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Show DescriptionWe've got your feedback as well as our thoughts on where we all think the web will be in 2036 - as we celebrate 12 years of ShopTalk Show history, we're looking forward to what's to come with ideas around cookie banners, undo, no more passwords, React, Deno, Node, and Mozilla's future, ChatGPT's thoughts, accessibility, blockchain, VR / AR, hoverboards, P3 color space, indie web, JS bundle sizes, and more! Listen on Website →Links 12 predictions for the next 12 years to celebrate 12 years of ShopTalk The most powerful Git client for Mac and Windows | Tower Git Client Justin Peacock: "@chriscoyier @davatron5000 sin…" - Super Rad Future of Web 2034 Obsidian - Sharpen your thinking rabbit — home Apple Vision Pro - Apple A Global Design System | Brad Frost Lemon Productions Podcast Editing by Chris Enns phamtranscriptionservices.com SponsorsJam.devYou've probably heard of Jam.dev, it's used by more than 60,000 people. It's a free tool that saves developers a ton of frustration. It forces your teammates to make the perfect bug report. They can't do it wrong because it automatically includes a video of the bug, console logs, network requests, everything you need to debug. It automatically lists out the steps to reproduce. It's so easy to get your teammates to use. It's just a Chrome extension. When they see a bug, they click a button and right away it creates a ticket. So it saves time for them.
https://shoptalkshow.com/577/
We're celebrating episode 500 by looking back at the previous eras of ShopTalk Show including why we started the show, how it's changed over the years, and how the tech and our lives have changed as well.
We're talking about our predictions for web tech in 2022: Container queries, web3, React, HTML elements, CSS compatibility, utility frameworks, designer and developer tooling, multiple frameworks, and more episodes of ShopTalk Show!
In this episode of Syntax, Scott and Wes do a crossover episode with Changelog's JS Party! Your favorite web dev podcasts join forces for a super collab that'll knock you frontend off! Amelia joins Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert from ShopTalk Show, while Divya teams up with Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski from Syntax. Let the FEUDing begin! .TECH Domains - Sponsor .TECH is taking the tech industry by storm. A domain that shows the world what you are all about! If you're looking for a domain name for your startup, portfolio, or your own project like we did with uses.tech, check out .tech Domains. Syntax listeners can snap their .TECH Domains at 80% off on five-year registration by visiting go.tech/syntaxistech and using the coupon code “syntax5”. LogRocket - Sponsor LogRocket lets you replay what users do on your site, helping you reproduce bugs and fix issues faster. It's an exception tracker, a session re-player and a performance monitor. Get 14 days free at logrocket.com/syntax. Mux - Sponsor Mux Video is an API-first platform that makes it easy for any developer to build beautiful video. Powered by data and designed by video experts, your video will work perfectly on every device, every time. Mux Video handles storage, encoding, and delivery so you can focus on building your product. Live streaming is just as easy and Mux will scale with you as you grow, whether you're serving a few dozen streams or a few million. Visit mux.com/syntax. Show Notes 02:49 - Frontend Feud Rules 04:06 - Round 1 10:28 - Round 2 17:26 - Round 3 25:37 - Round 4 35:15 - Round 5 42:03 - Round 6 Links Changelog JS Party Chris Coyier Dave Rupert Wes Bos Scott Tolinski Jerod Santo Amelia Wattenberger Divya The Feud At The Seventh Mountain Amelia's repo visualizer CSS-Tricks freeCodeCamp Wes Bos' courses Changelog Merch Level Up Tutorials Shameless Plugs Scott: All courses - Sign up for the year and save 25%! Wes: All Courses - Use the coupon code ‘Syntax' for $10 off! Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott's Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes' Instagram Wes' Twitter Wes' Facebook Scott's Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets
Crossover! Your favorite web dev podcasts join forces for a super collab that'll knock you frontend off! Amelia joins Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert from ShopTalk Show while Divya teams up with Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski from Syntax. Let the FEUDing begin!
Your favorite web dev podcasts join forces for a super collab that'll knock you frontend off! Amelia joins Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert from ShopTalk Show while Divya teams up with Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski from Syntax. Let the FEUDing begin!
