Responsive sticky footer woes and fixes

Over the years, I must have used about a dozen different approaches to coding up a sticky footer, with varying degrees of success. I recently stumbled upon an elegant CSS3 solution and immediately put it to work on the theme on this site. But then I discovered some problems. Here’s how I fixed them.

What’s a sticky footer?

Alright, let’s say you’ve got a design that involves a big, chunky footer like the one on this site. If you have a page or a post that’s light on content, maybe just a few lines (like my contact page) and your site visitor happens to have a tall browser window, you don’t want that big footer hanging out in the middle of the screen. You want it down at the bottom of the browser window.

yes-no

That is the art of coding a sticky footer. Continue reading →

Why frameworks make me cranky

Violin

The past few years have been witness to an explosion of frameworks and libraries: CSS frameworks, WordPress theme frameworks, JavaScript frameworks, PHP frameworks…frameworks for just about any language you might want to write code in.

On one hand, this is great. As developers, we tend to solve the same problems over and over again. It makes sense to take advantage of code that’s already written that solves the problem we’re solving right now. On the other hand, it’s so easy to become over-reliant on frameworks. It’s so easy to solve every issue by looking for a a bit of code somebody else already wrote to solve our problem. Continue reading →

Should everyone learn to code?

You keep using that word…

We hear about this a lot. Learning to ‘code’. But what are we talking about when we’re talking about coding?

Because that’s not just one thing. There are any number of different languages you could learn – HTML, JavaScript, Python, Java, Objective C, Basic, PHP and on and on and on. At some level, all of those could be considered ‘coding’.

When I say coding, I’m talking about anything you can use to make something with a computer, whether that’s a website, an iPhone app, a game, or a piece of software.

When I say I think everyone should learn to code, I mean that I think everyone should have the skills to make at least one simple, basic thing using a computer. Continue reading →