Learning LESS: Put It Into Action

Alex Ball is finishing his Learning LESS series as he talks about putting your LESS into action on your web projects. This post will be slightly different than previous posts, as he won’t really showcase new techniques and code examples as much as he’ll talk about how to use LESS, projects you can work on to jump start your LESS development and more. If you haven’t read the first five posts on the topic, check out the Variables, Mixins, Nested Rules, Using Functions and Divide and Conquer.

If you read the introduction to the Learning LESS series, you saw that Alex Ball recommends compiling all of your LESS locally, and simply linking to one CSS stylesheet. Two of the top programs to do this is LESS.app and CodeKit. LESS.app is a free application that will detect all of the LESS files in your web folder, and compile them to CSS. You can set specific output folders and select which LESS files you actually want to compile (this comes in handy if you’ve divided up your LESS into smaller modular files and import them all into one stylesheet). Additionally, you can minify your CSS from this application, saving your precious file size (but don’t even think about editing your CSS file).