Say you have a table header (i.e. <th>) of "Number of Howler Monkey Species by Country" and the data in the corresponding <td> is like "3". That's an awkward mismatch of width.

Perhaps not a huge problem for two columns, but if you had 20 that would be very hard to navigate and a poor use of space. A better use of space is to rotate the headers so that the column width can be much narrower.

Rotating 90-degrees is too far though. It makes it hard to read.

Interestingly, we get just about the same amount of space saving if we rotate the headers 45 degrees instead, and they are much easier to read.

The Trick

There are a couple of tricks here.

We're going to need to use transform: rotate() to angle the headers. Chrome/Safari lets you do that right on the <th>, but I had trouble with the text disappearing in Firefox that way, so let's do that within a nested <div>. That

we'll force to be the width we want the column to be (it also didn't work to force the cell narrow directly). We're going to need another nested element as well, so...

<th class="rotate"><div><span>Column header 1</span></div></th>

th.rotate {
      /* Something you can count on */
      height: 140px;
      white-space: nowrap;
    }
    
    th.rotate > div {
      transform: 
        /* Magic Numbers */
        translate(25px, 51px)
        /* 45 is really 360 - 45 */
        rotate(315deg);
      width: 30px;
    }
    th.rotate > div > span {
      border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc;
      padding: 5px 10px;
    }

Note the magic numbers there. I bet some of you are smart enough to figure out the mathematical relationship to all the other numbers going on in there. In fact, my example started out life as a fork of Jimmy Bonney's Column Header Rotation article. I was able to do it without the skew() stuff he was doing which I think makes it a bit simpler, but he also had figured out some math stuff using tan() and cos() which might be a good starting point if you start digging in yourself.

Fallback

If you go down this road, you might wanna make sure you aren't applying rules that screw up the table if the transforms don't work. Modernizr can test for that and apply support/non-support classes to the <html> element, so you can write stuff like:

/* These aren't needed and will be weird if transforms don't work */
    .csstransforms & th.rotate {
      height: 140px;
      white-space: nowrap;
    }

How you want to do the fallback is up to you, but it could be worse than just having the table be super wide:

My final demo has this in place.

Demo

See the Pen Rotated Table Headers by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

It's in Sass in case you want to fork it and figure out some awesome way to use variables and math and stuff to make it more adaptable.

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Rotated Table Column Headers is a post from CSS-Tricks

UMBC’s College of Engineering and Information Technology is using an Energy Education Award from Constellation Energy to provide energy research opportunities for a significant number of undergraduate students.

This semester, students in IS 420: Advanced Database Development received technology to collect the power consumption data of different appliances and devices. They are also working to build a web-portal (GUI), which will capture human actions, energy behavior and footprint over a specific period.

Project involvement encourages the students to think differently about energy systems and promotes advanced study and career preparation in the energy industry. The Constellation project helps students gain a greater sense of social awareness and deeper understanding of energy system technologies, as well as enhance their basic research and development skills through this hands-on experience. By combining their intrinsic research abilities and inspiration, the students will become conscious about the importance of being a responsible energy user in their daily lives and beyond.

Read more about the Energy Education Award here.

Startup Mighty Cast thinks teens may want a wearable computer with modular components.

A Montreal-based startup called Mighty Cast is working on an electronic bracelet to which modular charms can add new functionality. It hopes to start selling it for about $50 later this year.

A roundup of the most interesting stories from other sites, collected by the staff at MIT Technology Review.

Gene Therapy’s Big Comeback
Gene therapy is attracting investors once again: companies have raised $618 million since the beginning of 2013, Forbes reports.
—Susan Young Rojahn, biomedicine editor

Want to learn the newest way to become a billionaire? Try sharing.

The founders of website airbnb (Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia) just became three of the worlds’ youngest billionaires, and the first to earn their fortune in the so-called “sharing economy.” 

Airbnb connects travelers to hosts in 192 countries around the world. The Airbnb client pays to stay in the home of an Airbnb host during their trip.

While some worry that the site cuts into hotel profits without being subject to the same regulations as the former, Airbnb trumpets the economic benefit of its service. 

Airbnb is just one manifestation of the fast-growing sharing economy. Relatively new companies such as Zipcar (car sharing, founded 2000), Capital Bikeshare (bicycle sharing, 2010), and Lyft (ride sharing, 2012) all do business  helping people share.

Book and tool libraries use a similar model, but without the element of profit. Similarly, many of our student readers probably have experience borrowing  items such as pans from their friends and residence halls.

What are the implications of all this?  

Not everyone is in favor. Some industries argue that businesses based on peer-to-peer sharing  are unfairly difficult to tax and regulate: Chicago cab drivers are suing the city in an attempt to force it to regulate ride-share service Uber.

 Conversely, environmentalists see at least one obvious benefit: less stuff consumed.

The environmental impact of buying a single vacuum cleaner to share with your neighbor is half that of producing two vacuum cleaners.  Finally, the sharing economy can benefit consumers by saving them money. 

Is the sharing economy a fad, or the future?

Share your thoughts below.

If you are a Google Glass user, you might have been greeted with concerned looks or raised eyebrows at public places. There has been a lot of chatter in the “interweb” regarding the loss of privacy that results from people taking your pictures with Glass without notice. Google Glass has simplified photography but as what happens with revolutionary technology people are worried about the potential misuse.

FaceBlock helps to protect the privacy of people around you by allowing them to specify whether or not to be included in your pictures. This new application developed by the joint collaboration between researchers from the Ebiquity Research Group at University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Distributed Information Systems (DIS) at University of Zaragoza (Spain), selectively obscures the face of the people in pictures taken by Google Glass.

Comfort at the cost of Privacy?

As the saying goes, “The best camera is the one that’s with you”. Google Glass suits this description as it is always available and can take a picture with a simple voice command (“Okay Glass, take a picture”). This allows users to capture spontaneous life moments effortlessly. On the flip side, this raises significant privacy concerns as pictures can taken without one’s consent. If one does not use this device responsibly, one risks being labelled a “Glasshole”. Quite recently, a Google Glass user was assaulted by the patrons who objected against her wearing the device inside the bar. The list of establishments which has banned Google Glass within their premises is growing day by day. The dos and donts for Glass users released by Google is a good first step but it doesn’t solve the problem of privacy violation.

Privacy-Aware pictures to the rescue

FaceBlock takes regular pictures taken by your smartphone or Google Glass as input and converts it into privacy-aware pictures. This output is generated by using a combination of Face Detection and Face Recognition algorithms. By using FaceBlock, a user can take a picture of herself and specify her policy/rule regarding pictures taken by others (in this case ‘obscure my face in pictures from strangers’). The application would automatically generate a face identifier for this picture. The identifier is a mathematical representation of the image. To learn more about the working on FaceBlock, you should watch the following video.

Using Bluetooth, FaceBlock can automatically detect and share this policy with Glass users near by. After receiving this face identifier from a nearby user, the following post processing steps happen on Glass as shown in the images.

What promises does it hold?

FaceBlock is a proof of concept implementation of a system that can create privacy-aware pictures using smart devices. The pervasiveness of privacy-aware pictures could be a right step towards balancing privacy needs and comfort afforded by technology. Thus, we can get the best out of Wearable Technology without being oblivious about the privacy of those around you.

FaceBlock is part of the efforts of Ebiquity and SID in building systems for preserving user privacy on mobile devices. For more details, visit http://face-block.me