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The Internet is a strange and wonderful place. It never fails to amaze me the things people come up with. And what also never fails to amaze me is the effort we put into making simple tasks more complicated. For the new year, it is my hope to bring us back to the simplicity of things.

Blogging

Ahhh, blogging. Something to simple and so mind blowing. It revolutionized how we as individuals communicate on the web, it's simple platform from which we could add more to the conversation was simply awesome. Average people with much to say came out in droves. By lowering the level of entry, the increased levels of knowledge that poured out rivals anything in human history.

Bloggers

Here is where out story takes a twist. As more and more bloggers got involved into blogging, IMHO it began to lose focus. Blogging became more about a platform and how developers could harness this new technology and start build web sites from it. I am not taking away the contributions of skilled developers out there, but at o

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A general listing of random thoughts. Things I care about deeply and those I care only enough about to get a thought out of my head. Read along here, or follow along.

• Icon fonts, HAML and Sass
• Sass extends: Be aware of the loop
• Sprites are a pain, @each makes it hurt less
• Iterate list to produce placeholder classes w/Sass
• Do you need Sass?
• Seattle Sass Meetup goes Google+ Communities
• Clean out your Sass junk-drawer
• Using Github's Gist Platform as a blogging tool

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by Dale Sande

CSS has had a long and sordid past. A developer never sets out with the goal of making a complete and total mess of things. Their intention is not to build something that is practically illegible, impractical to maintain and is limited in scale. But somehow, this is where many inevitably end up. Luckily, all is not lost. With some simple strategies, organizational methods and out-of-the box tools, we can really help get that junk-drawer inline.

For many of us getting started with Sass, at one time or another have created a junk-drawer of files. For most, this was a rookie mistake, but for others, this is a continuing issue with our architecture and file management techniques. Sass doesn't come with any real rules for file management so developers are pretty much left to their own devices.

Large CSS files and increased complexity

CSS started out with very simple intentions, but as [tableless web design][1.1] began to really take a foothold, o

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I have been running the Sesttle Sass Meetup for over a year now, and one area where I felt meetup.com fell short was supporting the community outside the physical meetup.

The Seattle Sass Meetup has had some interesting growth over the past year, mainly with people NOT in Seattle. This is very cool and I have been looking for ways to support this geographically diverse audience.

I tried create a 'community' with Google+ Pages, but it wasn't quite right. There wasn't that clean mental separation between my personal page and my 'page'.

It's been around a month now since Google+ released Google Communities. Immediately I saw this as the extend community I was looking for. It even supports 'events'.

So I am tweeting this out to all my followers as well as those on my meetup list. So, what do ya say? Will you help me build this community? Your involvement is critical in its growth. Do you have Sass related topics that need a larger discussion? You come across articles that you want to share? Have questions

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Draft Episode 15: Why Sass? raises a very interesting question. "Do you really have to use Sass?"

by Dale Sande

For the most part, no you don't need Sass to get work done. The internet has been around for a long time and CSS was here WAY before Sass and people were able to get work done. But is this really a valid argument?

You can say the same for any new development language, innovation or advancement. Do we need Python, Ruby, C#, Clojure, Node or Dart? After all we have C, Perl, PHP, Java and Javascript. Do we need new languages to do the same things? But are we really doing the same things?

Innovation pushes us all forward

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At one time or another, we have all made a 'to-do' list. These lists are great when you need to complete a simple list of tasks and are very useful when you need to do those tasks immediately. But, what about when you need to remember to do something later?

What is a to-do list?

Simply put, a to-do list is a simple list of tasks that we need to remind ourselves to do something. Shopping lists, Daddy-do lists, etc. the basic premiss is that we are busy and our attention span is short. Without these handy lists we would forget to do lots of things. 3M has created a whole economy based on our short attention spans, never heard of Post-it notes?

Sticky notes have failed us

Simple notes are great for capturing simple ideas, but what about time sensitive tasks? What about groupings of tasks? What about those ideas that if we don't capture a thought now, it is forever lost? In offices around the world you will see monitors littered with Sticky Notes. Casual reminders of the overlapping responsi

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Sass' Silent Placeholder function works the same as normal CSS extending in the cascade

This example here illustrates how that Sass will extend a silent selector in the cascade the same way that a normal selector would. The only difference is that silent placehodlers are not processed into CSS until they are called into a selector that is processed into CSS.

Play with this in SassMeister to see how the processed CSS changes between the different selectors. http://sassmeister.com/gist/4512325

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Fact: Mixins/functions may not be defined within control directives or other mixins.

Here is an best practice example for passing a value from a mixin into a function for the return

Sass

SassMeister-input.scss

CSS

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// Sass v3.2.5
// Stipe v0.0.5.5
// @import "stipe/manifest";

$color_names: shadow_color href_color form_field_border;
$color_var: $shadow_color $href_color $form_field_border;

@each $name in $color_names {
  $i: index($color_names, $name);
  %#{$name} {

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/*
  Use like this (or with <dl>, <ol>, <table>)...

  <ul>
    <li>
      <input type="checkbox" class="check-all" />
    </li>
    <li>
      <input type="checkbox" />
    </li>