Recently in Blogging Category

[UPDATE: I stand corrected. Informed commenters point out that though the source was available, MT was never technically "open source". To quote Richard Blain, "I was misinformed" -V]

It's ironic, to me at least. When I first got interested in blog software, I heard that Movable Type was the one to beat. It was written in Perl, which was my language of choice; it was open source (so you could make your own modifications); and it was by many accounts the most advanced blogging software out there (but not without argument, of course, this is the Internet).

Five minutes after I discovered it, the company announced that their 3.0 version would carry a new, commercial license. Suddenly being Perl was useless, because I could no longer modify, fork, or crib from the code. I moved on, and finally settled on Wordpress.

Now, Movable Type is once again opening its source code. Thanks to Ben and Mena for contributing this code back to the community. Ultimately, open source software is not about the software, it's about the community of users, and we users appreciate it when the companies we support share with us. Keep up the good work!

Our friends over at A List Apart have been publishing pearls of wisdom for years, and here is the proof. These articles on CSS drop shadows are actually from 2004, but the techniques are still (mostly) valid today. You can probably dispense with the extra hurdles they went through to support IE for Mac, though. Does anyone use IE on the Mac anymore?

• CSS Drop Shadows - A great technique with minimal image manipulation.
• CSS Drop Shadows II: Fuzzy Shadows - An improvement on the previous drop shadow effect.
• Onion Skinned Drop Shadows - And finally(?), the onion-skin technique for CSS drop shadows, for those with subtle and refined tastes.