I gave a quick Firestarter talk at the San Francisco .Net user group yesterday about .less. .less (‘dot-less’) is an open source .Net library, which extends the functionality of CSS (it works with your existing CSS files), adding features like variables, using a syntax close to CSS. If you find that working with CSS causes some teeth-grinding , you should probably have a look!

Download the slide deck here

After much postponing, I finally cleaned up the layout of Clear Lines. I had cobbled together the previous design over a few days when I started, and, because it's not a crucial aspect of my activities, I left it at that until now. I like my new design better (I hope you do, too!), it feels much cleaner than the previous one. The main motivation was not the looks, though, but rather flexibility. I will add a few pages soon, and need to easily integrate them into the site navigation, so I finally replaced my hard-coded links by an ASP.NET menu. And while I was at it, I got inspired by Peter Kellner's beautiful menu for the Silicon Valley Code Camp site, and started looking into Css Friendly Control Adapters.

I like the fact that the whole menu layout is pure css, instead of tables, but I struggled quite a bit with getting css to play nice. Not the adapter's fault, rather my own limitations with css... In the end, I managed to get roughly the look I was after. That being said, if you open the page in IE7, it will render differently than in any other browser I tried: for some reason, I couldn't get IE to change the background color of the menu links on hover, or to render properly a border-bottom. If anyone has an idea what's wrong with my css, I would love to hear it!

Next step: upgrade the blog to BlogEngine 1.5, and probably add a sub-menu to the pages, similar to the Code Camp site.