The problem

He wanted to have the <li>s from an <ul> to occupy the entire width regardless of how many they were. If there was only one list item, it would have a width of 100%. Two would have 50% each and three of them, 33.33%.

Also, he wanted to accomplish this using CSS only, without having to figure out the number either using javascript or a server-side language and apply a class accordingly (a natural and understandable cop-out if you have to support all browsers). But this is 2009 and he was looking at webkit. There has to be a way, I thought.

So after scratching my head for a bit, I put together a test page and started throwing selectors together and attempting to figure it out.

The Solution

With the pseudo-class :nth-child you can easily select elements based on their position in the list of children. This allows you to select one element at a time.

But you need an extra something to take into account how many siblings it has. That was the whole point.

In comes :nth-last-child. The difference between the two is that nth-child applies to the nth child counting from the top (ie, the child that has n-1 elements before it) while the nth-last-child applies to the nth child counting from the bottom (ie, the child that has n-1 elements after it!).

That said, we could use both of this pseudo-classes together to create sets of rules that would only apply when there are one, two or three items in the list!

Code

Here's the code.

/* one item */

li:nth-child(1):nth-last-child(1) {

	width: 100%;

}



/* two items */

li:nth-child(1):nth-last-child(2),

li:nth-child(2):nth-last-child(1) {

	width: 50%;

}



/* three items */

li:nth-child(1):nth-last-child(3),

li:nth-child(2):nth-last-child(2),

li:nth-child(3):nth-last-child(1) {

	width: 33.3333%;

}

I wish I could find one rule that would automatically figure out the width regardless of the number, instead of enumerating them all. Or even find an expression of the type an+b that would collapse all those selectors into one... But for now, this'll do.

You can test it if you have either Safari or Firefox 3.5 (beta) on this demo page.

Why am I telling you this?

What made CSS2 so successful or powerful wasn't just what was written in the spec. It was also the myriad of articles that popped up all over the web that showed how to combine little aspects of the spec to amount to pretty amazing things.

In conclusion, the sliding doors, the faux columns or the running with sprites articles of CSS3 are still waiting to be written.

So, what are you waiting for? Push the envelope and try to discover new ways of using the properties, selectors and media queries to achieve something otherwise impossible.

Just let us know when you do.

Video

Slides

If you have any questions, suggestions or criticism, don't hesitate to send them my way either on the comments, via email or twitter.

BTW, if you haven't seen these guys' original videos, you're so missing out. Best comedy show I've seen online. I recommend the Hardly Working series. ;)

• Actor in a Leading Role

  My hunch: Mickey Rourke FAIL

  Winner: Sean Penn

• Actor in a Supporting Role

  My hunch: Heath Ledger EPIC WIN!! (see my review of the Black Knight)

  Winner: Heath Ledger

• Actress in a Leading Role

  My hunch: Kate Winslet FTW! (best acceptance speech of the evening)

  Winner: Kate Winslet

• Actress in a Supporting Role

  My hunch: Viola Davis FAIL

  Winner: Penélope Cruz

• Animated Feature Filme

  My hunch: WALL-E FTW!

  Winner: WALL-E

• Art Direction

  My hunch: Changeling FAIL

  Winner: Donald Graham Burt, Victor J. Zolfo (Benjamin Button)

• Cinematography

  My hunch: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button FAIL

  Winner: Slumdog Millionaire

• Directing

  My hunch: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button FAIL

  Winner: Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire)

• Writing (adapted)

  My hunch: Slumdog Millionaire FTW!

  Winner: Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire)

• Writing (original)

  My hunch: WALL-E FAIL

  Winner: Dustin Lance Black (Milk)

• Best Picture

  My hunch: Slumdog Millionaire FTW!

  Winner: Slumdog Millionaire

MY WINNER

I couldn't leave out the best movie I've watched in recent years, which, IMHO, deserved the Best Picture award this year: SEVEN POUNDS!!!

What do you think? Any comments? :)

• try to blog more
• tweet less
• and hope to advance a few projects I have brewing.

In review, 2008 was a great year, filled with great music. Kings of Leon and Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. (best name for a band, ever) take the top spots on my shortlist.

As for movies, I'm going to have to agree with pecus, Into the Wild was the best movie I watched all year (it premiered in 2008 in Portugal, so it counts). Followed by TDK and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

And that's a wrap! :-)

SAPO Codebits 2008 has come and gone... and let me tell you, what a 3 day experience it was.

Let's start from the beginning.

My talk

I was up very early in the schedule, so I gave the talk, Microformats - putting together the pieces of the puzzle (roughly translated title) on the second slot of the first day. It was nice being able to stop worrying about it very early in the event.

