I believe Jeffrey Way has a quote somewhere that goes like, "think about the developer who can save a couple seconds on a task. At the end of the year he will have accomplished that much more than the developer who didn't". If you have begun to streamline your process learning shorthand css is one method for increasing efficiency.

Using the background property in css you can specify a background image and a css3 gradient. This is particularly useful for png icons on top of gradients. In this instance the icon has a transparent background and is placed on top of the css3 gradient.

While setting the size of a font is relatively simple; choosing the unit of measuring the size can become complex quickly.

At their core there are two types of font-size units; relative and absolute. Relative units are calculated by their parent element's font-size while absolute units are set at a fixed value. Both types of units are useful.

Testing for mobile devices can be a royal pain in the butt. There are so many different device facets to keep in mind. There are about twenty different brands, a near endless supply of device resolutions, and newer features like retina display that require addtional testing. Now with the surge of popularity of responsive web design, we now have one more thing to test. Ready to pull your hair out yet?

Phew... that was a mouthful. Here is how I would define Object Oriented Programming; A programming pattern that allows specific chunks of functionality (objects) to interact with each other through the use of class functions (methods) and store class specific data (properties).

Over the next couple posts in this series I will walk you through building your very own Twitter jQuery plugin from scratch. By the end of this series you will better understand the structure of a jQuery plugin, regular expressions, jQuery optimization, datetime manipulation, and jQuery chaining. Additionally, you will have a working plugin which will grab tweets directly from the twitter api. This is a solution based off something that I have used on a number of sites.

Double line letterpress-esque borders are all the rage right now in web development. And why not? They look clean and provide some depth to your site. So lets dive right in with a few of my favorite techniques for achieving this effect.

The current development version of Modernizr does not contain the yepnope.js bundle. This is somewhat tricky as there is no error message or notification except in the console debugger.

Here is a simple trick I found out by blind luck. I wanted to prevent the textarea tag's default resizing in Chrome and Firefox. As there seems to be no attribute available for the tag such as resize="false" (Come on W3C...) I began looking for an alternative. It's actually quite easy to lock a text area using only CSS.

So this isn't a new trick by any means, but it sure is handy (Think outlines, book chapters, line numbering...) The more markup you can minimize via CSS the better, in my book.