A Quick Update

This past week or so I've been a busy bee re-writing the CSS for this blog. That might sound like an odd thing to do, but it had become unmanageable and was slowing me down. So this is a quick heads up, if you spot any bugs please let me know - you probably won't notice the few design tweaks I've made though!

So why did you do it?

I tend to work in lots of separate css files (reset, layout, typography, colour etc) and once the major development work is done I put it all into one file and run an optimisation script. This is for two reasons: the first is that @import is bad (via @alistairstead) and the second is that I don't want my CSS to slow this site down when there is no need. I have tried out a few different CSS optimisation scripts, but I recommend Clean CSS because it has plenty of options, can leave you with varying degrees of readability and so far it hasn't broken a single thing.

Anyhow, after putting all my css together into one file and minimising it I then made a few tiny tweaks to the minimised file. Then when I wanted to do a bit of major reworking I ideally needed to work with my non-minimised file, but this was now out of sync... so I was stuck! It all comes down to poor planning of my Wordpress theme & poor design of my post styles - I designed the site rather than the content because I didn't have any, and ended up with some nasty bits.

So lessons are learnt. I now have a manageable system and hopefully a slightly easier to read blog. It should take me less time to crank out posts (as I won't have to mess with styling the content) and I should be back on track shortly.