From all the feedback I've gathered, right then and there and also later on the web, I think it went very well. It's nice seeing people saying:

The truth is that I’ve already heard a lot about microformats, but I’ve never had the chance to search and read something more detailed about it. (...) So, now that I caught some interest in Microformats, I’ll soon be applying them on my web projects.
—Rogério Vicente

If you want, take a peek at the slides at my last post or view them on slideshare (they're in Portuguese, though).

I handed out a few stickers, but if you want some for you, either ask me or create your own at Moo
(created by Brian Suda).

Other Presentations

The fact that some talks I was interested in were at the same time, presented the usual difficulties.

Which talk should I go to?

The ones I liked best were:

• Web cartooning ao vivo e a cores, by Pedro Couto e Santos
• CouchDB, by Jan Lehnardt
• Tecnologia numa startup , by Celso Pinto (only saw it on slideshare)

There were a few others I missed but I'll try to watch them as SAPO start releasing the videos (yes, there will be videos).

Coding competition

Right. Since this was heavily inspired in Yahoo! Hackday, the highlight is the coding competition.

This year I teamed up again with my pal Pedro Eugénio and we implemented a basic prototype of an idea we had during the event. Little did we know what was in store for us!

Here's the pitch.

Who's In?

We thought that one feature that was lacking on all major analytics packages was being able to see what your users were actually doing on your websites. So we wrote a little demo that captured the mouse movements and mouse clicks of each user and played it in the admin area (using comet, which was our first attempt at using it), all merged into one replica of the website.

This would allow site owners to perform usability tests on users without affecting their behaviour by telling them they're being tested. Also, client support can use this to provide some remote assistance on-the-fly with no setup required. There's a whole bunch of use-cases for this, really. And some of them might actually pull some money behind it.

If you're interested, watch the screencast we used during the 90 seconds and see the picture of a visual enhancement we did after recording the video below.

We thought the idea was great and as we shared it with everyone who was kind enough to hear us, we started getting very positive feedback... namely from Bruno Pedro, Pedro Melo, Nuno Mariz, etc. That's always a great motivator. Also, Bernardo Mota helped us a lot with his experience with client support. Thank you all for the help.

Well... The best was yet to come, as this little demo granted us the ___th prize! (we were so taken by surprise that we didn't actually remembered to ask which prize we got! It was either 6th or 5th, I think.) 4th place I couldn't believe it! We won a prize!! And what a prize it was! We each got a brand new Macbook, a motorola Q 9h and 2x books. I grabbed one that I've been wanting ever since I saw Ann McMeekin presenting at <HEAD>: Design Accessible Web Sites. Pedro got a huge bible on Ajax. Awesome (the Eddie Izzard kind of awesome) prizes, I tell you. Great partners Codebits has. ;)

So thank you all who helped us, the jury for supporting us and now, we're off to find out the best way to get this online ASAP. I'll keep you posted.

One wish for 2009, though... I hope to see a lot less (or... none?) projects presented that were not developed within the 24 hours. There were still a good deal of projects that were clearly developed outside codebits and just used them at the competition... I know it's not that polite to critique if you're one of the winners, but the whole spirit of the event is to see what you can come up with in 24 hours...

So kudos to everyone who did their stuff at the event and as far as my favourite projects go, well, here's a list.

• Crowdbeats
• CloudStream
• Myusic
• Blog game

Organizers and participants

A last word to the organizers, who happen to be the company where I work at. Well done boys. It makes us proud to be part of the family with such a stunning event.

Also, I met a good deal of people throughout the 3 days and let me tell you, it feels good to see so many people getting together around the common interest, technology, and still be able to have a good time, laugh, sing, play, etc.

It's a proof that when it comes to geeks, there's more than meets the eye. ;)

Feedback more than appreciated.

Also, I forgot to say I'll be hanging out with cheatsheets during the hacking competition. On top of that, I have some moo stickers to hand out. Ask me for them... I'm also looking for more stickers, so if you have some, let me know.

Happy hacking, folks.

Estamos naquela altura do ano. Altura do Codebits! O ano passado, a primeira edição garantiu um lugar especial no coração de geeks por todo esse Portugal. Pelos pequenos teasers que foram sido lançados no Blog do evento, este ano ainda vai ser melhor!

E claro, não podia deixar de lá estar. Cá está o meu perfil na Intra do evento. Graças ao Celso, aquilo está carregadinho de XFNs e hCards. :D

Este ano, fui convidado a fazer uma workshop sobre um tema que me interessa bastante e que não deverá ser surpresa para quem lê o blog — microformatos. Na altura tive receio de ficar marcado como "O gajo que não se cala com microformatos", mas uma vez que nunca fiz nenhuma sobre este tema num espaço público (ambas as vezes foram formações internas), aceitei o convite.

