One bizarre trend emerging in this new RWD era is desktop-browsing web designers resizing their browsers to watch the break-points change the layout. The average user never sits at their desk repetitively shrinking and expanding the browser window like a mad scientist. Yup, we’re all strange.
Just gonna clear up a little thing here that I’ve seen people struggle with a few times. There are two different kinds of conditional comments for Internet Explorer that have slightly different syntaxes: Downlevel Hidden and Downlevel Revealed (microsoft docs). …
Here’s the rub: when you load JavaScript from a third party you should do it asynchronously. …
I’m headed down to Austin in a few days here for my 2nd SXSW. Hope to see some of you folks there. I’m trying not too have much of a plan, but here’s a few things I’m doing:
There is a SurveyMonkey party and a crew of us from Wufoo / SurveyMonkey will be there hanging out. Free food and drinks. RSVP here and come.
My ShopTalk Show cohort Dave Rupert lives down there. We have no official plans but …
Michael Buchmiller of BlueHornet walks us through the process of designing a poster for tinted decoder glasses, and then bringing the same idea with a similar interaction to the web with the AnythingZoomer.
In this screencast I move my own personal website from my old live FTP editing ways to a proper version controlled system including deployment. I haven't had much experience with this, so forgive me if it's a bit rough.
We start by moving the live website local, including bringing all the files down and copying the database. Then we set up a Git repository in Beanstalk and push it all up to that. Then we give Beanstalk our FTP credentials and set up how we want deployment done. Then we make some local changes to our site, and commit/push them to Beanstalk, which does the deployment for us. By then end, it's all working perfectly.
If you've got questions/comments/suggestions on this workflow, I'd love to hear!
Links from the video:
Followup:
Mark Jaquith on Working with WordPress Locally (specifically, dealing with plugins and config).
Good read from Nicolas Gallagher. Among the gems:
Class names cannot be “unsemantic”. Whatever names are being used: they have meaning, they have purpose.
When Twitter Bootstrap first came out, I rewrote the compiled CSS to better reflect how I would author it by hand and to compare the file sizes. After minifying both files, the hand-crafted CSS was about 10% smaller than the pre-processor output. But when both files were also gzipped, the pre-processor output was about 5% smaller than the hand-crafted CSS.
Again: the smaller CSS file came out bigger when gzipped.
Dave and I talk shop with Doug Neiner, whom I consider one of the smartest people I know. Doug is on the jQuery team and works for a company based around jQuery, so the topic of JavaScript comes up a lot. But we also talk some CSS, APIs, and a variety of other stuff while answering listener questions. This episode brought to you by Hover (the best place to buy domains) and LessMoney (a conference to make your business better).
Polyfill hero Scott Jehl has a new one for the theoretical <picture> element. The idea behind this new element is to solve the very real need to serve images of the appropriate size based on the browser window size. I'm all for it, but what happens if this exact syntax isn't the one that gets standardized?
