We’ve got another RAPIDFIRE for you this week, nothing but the best question and answer magic coming from our microphones into your ears!

We answer questions about freelancing and running a small business, CSS preprocessing, conference hangout etiquette, getting started with blogging, Jekyll vs WordPress, SEO, accessibility roles, and more!

Q & A:

3:19 I’ve noticed that in recent years, more and more Google is doing a good job of cementing a consistent look and feel across all of its products. I was wondering, do you guys think that we would ever seen a HTML/CSS/JS framework from Google? Is there such a framework already that I just don’t know about?

11:15 Eight months ago I quit my job at a startup to freelance on my own, which has been going great. And just six weeks ago, two good friends quit their jobs to join me in forming a 3-man web design/development studio. So, this question is for Dave in regards to your Paravel experience. Do you have any advice, insight or just straight up ramblings about forming and working with a small team of friends and how the three of you got Paravel to a point where you were doing work for high-profile clients like Microsoft?

20:51 I am relatively new to front end design/development. I have recently had my eyes opened to the world of preprocessing. I have dabbled with using Mixture and am now thinking about Gulping it up. Can you summarize the pros and cons of Gulp/Grunt vs Mixture/Codekit?

29:47 I’m an avid conference goer and every now and then, I get the chance to sit down with one or many conference speakers for a drink or lunch, etc. I know for me personally, I don’t always like to talk about work or what I do when I’m trying to relax and enjoy a drink or social event. So the question is: if you are talking with someone you respect, what should the topic of discussion be? Would you want to talk about what devs/designers do in the field or would it be “out of bounds” to talk about more personal things, like family, children, other hobbies, etc? If you mention it in a talk or discussion, is it fair to ask about those things?

34:55 What are your tips for becoming a lifelong blogger?

47:34 What are your thoughts on using Jekyll instead of WordPress for websites where most of the updates will be to something like a listing of events?

51:40 I’m no expert in SEO but I was wondering what are some of the best practices regarding meta tags? It seems nowadays like some tags are redundant, i.e. the keywords tag. What tags do you consider essential to your website?

56:53 I’ve got a quick question about accessibility, more precisely about the ARIA role attributes. So I’ve been using them in web projects for a while now, but only for the main header or main navigation. Can you use one role multiple times on a page for example for a sub-navigation? And what would you recommend in terms of quantity, so what would be a good amount of roles between none and way too many?

1:01:41 I was trying to think how to implement the page loading progress bar kinda like the one on Youtube, along with loading the pages with ajax for smoothing the UI, do you guys have any resources for synchronizing these two things?

Sponsors:

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42:26 Day Trip and CodePen

Show Links:

Shoptalk 153: with Mark Otto

Google Material Design

Polymer

Shoptalk 134: Rob Dodson

Paul Lewis

Paravel

Reagan Ray

Trent Walton

Dave Rupert

Mixture.io

Gulp

Grunt

Codekit

Post Processing CSS

Sara Soueidan

Gary V – Crush It

Syndicate Ads

A11Y Patterns

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