If..Else Log

By selling the PS3 for $399 (and with production costs of $494), Sony will lose more than $1 billion on hardware during the first year on the market according to Merrill Lynch Japan.

A little introduction

Whilst on the whole, the fundementals of CSS are fairly straightforward to understand, it's helpful to sometime explore some of the more esoteric uses. This time, let's have a look at using CSS adjacent sibling selectors and a little used CSS pseudo-element to create drop caps.

First, as a picture says more than a thousand word, let's have a look at what we're aiming for.

Adjacent Sibling Selectors

What are Adjacent Sibling Selectors or as I'll call them by the wonderful acronym, ASS (feel free to get your sniggering out of the way). ASS are a way for us to access adjacent elements so that we can selectively style them.

<h3>Title</h3>
<p>A paragraph about some stuff</p>
<p>Some more stuff to talk about</p>

Now using ASS, we can style the first paragraph without affecting the second. How do we do this? Let's take a look at the syntax.

h3 + p{
	color:red;
}

Fairly self explanatory stuff. The first element is h3, the second is p and + is the adjacent operator.

Pseudo-elements

Now that we can select the first paragraph, how do we style the first character? Quite easily actually. Using the first-letter psuedo elements. What is a pseudo-element? Well, one that is in common use and that most people are familiar with is the :hover pseudo-element.

a:hover{
	color:red;
}

Pseudo-elements (henceforth known as PE) are a way to access and style characteristics based on information that lie outside the document tree. There's no actual hover element but we're able to assess it via this PE. Likewise, to access the first character, we can use the :first-letter PE.

Putting all these together

With everything we need in place, lets gather them together to style our drop caps. What we'll do is highlight the first letter of the first paragraph following the title by increasing the font-size, and changing the colour slightly. To make sure we're only styling the content block, we'll make sure that only descendents of the .entrybody class is styled.

.entrybody h3 + p:first-letter
{
	font-size:30px;
	color:#aaa;
}

Final words

As with all techniques, there's a time and a place to use them. This post was written more as a means of introducing ASS and PE rather than as the recommended way of implementing drop caps.

The Top One Hundred Greatest Mathematical Theorems. BTW, if you want a riveting account of one the Mathematic's gloriest puzzles, read Fermat's Last Theorem . Written for the layman, it's an absolutely amazing story.

Installing multiple versions of IE on the same machine. I've given up supporting older versions of IE for my personal sites, and I feel that VMWare/Virtual PC are a probably a better solution but this page may be useful for some.

The wonderful thing about the dashboard is that you're kept aware of pertinent WP news such as the release of WordPress 1.5.1.3.

Google launches Google Earth. Now you can have CSI moments in the comfort of your own home.

When Adsense was first unveiled, it was a bit of a revolution. Unlike banner ads, they were unobtrusive. However, lately I've been seeing a worrying trend. Now that Google have changed their T&C to allow you to place up to 3 ad blocks, far too many sites have gone ahead and done so.

I try to help out from time to time on various forums, as a way of giving back to the community but I'm increasingly finding that quite a few blogs (which I'll leave unnamed) that are just starting out are filling up their sites with ads. Here, there, everywhere until it gets to the point that I have to try hard to look beyond to see the content itself.

What is going wrong?

I'm not adverse to well implemented ads. However, I wonder if people know what they're doing.

Having more than one adsense block per page will not increase your click through success rate

In fact, in my case, it'll do exactly the opposite. If I see that a site is polluted with ads, I will make a point of *not* clicking any ads. Why?

If I can't see the content beneath the ads, why should I care about site? I'm just going to move on. More importantly however, is that this sort of stuff annoys the crap out of me. Pissing off your potential readers is not a good long term strategy.

Having more than one adsense block per page will not increase the successful targetting of the ads

Now if one ad block isn't providing the appropriate information, what makes you think that adding two more will do the job? If anything, it'll have a negative effect. In one distinct ad section, I can see if there are any appropriate exits. Add multiple sections and I'll mentally blank them out.

Having more than one AdSense block per page will not result in regular visitors

Before you start putting up adsense, have a thought to what you're doing with your blog. Is this a personal venture or are you doing this for financial gain?

If it's a personal venture, think on this. Would you be prepared to be distracted by marketeers when you're having a night out? Would you be prepared to wear adverts on your clothes if it gave you a discount? And would you be prepared to have a few adverts in your phone call if it meant cheaper calls?

Many of us would like people to read what we write. Many of us enjoy writing. Don't annoy your readers. Remember why you're doing this.

What about you? Aren't you using AdSense

If this post is still on the front page, then chances are that there are no adsense blocks at all on this page. And there will not be any adblocks at all on the front page. My aim is not to annoy any regular readers; this was never about any financial gain. This site is here because I enjoy web publishing.

So back to the adsense. What I've done is only display ads after they've been alive for at least 2 weeks (14 days). This will mean that regular visitors will not see any ads at all. Only people who arrive after the 2 week period will see the ads and as the usual manner that occurs is via search engines, the ads will hopefully be more appropriate (by providing alternative exits).

To do this, add the following piece of code in your index.php:

1. <?php
2. $u_time = get_the_time('U');
3. if ((time() - 1209600) >= $u_time){//60*60*24*14 = 1209600
4. ?>
5. <!-- Place your adsense code here -->
6. <?php } ?>

This retrieves the post timestamp and compares it to the current time minus 14 days. Only then will it display the ads.

Does this work?

The code obviously works but what has it done for my earnings? To be fair, I don't care at all. I'd be happy to take off the ads completely, especially if they were annoying. Anyways, I've had adsense on this site for about half a year now and I've made, well nothing. I haven't hit the first pay cheque limit yet.

In six months I made 60 dollars worth of clicks. At 10 dollars a month, that doesn't even pay for my internet connection. The only reason I'm carrying on is that I want to hit $100 so that Google will send me a cheque. After I get the cheque, it's going straight on my wall. Yep, I'm not even going to bank it.

So after reading this section, you've probably come to the conclusion that I'm the last person to go to if you want to make it big with adsense. If however, you want some common sense advice about using ads without annoying your readership, I hope some of what I said made sense.

Philosophy via error messages.

Found via Mathias, picture from Alexander Christiaan Jacob.

A nice example of CSS Table-less Forms.

Marko posts a nice summary of CSS hacks for IE. I generally stay away from hacks for my personal sites but they have their uses and, of course, knowledge is always useful.