Aqui fica a sinopse publicada no site do Codebits:

Os microformatos têm-se vindo a afirmar nos últimos anos como uma peça vital no futuro da web. Dada a sua facilidade de implementação e o aumento do suporte destes formatos em várias frentes, há cada vez mais sites a produzirem conteúdos com estes formatos embebidos.

Nesta workshop iremos dar uma introdução ao conceito, uma visão geral dos formatos mais predominantes e mostrar várias formas de os consumir _hoje_ na web.

Vai ter por base a apresentação que publiquei há umas semanas, no entanto, foi alterada para estar mais próxima da realidade do codebits. Para além disso, foi actualizada com algumas novidades que sugiram entretanto. Também irá incluir uma série de exemplos e possibilidades para talvez despertar a imaginação dos participantes e poderem assim criar projectos para o concurso do Codebits que tirem partido da miríade de microformatos que existem por essa web fora.

Ora tomem lá um sneak-peek:

Se tens dúvidas ou críticas sobre os slides que publiquei, aparece e coloca questões!

Até lá? ;)

Mal posso esperar pela edição de 2009. Ano passado: quadrados. Este ano: cubos. Próximo: hipercubo? :D

I've had a couple of websites hosted at PowWeb since 2005. Even tough I had had other hostings before that, their plan really looked promising, at the time.

For the first year, everything went smoothly. After that, the lack of SSH and their poor handling of a few issues I had with my account really started to bug me.

When the yearly invoice was approaching, I really wanted to move everything elsewhere, but I ended up staying simply because it was too much of a trouble. Didn't want to move the whole set of websites, since, if I recall correctly, it was during some busy busy weeks.

But come on... this is 2008, the 21st century! No one should have their websites hosted on hosts they don't like. That's why this year, I got off my ass and moved everything to slicehost. Yes, I'm finally free of PowWeb! And that makes me smile.

On the table, I had mediatemple's (gs), slicehost and gandi. I decided to grab a slice and see how it goes. I'm on a monthly basis, so if I want to pick up and leave, I will. And yes, I know they were just bought by RackSpace. I'm an optimist.

With the total control over the machine, comes a lot more work. Since I've never worn the admin hat very seriously, some of you might have felt a few *hiccups* on either one of my hosted domains:

• *.andr3.net
• mobifeeds.net
• brunoluis.com

If you find something out of place, it's either a glitch in the Matrix or I've overlooked something.

Give me a shout, will ya? Thanks.

Feel free to give some feedback in the comments below.

Demo and Code

For those of you who didn't attend, I wrote a tiny little script over two nights that acts as proof of concept. It simply scrapes a given page and tries to gather data of the user's attention profile.

The goal would be to be able to provide content in which the user is interested right off the bat, as soon as they sign up. I described the harvesting algorithm in one of the slides, but here is a small list of the steps:

1. Get page contents.
2. Look for an APML
3. Gather set of rel-tags
4. Scrape any rel-next, rel-previous or rel-archives.
   This step is not done in the script, it just detects the presence of the links.

You can test it for yourself at: http://workshop.andr3.net/tageater/

If you want the code, it's available for download as zip file. I didn't put it up on SVN or anything because it's just an example. It's written in PHP (5.0), requires curl, DOM and SimpleXML.

It uses the microformats transformer Optimus, written by Dmitry Baranovskiy.

It includes a very basic cache mechanism, based on the filesystem. Make sure the ./cache/cache folder has the right permissions, if you want to use it.

I'm releasing all this under the MIT License, but remember this is only a proof of concept, or in another words, do not use this in production.

Examples

Here's a few tests I made with it. First, and this is included in the script eve though it's deactivated, I pointed it at the all the URLs specified by the BarcampPT attendees. On top of that, to avoid skewing the results by grabbing URLs owned by fellow geeks, I pointed it towards 5 of the highlighted blogs at SAPO Blogs at the time.

Q&A

A very important question came up from the audience right at the end.

What's the motivation to open up and publish our users' attention profiles?

By opening up your platform and allowing the users to knowingly publish their attention profiles, you are not only becoming a part of the web's ecosystem. You are increasing the value and importance of the users profiles in your own service/website!

Or as I put it, when the user signs up on any other website or service and sees that it's possible to import his attention profile from YOUR service, who do you think will benefit? Both the new service AND your own! He will become aware of the increased usefulness of having a profile with you. More here.

If you have some more questions, shoot. :)

z-Ceiling

Let me know if you run into some bugs or if it fails to pick up any element. Worked for me on Firefox 3, but should work on other browsers as well.

(the code of the demo I used at barcamppt is in the oven, should be ready soon.)

