WaysouthEverything I needed to know about CSS I learned on Neopets
October 14th 2008 18:00
Image courtesy of Neopets.com
In an attempt to justify the late nights and long hours spent in front of the computer, many adults and children alike bring up the great educational value of video games. Improves your hand-eye coordination. Teaches math skills. Gives valuable computer skills.
Some of it is true and some false, but I have to admit that I have learned some things from gaming. The computer skills. Some real world economic implications. And of course, I learned everything I know about CSS on Neopets.
I also learned everything I know about HTML on Neopets back in the 1990's. It's insidious actually, I don't really want to learn web design, but Neopets has always put a big emphasis on providing design opportunities and personalization to users -- if you have the skilz to back it up that is!
Every user can have up to four pets, and each pet has a "petpage" on the Neopets servers. Within the terms of service and other restrictions, you can do whatever you want on that page. You can only post links to other Neopets pages though.
Technically petpages are the only pages on the site that users can build from scratch. The rest of the site has bold yellow side bars and text navigation menus that are standard. There are other pages on the site that the user can customize, including their shop, gallery and User Lookup. And by using CSS they can completely alter the standard layouts, colors, text and backgrounds.
To some people this may not seem too exciting, but on Neopets it is a great way to show off your l337 coding skills and make your pet and it's owner seem special.
Neopets even have Spotlight awards for great Petpages. If you want to see the wild variety of stuff that people program onto their petpage, that is a good place to start.
Site Spotlight
This is a really awesome petpage that I saw recently which is very highly coded, and shows how much you can do with a one-page site . . . if you use a lot of CSS
oodalalee's petpage
You can see the rest of the spotlights, including user lookup and pet customization, here:
Spotlights and Contests
If you don't know how to code, but you want to have an uber-cool lookup anyway, try this site that offers some "premade" lookups, gallery layouts, and shop layouts. Sunnyneo also has some great tutorials for learning CSS, including adblocker. Did you know that you can use CSS to disable ads before they ever load? Check the tutorials!
You can also get good advice and some helpful links by visiting the Neoboards, especially those for Spotlights and Galleries, Avatars and Fonts. Neopets users have also learned to code special signautres and fonts into their posts. Ask about and someone will point you towards a tutorial.
Neoboards index
So there you have it! If you want to learn to code CSS and wacky fonts, you need to play more Neopets.
Join here if you haven't already --
Neopets.com
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