There are a number of tools from the web development community that are designed to make your life a whole lot easier. One such type of tool are automation tools or task runners. The three biggest players I have come across are Guard, Gulp, and Grunt.js. We will be diving into Grunt.js for the remainder of this article.

Since the last Sass article in this series was published over a year ago, here is a quick refresher. We covered the setup of Sass apps including: Guard, Compass, Prepross, and Scout. There was also info on variables and rule nesting. And we talked about why Sass is so awesome. In this article we are going to go through some more advanced techniques specifically: Functions, Mixins, Placeholders, Parent selector, Calculations, and conditional statements.

Created by the PHP-FIG, the PSR specification is a unified push to create standards across all PHP projects. The committee is formed from over 20 developers representing some of the most popular frameworks. Having a unified standard has been a much needed endeavor since PHP standards have been somewhat lacking in the past.

While working through the expertly written "The Ruby on Rails Tutorial" by Michael Hartl, I ran into a small configuration issue. The issue I experienced was with Guard not properly starting a Spork server from the command line. My system was able to run Rspec, Spork, and Guard with no errors as long as Guard didn't try to load Spork. Here is what my terminal output looks like.

When I was in college learning about web development back in 2005 (yeesh), I was always looking for the perfect method of programming. At first I thought "if I can only find the perfect way of doing this, I'll never have to learn it again". Of course with web development and life, perfection should only ever be a direction not an ending. Let me explain.

It has been a long time since I last posted a new article here. The blog had to take a backseat momentarily to allow me to redesign both it and my portfolio. The goal for these two sites was to implement and learn new technologies and development trends.

In this series of articles, I will go through the ends and out of Sass. I will focus on the Basics and Setup, Advanced Techniques, Project Organization, and Best Practices and Common Pitfalls. I would like to apologize now for all the terrible puns that will come up (Sass tends to lend itself well to them)

Chrome likes to hold onto old favicons. Hard refreshing, clearing dns, etc don't seem to do anything to update them. However, there is a fairly simple way to force a refresh.

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.