Posts Tagged ‘CSS’
I’m excited to announce the release of Chirpy v.1.0.0.5–Chirpy to the XXXtreme. That’s right. This version of Chirpy will blow the pants off of every clothed person in the universe. So, if you haven’t gotten dressed already, don’t bother… Before diving too deep into the realm of the extreme, let me re-divulge the following preface: if you’re completely new to the madness of Chirpy, I recommend that read about Chirpy’s core features.
Let’s start with the simplest part: download Chirpy at codeplex. Start fiddling around. If something doesn’t work complain about it. If something does work, tweet or blog about how awesome your life has become. Finally, if you’re feeling really frisky, download Chirpy’s source code and add something. I don’t care what it is. Just add something. Surprise me. I’ll probably love you forever. Or, I’ll throw something at you.
When we talk about “improving” our skills as knowledge-hungry developers, I find it interesting that we rarely mention the people in our lives (not Karl Seguin, alas) who we inevitably and repeatedly injure with our sloppiness: namely, designers. Yes, those people, over there, cloaked in Urban Outfitter attire, crying, listening to Bon Iver (or, like, whatever).
Let’s face it. Developers aren’t the most fashionable folk. We can’t dress ourselves, we don’t kiss well, we don’t understand human interaction with other humans, touching feels complicated to our fingers, etc. As such, when it comes to designing and laying out our webpages, we’re not the most graceful fellows.
Already know sir Zippy biblically? Well, then. Due to overwhelming demand (and a deadly case of the avian bird flu), Chirpy (aka Chirpy Zippy) is now available as an Alpha release on Codeplex.
First, an interesting fact: according to Alexa.com, searches for “css url” account for the largest percent of search traffic pouring into Phil Haack’s blog. Statistically speaking, roughly one percent of all of Phil’s web page hits spawn from the “css url” search. I found that pretty shocking, and, shocking as it is, it’s a fact that either…
This post is another “milestone” in the arduous journey of the Zippy bird. It’s an ugly bird, but the process of “making fluff out of feathers” has always suited me.
Alright, friends. So I’ve spent the last couple of days creating my ZipController. You can see the good, the bad, and the ugly by perusing through my posts. This morning, I started my day by cleaning up all the ZipController “demo code,” testing and retesting all of the functionality, and packaging up the whole project as nicely and as neatly as I could for your easy consuming.
Less for .Net (or .Less, or DotLess, or Less, etc.) is a pretty cool way to make super-wet (or super-lubed?) stylesheets a little bit more, eh, DRY.
Okay. Easy enough. Let’s return to our ol’ ZipController. Here, we’ll be making some pretty substantial changes. We’ll be adding two new, hearty public methods: Style(string path) and Script(string path). With those methods, we’ll be able to cache, compress, minify, douse in old pig fat, (or, you name it) our javascript and stylesheet files before handing them over to the browser.
