ShopTalk

No guests this week, as we plow through as much question on answer action as possible. Don’t worry, you’re regular installment of hot drama will be back soon. We talk about (roughly in order): The way we interact with websites on desktops/laptops vs touch screen devices is extremely different. How do we deal with that? Indentation in HTML (styles, and how that relates to View Source and CMS’s). How to improve your CSS skills. How and why to use the HTML5 Boilerplate. (Paul’s intro to it). How do you attract clients as a designer? Settings margins/padding/height/width in PX or EM? Why? Can you use both? Use separate stylesheets linked up from the head with media query attributes, or combine into a single file (“external” vs “internal”)? What’s up with “responsive images”? Navigation that appears on all pages of a site without repeating yourself. If you’re writing backend code like PHP, should we be using an IDE like NetBeans? How much money should designers/developers be making? Categorizing online inspiration Will the .scss syntax ever be standardized as regular CSS?

In this second edition of RAPIDFIRE we again chug through as many questions as we can. No guests, no links, no hot drama. We want to answer as many listener questions as we can, so this is how we plan to catch up once in a while. We talk about (roughly in order): What’s wrong with UA sniffing to serve a mobile stylesheet? What are the 5 CSS tricks we can’t live without? What’s up with HTML5 video streaming? How can you modernize your front end development skills? What are the books/blogs/designers that we follow? Are margin and padding interchangeable? HTML preprocessors with parsing smarts. Will we talk about IE7 for less time than we talked about IE6? Why use the Google CDN version of jQuery rather than the latest version from jQuery.com? WordPress or Tumblr? Where can you get more engaging code reviews? What to focus on as a front-end dev?

This week we were joined by Trent Walton and Reagan Ray, who together with our very own Dave complete the Paravel triforce down in Austin, Texas. We talked about (roughly in order): News’n'Links Best practices in forms. We should definitely talk about this in more detail in an upcoming episode, but this week we took the opportunity to say just use Wufoo. Rémy Bach’s medium-sized jQuery SuperLabels TypeButter and inventing new elements. Adobe WebKit Hackathon includes a start to ::nth-letter which is a start to answering ::nth-everything and possibly, many many years from now, removing the need for Lettering.js. Q&A Has Paravel ever done any products, in addition to client work? Goodfoot is one example, but closing of Gowalla doesn’t bode well for it. Also side projects like The Many Faces Of… What CMS does Trent use and how does he do custom art direction (art direction plugin, Dave’s better fork of that) Dealing with client requests that are beyond the skills of the team Using HTML5 and CSS3 in real client work The domain stealing saga, and the tragedy that is SohTanaka.com Is it best to specialize? What about as a team member vs trying to get hired? Growing in revenue and project quality without growing team size How to bundle HTML email in with client services Topics for a graduate thesis related to the web industry Sponsors LessMoney – A Conference in Tampa, FL on July 7th all about building a better business. As in, one that makes more money and is less stressful to run. … which runs back to back with … Front-End Design Conference – a two-day one-track conference about all things front-end web in St. Petersburg, FL (sister cities with Tampa) on July 8th and 9th. More Paravel @raygunray / reaganray.com @trentwalton / trentwalton.com

This week we were joined by Jina Bolton, a talented designer and developer. She’s currently working for Do.com (@DoWorkTogether) and helping out with the SASS website redesign (@TeamSassDesign). We talk about (roughly in order): News’n'Links’n'Drama: Magento Boilerplate Picturefill, a polyfill for

This week we were joined by Doug Neiner, a senior designer and engineer at AppendTo. Doug is an equally talented at both those jobs and, as he put it, would have an awfully hard time choosing between them if he had to cut one. Doug found the perfect spot in his basement to record this show with us, directly underneath his router upstairs. He told us later he was sitting on a pile of broken glass. Sorry Doug! We talk about (roughly in order): Hot Links BeerCamp Multi-Device Layout Patterns (mined from mediaqueri.es) Q&A Does there need to be any more jQuery plugins? Learnings from the CSSOff How do big websites like Hotels.com or Expedia.com get data? What is the scope of handlebars.js in Front-End Development? What’s up with floats? Why is there no simple float clearing property? “Push” vs “Poll” Working with build scripts Steps after a recently becoming unemployed Is there a tool to un-jQuery-fy something? What’s up with Doug’s “Contextual jQuery” talks? Sponsors Hover – The best place to buy domains. Use that link and get 10% your entire order. LessMoney – A conference in Tampa, FL on July 7th all about building a better and more successful business. More Doug @dougneiner dougneiner.com / code.dougneiner.com

