CSS Tools

You may have noticed that my blog page has changed appearance - this is part of a switch to community server 2.0.

As some of you undoubtably know, the appearance of most blogs (and web pages in general) is controlled by a technology known as CSS. I've read a bit of CSS, but I'm not really up on it, which means I never really do much with it.

A fellow MS blogger pointed out two tools to help:

The IE Developer Toolbar has a DOM viewer that lets you see the tree view of how a web page is organized - you can see how a title is defined, where text lives, etc.

And SiteVista lets you edit the CSS on the fly. Point it at a site, and it will show you the style sheets in one pane, the web page in another, and the current view in a third. Edit the style sheet, and your changes show up live in the current view.

*Very* nice. I may modify (a deep understanding of my graphics skills prevents me from saying "improve") the look of my blog now.

I noticed on my blog, there's a base CSS sheet and then my customizations on top of it. In that case, SiteVista will only show changes if you copy the element you want to change to the customization page, which is okay because that's where you'll want them eventually anyway.