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055: RAPIDFIRE #13

    48:49

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This week is just Dave and Chris answering as many listener questions as possible. That’s right, it’s RAPIDFIRE time! rat-a-tat-tat. We talk about (roughly in order):

  • What do we think of Kirby CMS?
  • Do we use Compass too? Are there Compass specific plugins?
  • Can you change a Sass variable depending on the media query?
  • Is it possible to find unused CSS selectors?
  • Do you ever use “inherit” as a value?
  • If you use Sass too much, will you forget CSS?
  • How do you explain to a client that you don’t know how to do something?
  • What are the key do’s and don’ts for a contract?

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055: RAPIDFIRE 13 [ 48:49 ] Download
  • Tome

    I can vouch for Bourbon; it’s really great and the Neat plugin for responsive grids is really well done. It just really irks me that you can’t use Compass and Bourbon at the same time – neither namespaces their functions so you can accidentally be calling not just the *wrong* function, but even *a* function without even knowing. Thoughtbot are cool folks.

  • http://twitter.com/awildthingy Andrew Wild

    Hey guys, I thought I would let you know (in case you didn’t know) that your flash fallback for your audio player is broken. In my quick glance, the element doesn’t display in Firefox or IE but works normally in chrome. Good luck fixing it and keep up the good work.

    • http://twitter.com/davatron5000 Dave Rupert

      We had a conflict with the live player so had to disable MediaElement.js across the whole site. We’ll try to get that patched up soon tho.

  • http://twitter.com/mikowl Michael Elias

    I started using Bourbon in a recent project and have really enjoyed it so far. Besides the standard CSS3 mixins you’d expect it comes with a buncha handy things like pixels to ems converter, buttons, clearfix, hide-text, etc. The flex grid is handy. Love the simplicity of it.

  • http://ahrengot.com/ Jens Ahrengot Boddum

    Hey Guys,

    Thanks for including my Compass/Ceaser question.

    Chris, if you’ve never worked with the sprite stuff in Compass you’re really missing out. It’s pretty damn incredible. However I see myself moving more towards icon fonts these days, but some times you’re just stuck with images – and when that’s the case – Compass is a fantastic helper tool.

  • http://www.diigital.com Mike Healy

    Not too sure about taking on responsibility for work you can’t complete yourself (penultimate question). If you recommend another developer to the client, everything they do will reflect on you. If you hire and manage someone on the clients behalf and that person can’t deliver you’re left responsible. Being helpful is great, but taking on things that you’re not sure you can deliver successfully is risky and could cost both parties.

  • Dr Madvibe

    Just started listening to the show after the demise of SitePoint’s and I like it: ‘very cool’ as the saying of the year goes.

    Was it this show that someone wanted to find their unused CSS selectors? Check out BrotherCake’s(*) ‘Dust Me Selectors’ – http://www.brothercake.com/dustmeselectors/

    * BrotherCake: JS wiz, SitePoint writer, former colleague and friend

  • http://twitter.com/donmateo Matthew Wimmer

    One idea for changing SASS variables with media queries that you didn’t exactly mention would be making a @mixin. Of course, not knowing the actual problem the questioner was trying to solve, this might be either overkill or insufficient. However, if he could abstract out the parts of his CSS that used the variable, and make a @mixin just for those, then changing the variable(s) with media queries would work like a charm. Please enjoy this rather excessive demo over at the codepen: http://codepen.io/mrwimmer/pen/JAmgs

  • http://marshallford.me/ Marshall Ford

    Regarding the inherit CSS question: The other day I found that a great way to use inherit for visited links. Getting past the usability drama, if you want your website’s visited links to look like normal links use color: inherit;

  • Lavi Perchik

    Thanks for taking my questions on CSS3 selectors (last episode) and the “inherit” value (this episode).

    As usual, Dave did a better job at pronouncing my first name :)

    Here’s the link I gave on my question: http://dabblet.com/gist/3029126

    I’ve written a slightly better example on CodePen, to demonstrate what could be done with inherit: http://codepen.io/laviperchik/pen/yzqfB

  • http://www.zmandesigns.com/ Zach “The Z Man”

    On the question “Is it possible to find unused CSS selectors?” there is new tool called CSSCSS that helps with that exact scenario. Pretty slick.

    http://zmoazeni.github.io/csscss/