Your favorite web dev podcasts join forces for a super collab that'll knock you frontend off! Amelia joins Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert from ShopTalk Show while Divya teams up with Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski from Syntax. Let the FEUDing begin!
We've got a new ShopTalk Show mug you can order, Safari and Chrome #HotDrama to discuss, what is the modern WordPress build process like, and what's the state of your local bowling alley or pickleball website?
In this episode of Syntax, Scott and Wes do a collaboration with Chis Coyier and Dave Rupert from ShopTalk Show! They talk about favorite tech stacks, podcasting, learning new tech, dealing with FOMO, and more! Prismic - Sponsor Prismic is a Headless CMS that makes it easy to build website pages as a set of components. Break pages into sections of components using React, Vue, or whatever you like. Make corresponding Slices in Prismic. Start building pages dynamically in minutes. Get started at prismic.io/syntax. Sentry - Sponsor If you want to know what's happening with your code, track errors and monitor performance with Sentry. Sentry's Application Monitoring platform helps developers see performance issues, fix errors faster, and optimize their code health. Cut your time on error resolution from hours to minutes. It works with any language and integrates with dozens of other services. Syntax listeners new to Sentry can get two months for free by visiting Sentry.io and using the coupon code TASTYTREAT during sign up. Cloudinary - Sponsor Cloudinary is the best way to manage images and videos in the cloud. Edit and transform for any use case, from performance to personalization, using Cloudinary's APIs, SDKs, widgets, and integrations. Show Notes 07:23 - What's your favorite stack right now? 28:52 - What are your thoughts on WordPress? Do you still use it? 33:59 - What do you want for listeners of Syntax? 38:21 - How do you deal with FOMO / the pressure to learn new tech? Links https://shoptalkshow.com/469/ Chris Coyier Dave Rupert Syntax 372: CSS Container Queries, Layers, Scoping and More with Miriam Suzanne https://svelte.dev/ https://kit.svelte.dev/ https://mercurius.dev/ https://www.prisma.io/ https://keystonejs.com/ https://graphql.org/ https://redwoodjs.com/ https://nuxtjs.org/ https://astro.build/ https://vercel.com/ https://wordpress.org/ https://dayoneapp.com/ https://automattic.com/ https://mongoosejs.com/ https://www.blink182.com/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-02-22/a-new-era-for-podcast-advertising/ Chase Reeves YouTube Channel https://xdebug.org/ ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Dave: 1: Haikyu!! 2: Nintendo Garage Chris: Ray App Wes: 1: Connor Ward YouTube Channel 2: Ryan Knorr YouTube Channel Shameless Plugs Scott: All Courses - Sign up for the year and save 25%! Wes: All Courses - Use the coupon code ‘Syntax' for $10 off! Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott's Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes' Instagram Wes' Twitter Wes' Facebook Scott's Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets
Dave and Chris talked at An Event Apart Spring Summit 2021 on the good and bad of the web. They talked about CSS, framework knowledge, more CSS, PWA's for projects, service workers, the language of tooling, and web performance.
