It sounds kind of weird, but I'm actually really passionate about CSS pre-processors. Switching to LESS from plain CSS was one of the biggest and clearest productivity improvements I've ever made to my dev toolkit.
I was reluctant to try it as I feel like there are already so many moving configurable layers to my dev stack and all I could think was "I have this nice static css file here - I just include it and everything works" and the only real exposure I had had to LESS/SASS was exactly the same sort of context free dozen lines of mixin code that does something awesome in some blog post just like you are describing (which made it seem much more intimidating than it actually was).
Now here's the real kicker: I didn't realize that I already know how to code css in LESS. Since LESS is a superset of CSS you can take any CSS file (even one from an existing application) and put it through a LESS processor and get back a usable CSS file. This is awesome as it makes it possible to start using LESS in the middle of a project and it makes it very easy to slowly stop doing all of the soul crushing find+replace that takes forever working with CSS as you ramp up with LESS.
I'd really encourage you to give LESS (or SASS or whatever you find fashionable) a try - I think you'll like it. If you get stuck or need help shoot me an email (on my acct page).
I was reluctant to try it as I feel like there are already so many moving configurable layers to my dev stack and all I could think was "I have this nice static css file here - I just include it and everything works" and the only real exposure I had had to LESS/SASS was exactly the same sort of context free dozen lines of mixin code that does something awesome in some blog post just like you are describing (which made it seem much more intimidating than it actually was).
Now here's the real kicker: I didn't realize that I already know how to code css in LESS. Since LESS is a superset of CSS you can take any CSS file (even one from an existing application) and put it through a LESS processor and get back a usable CSS file. This is awesome as it makes it possible to start using LESS in the middle of a project and it makes it very easy to slowly stop doing all of the soul crushing find+replace that takes forever working with CSS as you ramp up with LESS.
I'd really encourage you to give LESS (or SASS or whatever you find fashionable) a try - I think you'll like it. If you get stuck or need help shoot me an email (on my acct page).