Doing More with LESS

This week was dedicated to working with LESS and working with making the Kukui Cup page responsive using the Twitter Bootstrap framework. After some reading and tutorial videos I felt like I was ready to take a stab at implementing them both into the Kukui Cup page. However, it wasn't with its own challenges.

Working with Twitter Bootstrap was actually not too bad. It was similar to using the Skeleton structure we tried using a few weeks ago, but a little more straight forward with the class names and exactly what they did. It came with a nice class that allowed divs to be put into rows as well as a 12-column system that allows divs to put into 12 even columns or other versions of it (ie. 3 columns of width 4, 2 columns of width 6, etc.). It seemed easy, until actually inserting the div tags around already existing divs. With a page already having a few dozen div tags, it was quite simple to find the opening div I wanted to surround, but finding the corresponding closing div was a task that took some time. Now that a few of the simpler pages are done (ie. news and profile) its time work on the others like 'activity' that contain fixed with width objects.

As for LESS, as expected it was WORLDS simpler than having to re-enter the same css code or having a semantically bad css file that is hard to read. LESS allowed me to save things like color and paths to pictures in variables to reuse them later in other lines of the code. This saved a lot of time since I wouldn't have to go back and search through what color I used or look up what color that hex or RGBA code was. There are still some problems however. When I try loading the page in Google Chrome, the less.js file throws an error and I am not sure how to fix it. I will be looking into it more over the next few days so that the file will work well in all browsers (or well, maybe not Internet Explorer).