In this episode, Klare and Chris talk about speaking to users directly about CodePen to get their feedback and as much other intel as we can in the spirit of making CodePen better and validating some ideas for future features. Timejumps Sponsor: Netlify We had a question come in over on ShopTalk Show from a […]
Today on Audience, Craig talks with Chris Coyier of the Shoptalk Show, which has produced over four hundred episodes. Craig talks to Chris about what it’s like being an online creator (podcaster, blogger, software and web designer, etc.). Chris talks about the lessons he has learned and what it’s like to have a weekly podcast for ten years. They also talk about podcasting trends in terms of marketing, topics, and the future outlook of the industry. If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to Castos.com/podcast. And as always, if you’re enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. If you have a quick moment in this busy holiday season, please leave us a review on iTunes. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Today you’ll learn about: The Shoptalk Show, Chris’ podcast about web design How it was born from Tech-TV and CarTalk on NPR (RIP) The importance of consistency and dedication with a podcast How Chris organizes his web content on different platforms The cavalier relationship podcasters have with stats Optimizing versus creating good content Burnout Energy levels for online content Avoiding the online hive of anger The staying power of the industry Audio versus video versus both Advertising and marketing trends Affiliate links or no affiliate links? Website conversion What The Shoptalk Show (and podcasting in general) looks like in 2021 The Codepen Podcast Podcasts are an evolution Resources/Links: The Shoptalk Show: https://shoptalkshow.com/ Chris Coyier website: https://chriscoyier.net/ CSS-Tricks:
Show Description****************We're talking the redesign of The ShopTalk Show website, including some of the issues and technical challenges we faced designing a podcast website for 2020. Listen on Website →Links***** Derek Featherstone Dave’s GitHub TimeJump Logitech MX Master 3 VueConf ErgoDox Keyboards Sponsors********
On this week's episode, Chris and Steph chat about their new client projects, VimScript, and ways to automate refreshing materialized views in tests. They also play the game Overrated/Underrated, created by Tyler Owen, and respond to a CS student who is feeling overwhelmed by the various technologies and looking to transition from tutorials to meaningful projects.This episode of The Bike Shed is sponsored by Honeybadger.thoughtbot dotfilesctrlp.vimFZFLearn Vimscript the Hard Waythoughtbot laptop scriptscenicConversations with TylerShopTalk ShowDeadlinesThe Real Story Behind Story PointsIf you're enjoying The Bike Shed, we'd love it if you could give it a rating or review on iTunes. Thanks!
Show Description****************Tyler McGinnis stops by the ShopTalk Show to chat with Dave and Chris about his React courses, how he keeps up with web technology, and his thoughts on marketing and selling courses. Listen on Website →Links***** Egghead Why React Hooks Svelte Gatsby Sponsors********
Welcome! My name is Aaron Dowd. This is a show about how to make a great podcast.If you're interested in learning how to start a podcast, grow an audience, or improve at all the various skills that are a part of being a podcaster, this show is for you.In this trailer episode, I'm going to share my backstory, and talk about why I decided to start this podcast, who this show is for, and what topics I’ll be covering in future episodes.2020 update: I've decided to change the title of this show from The Podcast Dude to Podcasting with Aaron. The main goal is the same, but I felt it was time to move on from The Podcast Dude title.Little bit about me:I'm a podcast producer and editor from Fort Worth, Texas. I started helping people make podcasts back in 2013. I was a full-time editor, producer, and consultant for a small podcast network and a bunch of independent shows for several years before joining Simplecast in late 2017 to be their customer success lead.My job for the past 6 years has basically been to answer questions and help people make great podcasts.I started this podcast in 2015 to share everything I'd learned about podcasting. After producing 75 episodes, I took a break to finish a couple of online courses about podcasting called Successful Podcasting, Logic Pro X for Podcasters, and GarageBand for Podcasters.Topics I'll Be Covering in This ShowAs I'm recording this trailer episode in September of 2019, I've actually already published 80 episodes about a wide range of topics related to podcasting, including:How to Start a PodcastThe Best Affordable Gear for PodcastingHow to Grow Your AudienceHow to Outline a Podcast EpisodeHow to Record Audio That Sounds GoodHow to Write Great Show NotesHow To Sound Natural When Reading a ScriptHow to Make Money with a PodcastHow to Streamline Your Podcast Production WorkflowHow to Get a Job Producing Podcastsand moreMost of these episodes were recorded between 2015 and 2017, when I was working as a podcast editor and producer for my friend Sean McCabe.While a lot of the advice and tips I shared in these episodes are still helpful, a lot has changed in podcasting since I recorded them, and I've improved as a podcaster as well, so I'm going to re-write and re-record a lot of these episodes.I hope you find my podcasting journey helpful