Setting Decimal Precision in Sass When Compiling With Grunt

When you’re extending an existing Sass-enabled template in your local environment, you may notice your fresh instance of the template doesn’t quite match up with the demo template. For example, your line-heights, column widths, and other dynamic measurements are just different enough to drive you mad. If you use your browser’s inspector to investigate, you’ll likely discover your dev environment is rounding your computed measurements to the default of five decimal places. This is a common hiccup with Bootstrap, for example, where a base line-height of 1.428571429 becomes 1.42857. Continue reading →

Using Terminal aliases to easily switch project environments

If you work for an agency, chances are you have multiple development environments. Some clients have you mirroring their engineering team’s setup, others you created to your preference, and yet more are relics of past configurations you’ve forgotten about.

In this situation, I have a hard time remembering which project needs a “bundle exec guard” versus an “npm start” to get my SASS compilers, linting tools, and other gems going. Lately, I’ve been enjoying the use of bash aliases to both act as a more organized system of inventory, and to maintain my sanity when toggling between development environments. Continue reading →

Duplicating pages in-place in InDesign

I don’t know why I didn’t Google this until today, but it’s always bothered me the default “Duplicate Spread” feature in InDesign tosses your new page to the end of your document—always forcing you to have to drag it elsewhere.

To duplicate a page inline with the page you’re actively working on, hold down your option key (Mac OS) and drag the page you want to duplicate into the position you want it duplicated to (usually right after the master you’re duplicating from).

It seems the default should be to duplicate in-line, in the context of where you are working in the document. I’m not sure of a use-case where I’d want a single page thrown to the end of the document, unless I’m duplicating a batch of pages into a new chapter. In that event, I’d rather the single page duplicate in-line by default and a multi-select of pages request a decision similar to the PDF insert pages dialog.

Mobile Only: How to build and launch a website from your phone

As a thought experiment, I wondered if it was possible to design, develop, and launch a custom website from my phone, without touching a tablet or computer.

Spoiler alert: I could.

In fact, not only was it possible to build a website from my phone, but I was able to do it in less than a couple hours of research and work, using only free apps. The following post will give you the step-by-step on how to launch your own mobile-only website.

For this experiment, I used an iPhone 4 running whatever the last version of iOS was it supported. I didn’t use any external displays or input devices. Continue reading →