Hidden away in the depths of the CSS specification you’ll find CSS counters. As the name suggests they allows you to count a thing on your page with CSS incrementing the value every time it appears on the document.

This is principally useful if you have a tutorial website — whether that be about cooking or web development — they all have steps to follow, and you’ll most likely have to write the step number before the actual content. CSS counters can help by doing that automatically, you can even use it to count the images on your file and add figure numbers before captions.

In this example I will be demonstrating how to achieve this by creating a simple recipe for pancakes and making CSS search for the beginning of each paragraph and adding the number of the step before it.

As I grew up, being a “creative child,” which was the description my school psychologist used to explain why I didn’t care for school or the usual subjects like math and why I wasn’t like the other children, my mother would get frustrated and call me “bull-headed, just like your great grandfather!” There was little hope for me being anything else but a pain-in-the-butt artist. It was, unfortunately, that incorrigible demeanor I had, either through genetics or experiences that would keep me from being an artist.

Talent for space, shapes and colors would never be enough until I learned to open my mind. Just having the talent to enthrall the other kids in my class, the “normal ones” who would gather around to watch me draw dinosaurs eating army tanks and superheroes ripping the head off our teacher and then point and tattle to that very same teacher that I was drawing naughty pictures — the very same kids who grew up to be Wall Street brokers, lawyers and politicians — would not be enough to make me an artist for my career. As I would find out years later, neither would art school. Not at first.

Things were different in high school. I was allowed to take elective courses and chose, of course, lots of art classes. I spent three of five days in my week with the same teacher, in the same room, just trying different things, using whatever material I could find, or sitting, copying the drawings of Jack Kirby, hoping one day to be a comic book artist like him. I actually got to meet the man and shoved my ripped out notebook pages with various sketches at him. “Yeah, very nice, kid!” he said with a big cigar clenched in his teeth. With that rave review, I continued on the same path until I stepped into art school.

In the last post, we took an in-depth look at Google’s Panda and Penguin updates and how they have impacted on search rankings for businesses. Whilst we established that using black hat SEO techniques is likely to result in a site becoming penalized, we didn’t look at what’s known as gray hat SEO.

Gray hat SEO is, as the name suggests, somewhere in the middle of black hat and white hat. This means that whilst the practices may be perceived by some as being OK, for the most part they still break search engine rules and may result in losing rankings, or worse.

However, it’s important to bear in mind that whilst gray hat techniques can be used for genuine reasons and considered to be a good practice, it’s the abuse of the techniques which has led to suspicion when it comes to using gray hat.

The side project series is a series of posts in which we’ll be taking a look at the best of designers’ side projects. To get things started, this week we’re going to be looking at Type Fight, a side project by designers Drew Roper, Ryan Paule and Bryan Butler.

Type Fight plays host to weekly “fights” in which two designers are asked to create a typographic treatment of the same character and then have their final designs voted on to determine whose is best. So far, Type Fight has hosted 61 guest fights between design heavyweights such as Alex Perez, Rogie King, Brendan Pittman, and Aaron Eiland, to name a few. There is also an ongoing battle between Drew and Ryan, who are now due to face off for an 11th time.