Blaze New Media

“What’s going on!” I hear you cry. Well, don’t worry, if you’re looking for CssDev, then you’re in the right place. Things have changed a little around here, “Blaze New Media” is the new name.

After long consideration, and some lengthy site development, I’ve decided to put CssDev into early retirement. I say retirement, but really the only thing that has gone is the design and name. You can still find all of the old CssDev content in its rightful place, all bookmarks and back links will redirect to to the appropriate place on this site.

So why the change? Well, I came to the conclusion that it was silly to run the two sites separately when the content of both sites complimented each other so well.

All of the blog content of CssDev has been moved into the Blaze Blog section, then tagged and archived within the correct categories. Projects like the Durable Wordpress theme and CSS Tweak have been moved into their own dedicated projects section. Everything has fit together nicely.

On the more technical side of things, this site is running on the Textpattern Content Management System (CMS). I really love using CMS’ for sites that I create, I don’t think I’ll go back to creating pain static sites, ever. Using a CMS really cuts out the organizational mayhem you encounter when the number of pages and amount of content inevitably increases. I’ve actually been using Wordpress as a CMS for a couple of recent projects, I prefer its approach to content management. If time allows I’ll eventually transfer this site over to Wordpress.

As for the design, I’ve taken the minimalist approach, really because I want the content to speak for itself. If people are visiting here mainly to read something and get an idea of what I offer, I want to give them the best chance of doing that. No need to crowd people with intrusive design elements. I’m pleased with the final outcome, although the design is relatively simple, I think it still represents my style and approach.

Finally, welcome to Blaze New Media. I hope you enjoy the things you find as much as I’ve enjoyed creating them.

A few people have asked me recently how and why they should use CSS optimization tools like CSS Tweak.

I think there is a general misunderstanding about when these tools should be used, and how they can benefit your site overall. The issue for most people is that once they have optimized their CSS, it is completely unreadable and impossible to update. Optimizing the local development copy of your CSS isn’t really the right way to use the tool.

The idea of CSS Tweak is to provide optimization for deployment. So, this means you would keep a development copy of all your CSS files on your local machine. Then, when you are ready to upload your site, run the CSS through CSS Tweak, and upload the optimized files. This way, you have a perfectly maintainable copy on your own machine, and an identical copy on the server, only fully optimized, reducing your site load times and bandwidth usage.

That’s all really, I just thought I’d talk about this briefly, as it seems to be a recurring question. I don’t think I made this all that clear when I first released CSS Tweak, so really it’s my own fault! Has anyone been using CSS Tweak in this fashion already?