I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before. One of those most common complains with CSS frameworks (like BlueTrip…ahem) is that they include a lot of code that you won’t ever use (you’re probably never going to have a project where you use EVERY single column width or EVERY single possible typographical markup.

Let there be Dust-Me Selectors. It’s is a Firefox extension that finds unused CSS selectors and notifies you so you can remove them from your stylesheets. Awesome.

I’m trying to compile a showcase of sites built on BlueTrip to put on the website.

Let me know if you have! You can comment here, email me from the contact page, or post it on the BlueTrip forum.

BlueTrip.org has been doing pretty well for itself, even in it’s incomplete state. However, one of the things that it is completely lacking in is some method of communication and collaberation. The uber simple but reporter really isn’t built for that. I’ve always hung tight to the ExpressionEngine forum module so I don’t have much experience with standalone scripts. So it’s time to find a good forum.

My only requirements: PHP and MySQL, really simple, outputs valid code, and easy to theme. So far, the only options I’ve found are punBB, flexBB, and SMF, though I’m sure there are others. However, I happen to know that anybody who reads this blog must be brilliant, so anybody care to drop some knowledge?

Web design is (or perhaps should be) all about good practices and web standards. In spite of that, it’s pretty amazing how many designers just learn by doing and do what works rather than what’s good. Here are a few tips I wish I had been told about from the start.

1. Include a color scheme in your stylesheets

That way, when you’re creating a border color for some random form element and you can’t remember exactly what shade of light blue you have been using, you don’t have to search through the CSS declarations until you find it. Here’s an example from yours truly, CapsizeDesigns.com:

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NOTE: Due to the overwhelming popularity of BlueTrip, I’ve created a dedicated site for it at bluetrip.org. It’s a work in progress, but should help clear up some of the issues that come with running BlueTrip out of this blog post.

CSS Frameworks have been a hot topic the past few months. Although they’ve been getting a lot of heat from semantic freaks and minimalists (for adding unnecessary code), I think they’re a step forward. As I’ve said before, web design is about doing things quickly and beautifully. No matter how you feel about frameworks, it’s undeniable that they speed up the design process. I’m a fan.

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