and inspiring (remember, you don't have get everything perfect the first time).My Story (How I Ended Up a Professional Podcast Editor and Producer)My story really starts with music. My mom is a classically trainer singer who also plays guitar and piano, she taught me (and my siblings) how to sing and gave us piano lessons when we were very young, and I started learning how to play drums when I was 12. Pretty soon after that I decided I wanted to be a professional drummer, but I wasn’t sure how to make that happen or if I could even make any money with it.As I got into my late teens and into my college years, I didn't really have a plan for how to achieve my dreams, so I ended up just kinda drifting for awhile, working lame jobs and wasting a lot of time and money.I woke up one day when I was 21 and realized I hated the life I had, so I decided I'd make a big change, set some goals, and start pursuing my dreams. I wanted to be in a band and tour, but I knew that most musicians don’t make much money, and I didn't have much money, so I wasn't sure what to do.I had started working in an automotive parts factory around that time, but the work sucked and didn't pay much, and I didn’t want to be broke my whole life. I got the idea in my head that I could find a job I could do on a laptop so that I could make money while traveling with a band.Hey Google, How Do I Make Money From a Laptop?So in my early twenties, I googled "how to make money from a laptop". I found some articles about how it was possible to start a web design business and work from anywhere, so I started trying to learn how to be a web and graphic designer. I discovered podcasts around this same time too, and started listening to shows like Radiolab and This American Life, but also independent shows about business and marketing and web design and audio engineering, all kinds of interesting shows. This was all between about 2009 and 2012.How I Got Into Podcasts and Podcast Production and EditingPodcasts played a huge role in my self-education because I could listen to shows while working, driving, or doing chores. I was learning valuable things constantly and being introduced to ideas and potential opportunities I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.Around this same time, I also started studying audio engineering. Being a musician, I was interested in recording, mixing and mastering because I wanted to make demos for my bands.I started a podcast with some friends I met on a now defunct social network called App.net (the show was called Social Converse). I knew the most about working with audio, so I volunteered to be the editor, and that’s where I learned how to record audio, get audio from all the co-hosts, edit it together, and get it published in an RSS feed and out into the podcast apps/directories.Around that same time, I noticed that a lot of my favorite independent podcasts didn't have terribly great audio quality. There was a show I really liked called the Shoptalk Show. Back then, they were recording their Skype conversations and using the raw audio from that for their podcast. This was a pretty common practice back in 2012, and is actually still pretty common.There would occasionally be problems with their audio (levels all over the place, dropped calls, stuff that could have been edited out). I really liked the show and thought I could help, so I sent them an email and said, “I'm a big fan, and I’d like to help you by taking over the editing for the show. If you can get everyone on the call to record a track on their computer and send the files to me afterwards, I’ll put them all together, so some editing and mixing, and make it sound good.”They agreed and even offered to pay me a little bit of money for each episode (which was super exciting for me). So that was really the start of my career as a podcast editor and producer.Around the same time I started working with the Shoptalk Show guys, I saw a job posting on Authentic Jobs from Dan Benjamin (founder of the 5by5 network) who was looking for an audio engineer for his podcast network. That planted a seed in my mind: Maybe podcast editing could be a full-time, remote job for me. (I didn't get the job then, but I did end up editing shows for 5by5 for awhile in 2014.)I had also joined a band around that same time, so I was traveling around, playing shows, working weird hours and filling all my free time either listening to podcasts or editing them.The guys from the Shoptalk Show kept referring people interested in starting podcasts to me, so I had a few more weekly clients and I was answering a lot of questions about podcasting and helping people start shows.I really enjoyed helping people make podcasts and answering questions, but I got tired of writing responses to the same questions over and over, so I put up a page on my personal website offering podcast editing services and also wrote a few blog posts to answer some of the most frequently asked questions. After a few months, my site showed up in the #1 on Google if you searched for “Podcast Editor”. That brought more questions, but also more clients.I started getting more and more podcast editing clients, and eventually I had enough to quit the day job I'd landed a few months before as a junior front-end web developer.All this happened between about 2010 and early 2014. Around that time, I met a hand lettering artist from San Antonio who wanted to start a podcast network and online community for artists and entrepreneurs. I