This week we were joined by Ethan Marcotte, our chauffeur into the brave new world of responsive web design. We’ve been getting a good amount of questions about RWD, so we’ve saved the best ones up for a special espisode from the man himself. We talk about (roughly in order): Hot Links: StyleDocco Adobe Shadow SenchaTouch 2 The Non-Breaking Space Show Crossover The Industry Podcast Q&A: What is responsive design? When shouldn’t you use responsive design? Using image sprites with responsive design? Scaling images in responsive design Responsive display advertising Making the jQuery plugin DataTables responsive Grid systems to help the transition into responsive design Is hiding inline images good enough to prevent them from loading? Embedded tweets in responsive design Masonry style layouts Lovely sponsors: Hover – Buy domains without all the annoying cross-selling. Use that link and get 10% off your order. LessMoney Note: Dear Audiophiles, sorry about the choppy recording. Will work on it.

This week we were joined by Christopher Schmitt, Chris Enns (TRIPLE CHRIS SHOW!), and Dave McFarland. These are the fellas behind the new podcast The Non-Breaking Space Show. Watch their site, as we joined them immediately afterward to record an episode of their show (CROSSOVER SHOW!). We talk about (roughly in order)… Followup: We’ll be at SXSW. Follow @ShopTalkShow, we might have an impromptu meetup or something. Nathaniel Higgins had a neat idea for tracking how often your page gets printed. Q&A: Roundtable on our preferred text editors, paid and free. Can you get and display information from an RSS feed completely with JavaScript? How to create a two column layout with a fixed left sidebar and a fluid right side main content area. A bookmarklet on removing deprecated attributes, and how to promote yourself without being annoying. How to write semantic HTML for a poem. Will there be another dotcom bubble? What TV shows are we? What CMS would we choose if we could only choose one? What homepage do we set our browsers to? A full set of excellent sponsors this week! Hover – Use that link and get 10% any order. Hover is the best place to buy domain names. LessMoney – A conference in Tampa, FL on June 7th all about making more money. More about the Non-Breaking Space fellas: @teleject / christopherschmitt.com / Environments for Humans @iChris / chrisenns.com / SSKTN @davemcfarland / sawmac.com

No guests this week. We just chug through as many questions as possible. We plan to do one of these every so often to make sure we get to as many listener questions as possible. Q&A (roughly in order): What to focus on to move career forward “Google” Dart Clever uses of ::before and ::after A brief intro and explanation of the difference between Node.js and CoffeeScript Using PHP to serve CSS Planning a framework How Modernizr helps make cross browser compatible sites Cleaning up the WordPress mess of plugins injecting CSS and JS Why CSS opacity affects all decedent elements and what you can do about it Finding the time Pros and Cons of Blueprint CSS Framework CSS rotation and poor text rendering When will we be able to animate/transition pseudo elements? [chart] Pixel tracking for emails and alternatives

This week we were joined by Zoe Gillenwater who we like to think of as one of the mothers of responsive design, in that she was talking and writing books about responsible fluid layouts for quite a long time. Add some media queries and you have what is essentially modern day responsive design. We talk about (roughly in order)… Shoutouts: Conferences: BarCamp Tour, InControl, LessConf, SXSW Wufoo Demo, Wufoo Spanish Q&A: Are print stylesheets still important? How we approach them, some tips, and speculation on how their usage might be tracked. CSS formatting (mentioned: Jeff Starr’s Obsessive CSS Formatting) The new spec for CSS variables and how they stack up to LESS/SASS Icon fonts like Pictos, performance concerns, and accessibility concerns. Background images and fluid width layout. Example of background-size, jQuery BackStretch Strategies for approaching CSS transitions/animations Are we still using conditional stylesheets? Boilerplate html classes Why is there no shorthand for the different text properties?

