CSS Wizardry » Writing

CSS Wizardry, personal content and getting things for free

Harry Roberts — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 12:25:01 +0000

Today I was somewhat surprised to receive a tweet from one of my (I’m guessing newer) followers saying he was ‘disappointed that I tweet personal content from this account’ and that he ‘expects more CSS related content’. I’m not going to link to the tweet, because I feel that’s not necessary, but I was a little taken aback. Here’s my open reply…

N.B. This article is not aimed directly at the person who sent the tweet, rather an open letter to everyone…

CSS Wizardry is my own personal branding. It started off as my portfolio back in 2007 when I was 17. Since then it has transformed as I released more and more tutorial and resource content, and started writing in-depth articles. I also joined Twitter to help spread my personal brand to reach a wider audience. Twitter, along with some very high brow followers I am both pleased and humbled to have acquired, has been a massive force in CSS Wizardry’s expansion.

Since its inception, CSS Wizardry has remained free to use~~, and free of ads~~. ~~I currently do not monetise CSS Wizardry whatsoever.~~ Cheeky wee ad in the sidebar. I have provided hours and hours and hours of decent, insightful content at no cost to my followers/readers and have not directly collected a penny for myself from doing so. CSS Wizardry costs me massively in both time writing content, and money in hosting etc. I give a lot away for nothing, and actually at cost to myself.

I was conscious some time ago that I had a few personal articles on CSS Wizardry which I thought were perhaps out of place, so I created my even-more-personal site at harryroberts.co.uk to house all that stuff.

People like to follow people, otherwise they’d just read RSS feeds…

If you really don’t want any personal stuff appearing via Twitter then simply don’t follow me. If you just want web development content then subscribe to the feed, but please please please…

Play fair, CSS Wizardry is a time and cash investment on my part to provide good quality content for you for free. Don’t bitch about it, ey? That’s just ungrateful…

Typographic phrases (or: how to turn sayings geeky)

Harry Roberts — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 09:46:28 +0000

A while ago I had the idea to express some old sayings in a silly, geeky way, using code and logic to express logically, the meaning behind some well known phrases. I got Illustrator fired up last night and decided to finally got a few made. They’re kind of obvious really, even a non-developer brain can make sense of them, and deciphering the saying is pretty simple, but I think they’re cool nonetheless.

Many hands make light work

There are lots of contradictions in sayings and phrases. Like this one, if many hands do make light work, then how does this next one work?

Too many cooks spoil the broth

A stitch in time…

While the cat is away…

Absence makes the heart grow fonder vs. time is a great healer

This one is another glaring contradiction, so I decided to combine the two into one poster.

Out of sight, out of mind

Two wrongs don’t make a right

This one doesn’t really follow the code paradigm, but I thought I’d include it anyway.

Got any more that would work in this way? Leave any suggestions in the comments.

Also, I do realise that, programmatically, not all of these posters make perfect sense. For example, $cooks > 'enough' doesn’t really work in a programming sense… It’s just a bit of fun!

The importance of proper punctuation

Harry Roberts — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:44:38 +0000

This is a short (and cheeky) post on the necessity of using proper punctuation—particularly the hyphen—and how it can completely alter the meaning of your sentence, often with ill effect. This morning, for one reason or another, I was reminded of a conversation I had with @nofunnyname last week on the subject of him buying a car. He said:

“I need to get an old ass banger.”

So, is that ‘old-ass banger’, or ‘old ass-banger’? You decide ;)