improve your skills

In some aspects, css and html don't differ a lot from other skills. If you want to improve them, you have to challenge yourself. Find problems in your current way of working. Try to fix those problems or at least keep them in mind. And when new projects and challenges arise, try to use your time well to improve the overall quality of your work.

But challenging yourself also brings up fresh problems, and fixing those might solve seemingly unrelated problems.

When I started to build this blog there were several things on my mind. I wanted better control over paddings and margins, I wanted clean html and I wanted to see how I could best differentiate between templating and refining classes. If you look back at the articles I've written, you'll see that some of these topics were already discussed (quite heavily) on this blog. I learned quite a lot when making this site.

Another challenge present in this blog are the colors used for theming. There are three themes, each featuring a base color, implemented on the same template. Keeping control over these colors in css was a requirement I wanted to focus on. Along the way, I stumbled on a couple of handy techniques, which I wouldn't want to keep from you.

The next couple of articles will discuss several techniques I used to improve the handling of the colors for each theme. Other than that, these techniques are pretty much unrelated and might fare you well in other situations, so I thought I'd be wise to give you a little introduction to the upcoming articles. A little context is always welcome.

In short, you can expect the following topics:

• using generated content
• using png masks for icons
• organization of your css file

These techniques might not be exactly new or dazzlingly original, but they are pretty useful and deserve a little in-depth attention.