I’ve used a debug css file for years. Its changed a lot over time but I seem to have settled on a format that works well with my workflow and other debugging tools (Firebug). This simple css file simply gives a background colour to every element to quickly enable me to see how well these elements are arranged on screen.

At a glance you can tell what’s not aligned correctly, where spacing is uneven and where certain elements are breaking out of their containers.

It’s nothing special but saves me a lot of time so I thought i’d share incase it helps anyone else out there.

Download: debug.css

Feel free to use and improve. Let me know how this could be made more useful.

Feeling inspired by the work of Yahoo’s development evangelist (That’s a real job title folks) Christian Heilmann I decided to have a little play with YQL. For those not aware of YQL take a look at Mr Heilmann 24ways post “The Web Is Your CMS”.

Put simply YQL makes working with APIs much easier by doing all the hard work for you. All you need to get data back from a service such as Youtube or Flickr is a simple YQL query which would be recognisable by anyone who has basic knowledge of SQL.

I used YQL to create this little experiment on AppleMad. Using YQL I grabbed a few Apple related blog posts, some delicious bookmarks tagged with “apple” and Apple related tweets from twitter. There’s not anything amazing happening here and I’ve still got some refining to do to make it more useful but the real point here is, from knowing nothing about YQL to putting this little site together only took a few hours. And most of that was me getting to grips with PHP (I’m a front end dude). I highly recommend looking into YQL, its a great way to easily get content from the web and display it on your site.

Further reading

• Yahoo! Query Language
• The YQL blog
• Christian Heilmanns blog