ended up helping him start a show and a small podcast network, and that was around the time I started this show too. A few years later, I joined my favorite podcast hosting company, Simplecast, to help them with customer support, education, and more.You'll be able to hear the original episodes of this show until I re-record them and replace them with new versions, but the original versions of all the episodes are available at https://seanwes.com/podcastdude-archive/.If you want, you can go listen and hear what I sounded like when I was first getting started with podcasting. You can also check out all the original show notes I made as well.Anyways, that's a not so quick introduction to me. Thanks for listening!You can check out thepodcastdude.com/episodes to see a full list of the available episodes for this show.If you have a question that I haven't answered in one of those episodes (or if you just want to say hi and introduce yourself), you can reach me via email at aaron@thepodcastdude.com, leave a voicemail at 8173818219, or drop a comment on my YouTube channel.I hope you enjoy the rest of the show, and happy podcasting.Aaron DowdSeptember 2, 2019Cool Stuff to Check Out:Recommended Podcasting GearThe Podcast Dude WebsiteSubscribe On YouTubeSuccessful Podcasting CourseSimplecast Blog (Helpful Articles About Podcasting)
The Podcast Dude TrailerHi. My name is Aaron Dowd. In case it's not obvious yet, this show is for anyone who wants to make a great podcast. If you're interested in learning how to start a podcast, grow an audience, or improve at all the various skills that are a part of being a podcaster, this show is for you.In this trailer episode, I'm going to share my back-story and talk about why I decided to start this podcast, who this show is for, and what topics I’ll be covering in future episodes.I'm a podcast producer and editor from Fort Worth, Texas. I started helping people make podcasts back in 2013, I was a full-time editor, producer, and consultant for a small podcast network and a bunch of independant shows for several years before joining Simplecast in late 2017 to be their customer success lead. My job for the past 6 years has basically been to answer questions and help people make great podcasts.sI started this podcast in 2015 to share everything I'd learned about podcasting. After producing 75 episodes, I took a break to produce a couple of online courses about podcasting called Successful Podcasting, Logic Pro X for Podcasters, and GarageBand for Podcasters.Topics I'll Be Covering in This ShowSo as I'm recording this trailer episode on September 1st, 2019, I've actually already published 80 episodes about a wide range of topics related to podcasting, including:How to Start a PodcastThe Best Affordable Gear for PodcastingHow to Grow Your AudienceHow to Outline a Podcast EpisodeHow to Record Audio That Sounds GoodHow to Write Great Show NotesHow To Sound Natural When Reading a ScriptHow to Make Money with a PodcastHow to Streamline Your Podcast Production WorkflowHow to Get a Job Producing Podcastsand moreMost of these episodes were recorded between 2015 and 2017, when I was working as a podcast editor and producer for my friend Sean McCabe.While a lot of the advice and tips I shared are still helpful, a lot has changed in podcasting since I recorded my first 75 episodes and I've improved as a podcaster as well, so I'm going to re-write and re-record a lot of these episodes.I hope you find my podcasting journey helpful and inspiring (remember, you don't have get everything perfect the first time).My Story (How I Ended Up a Professional Podcast Editor and Producer)My story really starts with music. My mom is a classically trainer singer who also plays guitar and piano, she taught me (and my siblings) how to sing and gave us piano lessons when we were very young, and I started learning how to play drums when I was 12. Pretty soon after that I decided I wanted to be a professional drummer, but I wasn’t sure how to make that happen or if I could even make any money with it.As I got into my late teens and into my college years, I didn't really have a plan for how to achieve my dreams, so I ended up just kinda drifting for awhile, working lame jobs and wasting a lot of time and money.I woke up one day when I was 21 and realized I hated the life I had, so I decided I'd make a big change, set some goals, and start pursuing my dreams. I wanted to be in a band and tour, but I knew that most musicians don’t make much money, and I didn't have much money, so I wasn't sure what to do.I had started working in an automotive parts factory around that time, but the work sucked and didn't pay much, and I didn’t want to be broke my whole life. I got the idea in my head that I could find a job I could do on a laptop so that I could make money while traveling with a band.Hey Google, How Do I Make Money From a Laptop?So in my early twenties, I googled "how to make money from a laptop". I found some articles about how it was possible to start a web design business and work from anywhere, so I started trying to learn how to be a web and graphic designer. I discovered podcasts around this same time too, and started listening to shows like Radiolab and This American Life, but also independant shows about business and marketing and web design and audio engineering, all kinds of interesting shows. This was all between about 2009 and 2012.How I Got Into Podcasts and Podcast Production and EditingPodcasts played a huge role