Category Archives: Behind the Websites

Everything to do with website coding that we can think of. Front-end, back-end, upside and down, you’ll find it here. It also contains our thoughts about Content Management Systems (CMS) and all the other little and technical things.

Behind the Websites: WordPress Theme Elements

When producing a theme, we try not to limit the website owner’s options within the WordPress Dashboard. The owner may wish to enable an option down the track and be disappointed to find they can’t.

Behind the Websites: Maintaining Link Focus

Anyone who has attempted to navigate a web page using the keyboard will have experienced sites that remove the default a:focus style without adding in a replacement.

Behind the Websites: Minimum Page, A CSS Base

We decided to release Soupgiant‘s CSS base to the world at large, you’ll find it at minimumpage.com.

Behind the Websites: !important is Important

The !important declaration has really bad reputation, and deservedly so. As is often the way, this reputation results from abuse rather an inherent problem with the property itself.

Behind the Websites: HTML5: I couldn’t (quite) do it

I found it difficult to use pure and semantic HTML5 when dealing with current versions of Internet Explorer. I really tried to adopt the commonly advocated view that it’s okay to require website visitors have JavaScript enabled but settled on a different option I could actually live with.

Behind the Websites: Forms are forms, not lists

I have often seen HTML forms coded as part of a lists, including from some publications and people I highly respect. I believe this to be incorrect.

Behind the Websites: Selectivizr with CSS on a sub-domain

Updating the Soupgiant base WordPress theme recently (among other things we were porting it to HTML5), we needed to decide which shims and/or polyfills to use. We starterd with Remy Sharp’s HTML5 enabling script but another to consider was Selectivizr to improve IE‘s support of CSS3 selectors.

Behind the Websites: A half-baked (CSS) idea

Spritebaker has done the rounds a fair bit in web development circles over the past few weeks. It’s a great idea, done well. The only problem is it has the strange effect of making it seem like the page is actually taking longer to load. I take a look at a possible solution.

Behind the Websites: jQuery 1.5 as jQuery 1.5.0

When jQuery 1.4 was released, the Google URL being publicised by the jQuery team was http://…/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js – while Google had set it up as http://…/jquery/1.4.0/jquery.min.js. I had problems with this seemingly minor difference.

Behind the Websites: HTML5 for Web Designers

The first release from publisher A Book Apart does exactly what I would hope for from the people who brought us the excellent A List Apart online magazine. It simplifies a topic and gets me excited about using new web technologies.