Blaze New Media

The popularity of CSS Tweak has blown me away over the last couple of days. After being picked up by Wired, the number of daily optimizations has gone through the roof!

For people who have no idea what I’m talking about, CSS Tweak is a web based CSS optimization tool. It will take any CSS file and optimize the syntax, grouping your style declarations into shorthand where possible. It can also remove comments, and strip whitespace for maximum compression.

There are other tools out there that have more compression options, but I made CSS Tweak to be simple, fast and easy to use. This meant only including the features that I felt were the most useful. By concentrating on things like making the interface simple and straight-forward, the tool would be far more beneficial for the majority of users that wouldn’t want more advanced compression options.

One major difference from other tools however, is that you can stop it from altering your syntactical layout. Instead it will go through and stick with the code layout structure you have defined, and clean up any areas that are incorrectly formatted. Some other tools tend to reformat your CSS, and move things around.

I’m very flattered by people’s comments, it seems that people enjoy the simplicity and speed the most. Jeffrey Zeldman added the tool to his bookmarks over on Ma.gnolia which has flat out bowled me over! He mentioned that the tool could use a brief help page, which I’ve now added. Thanks Jeffrey.

I’ll be making a few updates to the tweaker over the next little while, I need to fix the pasting option I’ve fixed the pasting option, so you can now quickly paste your CSS into the tweaker.

Also, I need to clarify something – the tool doesn’t check the validity of your CSS. All it does is check that the file you are trying to tweak is actually CSS at all. I guess my error message is a little confusing. I did this to stop people uploading and trying to tweak JPEG’s or PDF’s for example. If you want to validate your CSS, use the W3C’s tool.

CSS Tweak is free and you can find it at: http://www.csstweak.com

Update: I have a forum set up where you can submit bug reports, or suggest enhancements for the tool. This way I can keep track of fixes to make for the next version.

Durable is my first Wordpress theme and it’s a little different from other themes I’ve seen so far. It has been an enjoyable and educating experience constructing it.

Durable puts site users in control of page colors, allowing them to create their own personal themes for the site. Each element of the page is editable in real time; the user can select the colors for backgrounds, text and links.

Administrators of the site can go a little further. Their color choices can either be saved as a personal theme, or saved as the site’s new theme so that all users will see their color selections.

The color selection is done via the “Options” menu, visible in the menu bar of every page, and colors update as soon as they’re selected thanks to the very cool ColorMod color selector.

Durable’s Features

• On the fly color scheme editing for you and your users.
• Live AJAX search for archives accessible on any page
• Drop-down menu sections for Archives, Pages, Links and Search, removing the clutter and giving more space for your articles.
• Dedicated archives page showing a “tag cloud” for Months and Tags/Categories.
• Fluid design, meaning users with larger monitors will benefit from extended reading space.
• The following admin options via the Wordpress administrator interface;
  • Switching between the “Torn Page” effect or solid colors for page sections
  • Text alignment of articles (left or justified)
  • Number of posts to show on front page (3, 5, 7 or 9)
  • Switching color changing on or off

You can check out a demo of Durable by switching the theme of this site;

• Switch to Durable
• Switch to CssDev Original

This will give you an example of Durable running on a real world blog, and not just filled with “ideal” information.

I’d love to hear your feedback (email: andy at cssdev dot com), , I am working hard to fix up any bugs in these pre version 1.0 releases.