Easy CSS Sprites with Sprite Cow

CSS sprites are a commonly used technique to decrease page load times. One of the biggest hassles when setting them up, though, is figuring out the coordinates for the images in your sprite. (The other is rebuilding the sprite when you want to add new graphics…)

There’s not much to be done for the latter, but there is a handy tool that makes finding the coordinates painless. Sprite Cow intelligently draws a box around an image you select in your sprite sheet (after you load the sprite, of course) and writes the CSS for it. You can’t get any simpler than that.

I bet the developers could make some good money by making a Mac version and putting it up for sale in the App Store.

BlogBuzz July 9, 2011

Where to Find Free Fonts for CSS @font-face

If you’ve discovered the magic that is the CSS @font-face property, then you have likely run into one of its biggest problems: while there are plenty of free fonts online, not many are licensed with terms that allow you to use them with @font-face.…

BlogBuzz July 2, 2011

MacRabbit isn’t Dead!

Users of Espresso and CSSEdit have been complaining for some time about the lack of updates to the software. In a surprise announcement, MacRabbit (the developer) announced that Espresso 2 is on the way and that CSSEdit’s functionality is being rolled into it. The…

Don’t Assume a User’s Browser Window Size

Chris Coyier has an amazing article that finally puts the screen resolution myth to rest. Despite screen resolutions getting progressively bigger, the available width for your web designs is not. If you have a ginormous 30-inch monitor, you probably don’t keep your web browser…

Get Twitter and Facebook Link Statistics with JSON and jQuery

Both Twitter and Facebook have little JavaScript widgets that allow you to share a page using the respective service, displaying a running total of users who have done so. While that’s fine for most purposes, what if you just need the count, for some…

Pure JavaScript QR Code Generator with jQuery

Need a fast and lightweight way to generate QR codes in-browser, without relying on a third-party service? There’s a new jQuery plugin that’s exactly what you’re looking for. Weighing in at only 4kb, it generates QR codes using only JavaScript—no image resources, no calls…

BlogBuzz June 18, 2011

How to Defeat Cyrillic Spam in WordPress

Lately, I have been getting a lot of Cyrillic comment spam. It tends to slip past Akismet, as well as the built-in WordPress spam filters. They’re always spam, never legit comments. (As this is an English-language blog, there wouldn’t be much point for somebody…