Slow and Steady Progress

     As I had run in to problems last time working with Twitter Bootstrap-- specifically with getting the responsiveness (via the support classes "visible-*" and "hidden-*", with * being one of "phone", "tablet", or "desktop") to work, I am apologetic to announce that I have not found a solution yet. I have posted a question on the Twitter Bootstrap Google Group, but am yet to receive a definitive answer from the authorities. Disappointed, I decided to move on-- leaving responsiveness for a later day-- and focus on cleaning up the site in the meantime, implementing the other components of Twitter Bootstrap such as the fluid grid system and also converting CSS files to LESS. While these two components aren't much trouble, there were several other much more basic things that I had to tidy up before getting to use these tools. These menial tasks included: getting rid of the white backgrounds of icons, getting the LESS files to read properly, and whatnot.

     When using LESS, it is important to remember to import them into the html pages using this format:

<link rel="stylesheet/less" type="text/css" href="styles.less">

I did not realize this, and instead I used the standard CSS base of

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles.css">

and just changed the href file name. This, apparently is a big no-no, and is easy to forget about.

     Secondly, as I was coding my LESS files, I became rather frustrated with not being able to recognize errors because of the lack of syntax highlighting (my IDE is Eclipse). It is difficult to read code when it is all one color, not to mention a strain on the eyes when yours is fluorescent green against a black background like mines. I decided to try and find a sort of plugin or editor that includes syntax highlighting support for LESS, and stumbled upon this plugin for Eclipse. Unfortunately, as of now I have not been able to get it to work properly, but hopefully this is to be resolved soon.

     So as far as actual progress being made... truthfully it's not much.. yet. But as soon as I get all the preliminary environments set up properly, I can really get to the meat of the issue, which is to fix up all the pages (and hopefully with responsiveness too!). There's lots of work to be done, but thankfully the basic components of Twitter Bootstrap and LESS are extremely easy to use.