What you're seeing there is the comparison between Safari 3.1.1 and Google Chrome, running inside VMWare. I have ClearType enabled, so I have no idea why border-radius has no f—— anti-aliasing!!

Also, where's text-shadow??

Conclusion?

Google Chrome has got to be using a very stale version of Webkit... because it FAILS at basic CSS3 stuff!

While it's enough to mop the floor with IE 6, 7 and 8, it's not enough to bear the name of "webkit".

Apart from that, it's impressive. Hope everyone using Windows grabs a copy. Dad, I'm not looking at you, stick to Firefox! ;D

The creator of Hellboy is not only alive and kicking but also a part of the project! Guillermo had the nerve to kept adding stuff into HIS story?? How would Tolkien stand a chance? Things didn't look good.

If you add that to the similarity between all del Toro's monstrous creatures - which you can see on the picture on the right; the top is from Hellboy 2 and the bottom one is from Pan's Labyrinth - things are definitely not looking good for The Hobbit, are they?

That's what I thought when I came out of the movie.
(I actually liked it.)

At least until I came online and searched for news about The Hobbit.

The GOOD news

Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro writing Hobbit themselves, not only that, they're teaming up with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, the same gals who aided Peter "The Hobbit" Jackson put together the pretty outstanding adaption of the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings.

There. I can sleep at ease until 2011.

That shot in Hellboy 2 when they enter the "earth", sure had some resemblance with the Misty Mountains... hadn't it?

With all that said... I'd just like to add this picture, and let it speak for itself:


It hurts even more to see now how much talent was lost that night.

| View | Upload your own

Thanks Pedro, for inviting me.

Ignore this.

1. THE Icon

   It's been announced that no other than the original creator for the beloved Firefox icon, Jon Hicks, has been working on a new one! I love his work so much, that I can only expect great things for this new version.

   
   

   UPDATE: Ops! According to this thread on Google Group mozilla.dev.apps.firefox, they dropped the logo for this release! As if postponing revealing µformats wasn't enough droppin'... :(

   
   

2. Extensions Add-ons

   With both a Microformats API, created by none other than Michael Kaply–from Operator's fame–and also SQLite available to extension developers, I'm hoping this version takes Firefox extensions and Microformats to the next level. If you're developing a toolbar for your service, it will be a piece of cake to grab µformats data from webpages and import them directly to your service. After writing a user-script for Operator, I'm certainly curious. If you're into Add-on developing, here's a tutorial on developing Add-ons for Firefox 3 using the Microformats API.

3. Anti-aliased border-radius and other CSS goodness

   You'll still have to use the Mozilla-specific property -moz-border-radius but at least the result will be far better looking than previous versions (2.x). Check the screenshot.

   
   
   And believe me, it makes a difference!

   
   You can check the rest of the CSS improvements by going through the list, but I, for one, am specially salivating for RGBA and inline-block. Too bad we-know-whom will take forever to catch-up.

4. Offline stuff

   Events and storage! What more can I say? I'm definitely going to check it out. With IE8 pointing towards the same, offline webapps will become hotter and hotter.

5. Reviving mailto links

   The ability to choose Web applications to handle special protocols, is going to greatly improve the experience of using webapps as a whole. Composing new mail messages by simply clicking on mailto: links, adding events to online calendars or contacts to online address books. It was a missing piece of the puzzle of online productivity tools. Me like-y.

Everything else...

It's not like the rest doesn't matter... The address bar, the phishing explicit warnings, the download manager, the add-on downloader straight from the browser chrome, quick bookmarking, native theme for MacOS, Vista and Linux... All awesome stuff! But if I had to pick out 5 items, those would be them.

I'm ready. Ship it!
Oh! And have yourself a merry Download Day!

If you want more, make sure you read the Field Guide!

After a shy tweet amidst today's ruckus by whoever is behind microformats.org account at twitter, I had to put this up here.

Yahoo! had talked the talk but they also walked the walk! You can now search pages with microformatted content! Just include the too long keyword: searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.uf.<format> in your search.
(read the blog post on YDN)

Not only that, there's already plenty results in the wild! Have a look at these numbers:

1. hCard — 1,150,000,000 pages (!!!!!)
2. hCalendar — 84,700,000 pages
3. hReview — 43,300,000 pages
4. hAtom — 304,000,000 pages
5. xfn — 261,000,000 pages

Remember. These numbers represent number of pages with at least one occurrence of the chosen microformat. So, in reality, there's a lot more individual fragments of µfs out there!

Harness the power of semantic content

You can now search the hell out of these contents! Here's a few examples:

• Search yourself (in this case, me).
• Events in Lisbon
• Web Conferences in 2008
• Pearl Jam reviews
• You try it...