I design sites (not well most of the time!) and often pinch bits and bobs from the various CSS stylesheets I’ve created over the years, generally I normally end up coming up with something that looks at least half decent! However, all that cutting and pasting leaves my stylesheets in a mess – with tonnes of unused CSS styles! I spotted a reference to Dust-Me Selectors today on San Baldo, and using this fantastic Firefox Extension I have managed, in the space of minutes to reduce on stylesheet from an unmanageable 600 lines to a mere 200! It extracts all the selectors from all the stylesheets on the page you’re viewing, then analyzes that page to see which of those… Continue reading »

Not for plumbing (although that’s a whole other story at the minute!!), but data pipes are always something that has interested me, my biggest issue I think is finding something that I would pipe together. Before I go any further I should explain what pipes are: You take data from a source (an RSS feed is normally best). You do some parsing of that data and extract some useful bits, that you then that input into another feed source. You then combine the two pieces of data to produce one RSS feed. All this in the past would have been the domain of programmers, but it appears Yahoo Pipes have made this easy, not something I’ve ever played with but… Continue reading »

No, I don’t want somebody to write them for me (although it would be very nice!), I want to speed up my development time sometimes. I get bogged down in the code and could do with sorting that problem. So I’m having a look at a few things that might help this, any advice anyone has on any them is appreciated (I’ve opened up comments, but you’ll still have to register). The Gubed PHP Debugger is Free and looks useful. dBQwikSite looks like it could spit out PHP & MySQL sites all day long, the licence is up in the $150 region, but that’s probably not out of the ballpark for what I want! Might download a trial of this… Continue reading »