Using CSSedit Milestones

Published by: ezra vancil on 12th Mar 2009 | View all blogs by ezra vancil

I'm kinda pissed right now. I just wrote a nice informative blog about CSSedit, and went to submit, my internet connection coughed, and it was gone. But you know what, that makes me love CSSedit's Milestone feature allot more. I wish everything, including this blog had a milestone. Imagine having a trail of CSS versions all the way back to the start of your project... wouldn't that be great. Or, being abel to experiment on your CSS theme without ever worrying about screwing something up. that's the power of the Milestone feature.

Lets say everything is looking good, but I want to see what the whole deep purple site looks like in lime green, or better just create a lime green site for saint patties day, and toss it later.

Here is what you do:

First, save your working version as a Milestone:

Second, Name your milestone and don't worry about date or time, it does that for you.

When your done with your Lime Green styles, do the same, save it... and if it looks like crap or Saint paddies day is over, just revert. It's like having thousands of variation style sheets in one.

Thats it.

Debugging with CSSedit

By combining CSSedit's infinite undos you can also use this as your debugging method.

Just think, you've put hours into making your blog post look like bling on a stick, only to find it totally screwed up your profile pages. Easy. Just save all your work in a milestone, and start hitting the control-z. Watch the preview page, and when you see one of the problems disappear, make not of that CSS declarations you just nixed with control-z. Keep doing this until you have the profile page looking good again, and a list of all the declarations that changed it for the better when you un-did them.

Now go back to the milestone that contains all your Blog work, and simply search for those CSS tags. Now you can either paste in those old CSS attributes, or mess with the ones in that milestone... but at least you know which ones they are, and don't have to dig for hours. This little trick usually takes me about 1-2 min to scour through hours of CSS.