In our most recent installment, Bart taught us how to use CSS "variables" (custom properties) to customize Bootstrap to make your pages not look like every other Bootstrap page on the Internet. He explained at the end that you can take all of this quite a bit further if you learn how to use SASS (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets).

SASS is a preprocessor for CSS, which means it creates "normal" CSS but allows you a lot more flexibility in how to create that CSS. For example, you can even create lists and maps and loop over them just like a proper programming language. We get SASS for free with Jekyll so why not take advantage of it?

There's a lot to learn about SASS, so we broke this topic up into two parts, but even this first "half" is a mammoth episode. Nothing is a hard lift, but there's a lot to lift!

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes for both Part A and Part B and the audio podcast for Part A at pbs.bartificer.net. As Bart says at the very end, Part B comes with a "health warning" as it hasn't yet been proofread!

In our previous installment, Bart taught us how to use CSS "Variables" to style our web pages and web apps. In this installment, he takes it up a notch by showing us how to start with a Bootstrap-enabled page, and still customize the colors, fonts, and more with CSS "Variables".

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2026_04_25

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only, but all you have to do is ask Allison!

In this very fun installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart teaches us how to use CSS “variables”, which aren’t actually variables (they’re custom properties). These non-variables allow you to take advantage of Bootstrap to style web pages, but make the look and feel all your own. Bart outdid himself on the shownotes, the examples, and the challenge looks super fun.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net.

If you appreciate the work Bart puts into Programming by Stealth, consider supporting him through Patreon or Paypal by going to supporting him on Patreon..