Sexy Style Sheets with Sass (and Compass)

Today at BarCamp Rochester I gave a talk outlining some of the awesome features of Sass and Compass (the style sheet preprocessor and the preeminent framework built for it, respectively) with lots of examples and lots of code.

The slides are online here (built with DeckJS). They discuss some basic Sass features and some additions Compass brings to the table as well.

Considering the fairly dense nature of the material and the speed I had to rush through them, I think the talk was fairly well received. If I could have another go (and I may soon) I would consider reformatting the presentation so it’s less “here’s a feature, here’s another feature, and yet another feature” but instead connects the features so you get a better sense of how they’re used in a workflow. Demonstrating the process of building of a page in realtime with Sass and Compass would be more fun and accomplish this, but it would have to be carefully scripted.

I left out three major things in the discussion (but touched briefly on one of them):

  1. Partials
  2. Sass vs. SCSS syntax
  3. Getting started (installation for Sass and for Compass)

I’ve linked to some resources above that will guide you to the right places for beginning your own exploration of those topics.

I had a great time at BarCamp Rochester, reconnecting with folks from the Rochester tech community and hanging out with friends from Buffalo. And the swag is awesome: I walked away with three new t-shirts (thanks BarCamp Rochester, Puppet Labs, and Stack Overflow!), many new stickers (thanks jQuery UI, Puppet Labs, and Stack Overflow!) and a killer beer stein (thanks Stack Overflow!).

I’m already looking forward to the next BarCamp, and hopefully we can get one running in Buffalo regularly again soon!

Thoughts on licenses

I was going to write this post here, then I thought I’d post it at the Van Patten Media blog, then I changed my mind and cancelled the whole post. Finally, I’ve decided to write a shorter version of my thoughts here. Bear with me.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about open source software licenses. Aside from using open source all day err’ day, Van Patten Media has also released several open source software components; most of these in connection with WordPress.

So why think about licenses? Well, they’re the framework that defines a piece of open source software. Essentially they are what opens it. And when VPM has been so active in ensuring compliance with the open source ecosystems we’re apart of (our publicly available plugins and theme utilities are entirely GPL or GPL-compatible, as circumstances dictate) I get annoyed when other services in this same ecosystem (the WordPress ecosystem, usually) violate what I believe is the spirit of the GPL, the license that governs most WordPress activity.

What leads me to feel this way? Three things: Read More »

Local WordPress Development Dilemma

My current web development workflow is a little sloppy, I admit. Traditionally, you have four stages: dev, QA, staging, and production. My workflow completely eliminates one of those stages (QA) and combines two (dev and staging are just one stage for me). And–the pièce de résistance–I don’t keep my combined dev/staging setup on my local machine; it’s all on my remote server.

Sure, it works… but it’s not ideal (as Paddy has been very quick and all too eager to point out). And as I’m on the hunt for a new text editor (my beloved Espresso 1.x is not Lion-friendly) and get to know Git better, I’ve decided to overhaul my development workflow (and eventually institute the changes across Van Patten Media… I’m sure Peter will be happy to see me attempting to standardize this process a bit!). The goal? Local dev, remote staging and production, with deployment between the three handled by Git and Git hooks (as much as possible) with Vagrant handling the local server environment (as opposed to MAMP or something like that). Read More »