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Friday Feast #56: CSS, MT, Style Guides, TopStyle
02:15 PM - Aug 22, 2003

I’ve had an interesting and challenging 7 days dealing with Movable Type and server upgrade issues, unusual thunder storms, and daily life. In the meantime, the world marches on, and there are plenty of great links to share for today’s feast—CSS layouts, Movable Type, site optimization, more style guides, and TopStyle.

CSS Layouts

There are increasingly more excellent examples and templates available for cross-browser CSS designs. You can learn a lot from them, use them yourself, or use them as a guide to create your own. Here are a few links to comments, tutorials, and templates.

• 3-col layout via CSS by Petr Stanicek even has a footer that spans the bottom of the page, no hacks, and is cross-browser tested for a multitude of browsers. Netscape 4 bungles it, but it’s easy enough to give Netscape 4 many of the CSS features while hiding the CSS positioning details from that browser anyway.
• 3 column CSS layouts: Easier than you might think by Simon Willison. Helpful info and links about considering approaches to CSS layouts around the Web.
• Perched Upon a Lily Pad is a 3-column all CSS, cross-browser friendly 3-column CSS template freely available via positioniseverything.net. Read all the tips and follow along. Very helpful.
  [hat tip: Superb CSS template/tutorial, Simon Willison’s weblog]
• ThreeColumnLayouts an incredibly helpful resource for 3-column layout information. The handy chart lists links to quite a few 3-column layouts and indicates headers, footers, fluid, Netscape 4 compatible, and notes. Fabulous resource for a quick overview and helpful information about at least 20 3-column layouts around the Web.
• WebsiteTips.com: CSS Templates provides links to helpful CSS templates and resources. The CSS section has plenty of helpful resources for CSS tutorials, W3C recommendations, CSS tools, and more.

More Style Guides

• Guardian Unlimited Style Guide
  Download as a PDF or MS Word document. See also my post the other day about the BBC News Styleguide.
  [hat tip: Branchleft]

Movable Type Trackback Tips

• About Posted Elsewhere is a helpful tutorial about how to create a miniblog and RSS feed of your selected comments on other weblogs using the Standalone Trackback tool. Easy-to-follow instructions. Inspired by Matt Haughey’s Posted Elsewhere sidebar feature, Joshua Kaufman created one and wrote this tutorial to share how you can create one of your own.

Movable Type Blogroll Tips

• Movable Type blogroll by Dylan Tweney is a terrific way to use Movable Type for making blogrolls. Dylan’s approach uses a PHP include, but you could also use MT’s Include tag or SSI.

  Most web hosts provide SSI, which is what I use for my headers, footers, navigation, sidebar information, and more. My page templates look pretty sparse since they’re mostly markup, MT tags, and SSI.

• Added blogroll managed by Movable Type by Rick Klau uses MT’s MTInclude tag, a new template for the blogroll, and a handy bookmarklet to easily add new sites to your blogroll.
• PHP Blogroll by Phil Ringnalda is a PHP include approach that produces a list of links sorted in descending order of update, based on when the weblog last pinged weblogs.com or another of blo.gs’s sources of update info.

Site Optimization [Book cover: Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization]

Although many of us have broadband connections at work, the stats continue to show that the majority of Internet users have 56K connections or less. Check out WebSiteOptimization.com’s August Bandwidth Report for some fascinating reading and the latest stats.

When designing websites, it’s still as important as ever to keep the target market’s connection speeds in mind in most cases. Andy King’s fantastic book, Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization is packed with tips and information about how to effectively optimize websites. I highly recommend it.

TopStyle Keyboard Shortcuts

• TopStyle HTML Keyboard Shortcuts
  There are many keyboard shortcuts that I use constantly within TopStyle in addition to creating a few of my own. TopStyle’s customizing ability is one of the user-friendly features I especially enjoy. If you use TopStyle, it’s well worth spending a little time to explore the keyboard shortcuts, customizations, and many other features.

  See my bradsoft.com Cited Links and nick.typepad.com Cited Links pages for tips, reviews, and comments that I’ve made the past couple of years about TopStyle.

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