Monthly Archives: August 2009

Add a Mobile Stylesheet to Your Site

Don’t want to go all-out with a separate mobile mini-site, but you still want your site to be accessible on phones and PDAs? You can just add a new stylesheet intended only for mobile browsers, in which you can reformat the page to render acceptably on a wide range of handheld web browsing devices.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" type="text/css" media="Screen" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="mobile.css" type="text/css" media="handheld" />

By linking a stylesheet with a media of “handheld,” you tell mobile browsers to remove any of the preceding styles. You can then apply some new styles within, taking care to avoid explicitly setting widths or anything that might foul-up mobile browsers.

It’s a little bit more complicated than that in reality, but not too much so. You can find a full how-to over at Perishable Press: The 5-Minute CSS Mobile Makeover.

Design Spotlight: Pro Blog Design (Again)

I’ve reviewed Pro Blog Design‘s theme at least once before, probably twice. Now that Michael Martin’s design blog is entering its third year, it has received yet another redesign.

PayPal Goes Down For 4.5 Hours, What Does This Mean For Business?

On August 3, PayPal had a major outage that brought their service offline for an extended period. The systems were down globally for an hour, and it took an additional three-and-a-half hours to bring everything back up to full capacity. What does a 4.5-hour…

Using isset() Instead of strlen() in PHP

I found something interesting in an old Smashing Magazine article. The author describes a slightly faster alternative to the strlen() function in PHP, which is used to determine the length of a string variable. An interesting fact about PHP is that a string is…

Design Spotlight: The New Twitter Homepage

Last Tuesday Twitter unveiled their redesign of their homepage. The change is intended to help remedy peoples’ inability to grasp the concept of Twitter, putting trending topics and a search field front-and-center. Instead of promoting to new users the ability to say what they’re…

BlogBuzz August 1, 2009