This week we were joined by Jeffrey Way who is a long-time Envato employee, probably most well known to our listeners by being the editor of Nettuts+. Jeffrey hails from the mountain town of Chattanooga, TN, home of the world’s fastest internet. We talk about (roughly in order)… Follow up and hot drama: Quick followup on Performer JS Bootstrap, the most popular project on GitHub, goes 2.0 HTML5 Boilerplate goes 3.0 and removes Respond.js and the build script. And how how we mostly use it by just snagging individual lines from the GitHub repo. Pea.rs, a collection of neat a clean mini design patterns with HTML and CSS All the drama around -webkit-. Non-webkit browser vendors are thinking about supporting that prefix to more sites work, because of lazy developers not including other prefixes. Most folks are crying out that that’s a bad idea, but with different proposed solutions. Working group even considering standardizing around -webkit-. Read: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]. Question and answer: Will Envato make a marketplace for iOS designs? Already kinda have on Code Canyon. Battle of the code editors. Should we be able to add class names via CSS? How does Jeffrey do it all? Quotes: [1], [2] How we test on IE: Browserstack, Virtualbox + Multiple Windows VMs, Actual $200 laptop More Jeffrey: @jeffrey_way / jeffrey-way.com @envatowebdev / nettuts.com Want to win a copy of the HTML & CSS Book? Just send in an audio question and you’ll be qualified to win. We’ll pick one winner a week for three weeks. No sponsor this week =(. Wanna reach our audience? We’re thinking they are mostly spendy try-anything trend-setting types. Hit us up.

This week we were joined by Jonathan Longnecker and Nate Croft, who together form FortySeven Media, a design studio focusing on web design, branding, and ExpressionEngine development.

This week we were joined by Chris Eppstein who is known for his work in the world of CSS preprocessing. But Chris has a deep history in the web, being a full stack developer for many years and for many different startups. This week, in loose order, we talk about: A sweet new candidate for intro music by Chris Taylor. Who various celebrities favorite HTML elements are. How a preprocessor can help with better names for fonts, and ways to keep even that from being repetitive. The difference between to similar looking CSS selectors. How we might start thinking about JavaScript optimization. Some “startup” tips. How Coyier the Destroyer would win in a wrestling match against Chris Eppstein (after all the crying). Sprites: why they are good and things to watch for (Compass helper). Testing on mobile devices on a budget (Brad Frost’s article). More on Chris: Chris Eppstein @chriseppstein Compass SASS Caring.com Like Compass? It’s charity ware so if you like it Chris asks you donate to the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation (UMDF). This show brought to you by LessAccounting and United Pixelworkers (save 10% off a shirt with code “shoptalk”).

This week we were joined by Paul Irish and we, you guessed it, talked shop! We answered a bunch of reader questions (including some sweet audio questions, thanks folks) and talked about (mostly in order): The crazy cool Acko.net (Three.js) Pokémon jQuery on mobile devices How Paul got a job at Google (Modernizr) The recent slight-more-popular SVG (The Noun Project, Resolution Independence with SVG) CSS animations/transitions and using them in responsive design How to start contributing back to the community while garnering some reputation (Moving the Web Forward, Compass) Approaching JavaScript on projects / using templating vs. pre-formatted HTML Find Paul: Personal Website Twitter Google+ GitHub

We are pleased to have the legendary Jonathan Snook, author of SMACSS, on the first ever episode of ShopTalk. We got things going with some listener-submitted questions. We couldn’t answer all the questions, but you should keep asking. Thanks for everyone who tuned in live and joined in on the IRC. We apologize for any technical errors. We’ll work on getting more bandwidth sorted out for next week so we don’t break the internet anymore. Show Notes Jonathan Snook Snook.ca SMACSS prepareTransition – Launched today! Books by Dan Cedarholm OOCSS deCSS3 – A bookmarklet to see how gracefully you’re degrading. Modernizr Sponsored by LessAccounting

Dave and Chris happen upon each other and decide to start a podcast… about shop. And talk. ShopTalk.