I’ve been blogging (very unevenly) for a long time now. A friend who was one of the first of a very small group to adopt the term “blog” convinced me to give it a try. At the time the best option available in terms of software to run the blog was a program called Greymatter. After a while I switched to MovableType, which served me well for a long time, and then later WordPress. This blogging was all done under the domain web-graphics.com, and evolved into a somewhat collaborative effort with other authors. Web-graphics died a rather slow and ignored death as I prioritized other things. Over the last six or so years my only web writing has been mostly little drips and drabs on this Tumblr.

Tumblr is pretty great for a number of reasons, but especially for ease of entry. The absence of UI process interference makes writing to a Tumblr less daunting than most other systems. Still, that’s not the only thing that’s important to me in choosing a blog system. Since I’d like to write more, I’m trying to sort out what kind of system to use - and to do that, I’ve made a little spreadsheet.

I haven’t come to a conclusion yet - but I’m leaning towards Middleman. There’s probably 100 other systems I could score on this sheet. To be continued…

It never occurred to me that you can leverage jQuery’s deep browser support for selecting stuff on an ad-hoc basis for your CSS. But now that I found this pattern, I’m seeing it mentioned by folks in a number of places.

Example problem: you want to use :nth-child CSS selection to add margins to every other content block that’s dynamically generated (in other words, markup that you can’t add a class to directly because it changes). But you know old IE (and other old browsers) won’t understand fancier CSS selection like this.

Solution: make a plain old class with the styles you want, and then apply it with jQuery’s addClass function using the fancy selector. It might look like this:

$(‘#container article:nth-of-type(3n-1)’).addClass(‘middle-with-margins’);

Worth noting - it could be confusing later to figure out how you’ve intertwined JS and CSS like this. Adding comments to both the JS and the CSS would help a little.

Related: there’s also this: selectivizr

Chris Coyier has a greatly helpful website, podcast, and other stuff and fellow web makers can see implicitly that he’s super efficient and productive because he’s always sharing knowledge. But it’s not just what he’s sharing, it’s how he goes about it — this guy is upbeat and positive, and look - I’ve never met him, but he just seems trustworthy. I think his easy-going attitude is just as important the content he produces, and I think that attitude is pretty well expressed in the license he just made for his website.