This week we were joined by Gene Crawford, master of the South Carolinian Internet and commander of the triforce that is Unmatched Style. Gene cut his teeth doing client work for many years and now does spectacular web conferences like ConvergeSE. We talk about (roughly in order):

Followup’n'Drama:

• Running is good for your back
• Louis Lazaris on Health Tips for Web Developers
• Opera gets Webkitty
• Vendor bang bang Vendor bang bang

Q & A

• Hey great job. But what if we used Squarespace instead?
• How many years of experience do you really have?
• How are we handling images for the “retina” display?
• Do we start the design process with actual pen and paper? Or something like Balsamiq. Also, Styletil.es
• Where do you add brand new CSS styles into an existing project? How do you stay organized?
• What tools do we use for testing usability of websites? Silverback.
  Dave’s dog is a troublemaker.

Sponsored by

• Mijingo – Video Training and Screencasts for Web Designers & Developers

Winners of the Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 book

• Jeremy Worboys
• Barry Maxwell
• Kyle Gordy

More Gene

• @genecrawford / @unmatchedstyle
• crawfishstudios.com
• period-three.com
• unmatchedstyle.com
• convergeSE.com

It’s RAPIDFIRE time! No guests, no hot drama, and sadly this week no sponsors. We just dig into as many questions as we can. We talk about (roughly in order):

• Should clients have to pay for security updates?
• When to use a PHP framework like Yii, CodeIgniter or CakePHP
• How, Why, and When to use modern support tools like Modernizr
• Why is there no “wrapper” pseudo elements?
• Couldn’t we achieve what CSS preprocessors can do with PHP?
• Dealing with health and a sedentary lifestyle
• Interactive elements in jQuery UI vs native HTML5
• Finding clever domain names (Try Domainr or Thsrs)
• Disappear an image on scroll down
• Using JavaScript to insert/remove content at different width breakpoints
• Pricing yourself and the awkwardness of asking for money
• Making a triangle with shadow in just HTML/CSS (Dabblet)

This week we were joined by Ian Stewart, a Theme Wrangler for Automattic working on WordPress themes for WordPress.com, the biggest Automattic project. We talk about (roughly in order):

News’n'Links’n'Drama

• Chrome 20 supporting date and color input types as well as scoped CSS behind a flag
• Running stable and canary Chrome side by side
• Semicolons

Q & A

• About WordPress MultiSite
• Dealing with clients who are confused about the “admin” of WordPress and when/if to bring the power of creating posts to the front end
• The difference between WordPress and Drupal
• Syncing databases (ramp)
• Boilerplate theme with child themes, and overriding functions/parts of the parent
• Are Gantt charts useful?
• Can you break out into the industry without going to college?
• How to spellcheck your site both within WordPress and the code itself. (After the Deadline, turn on spellcheck feature in your code editor)

Sponsors

• LessMoney – A conference in Tampa, FL about running a better business and making more money.

More Ian

• ThemeShaper
• iandanielstewart.com
• @iandstewart

This week we were joined by Jenn Lukas and Allison Wagner who are front end web developers at Happy Cog (Philadelphia).

Links’n'Drama

• Tim Kadlec’s research on resource downloading
• JS2Coffee.org
• Drinking at Conferences (Ryan Funduck’s blog post)

Q & A

• Single line vs. Multi line CSS (findability, information density, CSS3 issues, comments, etc)
• Level of JavaScript knowledge
• What to learn next / Is higher education necessary for a career in web development?
• Dirty code / Clean code awareness
• Meeting other front end devs (Montreal and elsewhere)
• Do we use reference charts for HTML and CSS while coding, or is it all memorized? (We ended up talking about some generator tools like these two gradient generators)

Sponsors

• Harvest – Time/Expense tracking and invoicing app. Use coupon SHOPTALK for 50% off the first month.
• LessMoney – A small intimate conference about making more money in Tampa, FL.

More about Jenn and Allison

• @jennlukas – jennlukas.com – Happy Cog – .net Magazine monthly columnist
• @alliwagner – Happy Cog

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 <picture>
• More followup on tracking print usage on websites: Stephanie Hobson’s thoughts and research.
• CSS for Grown Ups: Slides and Audio
• Hot Drama on potential removing of swearing from Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into HTML5.
• Mozilla begrudgingly adopts H264

Q&A:

• Google+’s HTML
• Handing off between front end and back end developers
• <i> vs. <span> for icons
• What programs do we design with
• Getting called out on terminal usage
• Will using preprocessors too much make us forget the orignal language?
• Differences and usage of @mixin vs. @extend
• Learning of the newfangled

Sponsors:

• LessMoney – A conference in sunny Tampa, FL on July 7th about building a better business
• Hover – Save 10% off your order from the best place to buy domain names

More Jina:

• @jina
• sushiandrobots.com
• Art in my Coffee

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.