specifically. Namely with the dreaded IE — precisely with versions 6 to 8.
Anyway, as I said, it wasn’t all bad — albeit very frustrating at times (which comes with the territory). But I really can’t complain. I received a new appreciation and a renewed interest in CSS. I’m all in. With everything. And my approach, especially. It’s all about Object-oriented CSS and writing efficient code now. Gone are the days of writing a selector, then all the rules that apply to that single selector. Make your CSS work for you, not the other way around. (Do me a favour? Don’t look at the CSS for Fluid Studios. Thanks.) I’m still learning but I haven’t been this excited about poking out code in a long time. A really long time.
Toward that end, I’ve spent the last little bit of this year, most of December mainly, trying out Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets (Sass). To the point;
Sass makes CSS fun again [that it does]. Sass is an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more. It’s translated to well-formatted, standard CSS using the command line tool or a web-framework plugin.
Farting around on the command line to see Sass’ worth is one thing. But making productive of said tool is quite another. Enter Codekit (which is much more than a web-framework plugin, or so it appears). And in recent weeks, I’ve really taken to using said tools, enjoying the time I spend developing for the web, and actively wanting to improve the CSS I write. That’s all that should matter, right? This is how I’m going to look at starting 2013, at least.
And sorry for the somewhat scattered post today, I’m rusty. I plan on resolving that soon into the new year. Stay tuned…