in my self-education because I could listen to shows while working, driving, or doing chores. I was learning valuable things constantly and being introduced to ideas and potential opportunities I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.Around this same time, I also started studying audio engineering. Being a musician, I was interested in recording, mixing and mastering because I wanted to make demos for my bands.I started a podcast with some friends I met on a now defunct social network called App.net (the show was called Social Converse). I knew the most about working with audio, so I voluteered to be the editor, and that’s where I learned how to record audio, get audio from all the co-hosts, edit it together, and get it published in an RSS feed and out into iTunes (now called Apple Podcasts) and the other podcast apps / directories.Around that same time, I noticed that a lot of my favorite independent podcasts didn't have terribly great audio quality. There was a show I really liked called the Shoptalk Show. Back then, they were recording their Skype conversations and using the raw audio from that for their podcast. This was a pretty common practice back in 2012, and is actually still pretty common.There would occasionally be problems with their audio (levels all over the place, dropped calls, stuff that could have been edited out). I really liked the show and thought I could help, so I sent them an email and said, “I'm a big fan, and I’d like to help you by taking over the editing for the show. If you can get everyone on the call to record a track on their computer and send the files to me afterwards, I’ll put them all together, so some editing and mixing, and make it sound good.”They agreed and even offered to pay me a little bit of money for each episode (which was super exciting for me). So that was really the start of my career as a podcast editor and producer.Around the same time I started working with the Shoptalk Show guys, I saw a job posting on Authentic Jobs from Dan Benjamin (founder of the 5by5 network) who was looking for an audio engineer for his podcast network. That planted a seed in my mind: Maybe podcast editing could be a full-time, remote job for me.I had also joined a band around that same time, so I was traveling around, playing shows, working weird hours and filling all my free time either listening to podcasts or editing them.The guys from the Shoptalk Show kept referring people interested in starting podcasts to me, so I had a few more weekly clients and I was answering a lot of questions about podcasting and helping people start shows.I really enjoyed helping people make podcasts and answering questions, but I got tired of writing responses to the same questions over and over, so I put up a page on my personal website offering podcast editing services and also wrote a few blog posts to answer some of the most frequestly asked questions. After a few months, my site showed up in the #1 on Google if you searched for “Podcast Editor”. That brought more questions, but also more clients.I started getting more and more podcast editing clients, and eventually I had enough to quit the day job I'd landed a few months before as a junior front-end web developer.All this happened between about 2010 and early 2014. Around that time, I met a hand lettering artist from San Antonio who wanted to start a podcast network and online community for artists and entrepreneurs. I ended up helping him start a show and a small podcast network, and that was around the time I started this show too. A few years later, I joined my favorite podcast hosting company, Simplecast, to help them with customer support, education, and more.You'll be able to hear the original episodes of this show until I re-record them and replace them with new versions, but the original versions of all the episodes are available at https://seanwes.com/podcastdude-archive/.If you want, you can go listen and hear what I sounded like when I was first getting started with podcasting. You can also check out all the original show notes I made as well.Anyways, that's a not so quick introduction to me. Thanks for listening!You can check out thepodcastdude.com/episodes to see a full list of the available episodes for this show, and if you have a question that I haven't answered in one of those episodes (or if you just want to say hi and introduce yourself), you can reach me via email at aaron@thepodcastdude.com, or leave a voicemail at 8173818219, or drop a comment on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/thepodcastdude.I hope you enjoy the show, and happy podcasting.Aaron DowdSeptember 2, 2019
Show Description****************Jason Miller stops by to chat about the world of performant JavaScript, the future of PreactJS, and lettings tools do the code golfing for you. Listen on Website →Links***** PreactJS Jason on GitHub Polyfill.io ShopTalk Show #345 with Laurie Voss Sponsors********
I am interviewing Aaron Dowd, a professional podcast producer, editor, and ambassador for Simplecast, based in Fort Worth, TX Clients including: Dribbble, the 5by5 network, the Shoptalk Show, CodePen Radio, Changelog, seanwes, The Businessology Show thepodcastdude.simplecast.com twitter.com/thepodcastdude
Dave Rupert stop by the show to talk about ShopTalk Show, Aside Quest, and figuring out the format for your podcast and sticking to it.
Dave Rupert stop by the show to talk about ShopTalk Show, Aside Quest, and figuring out the format for your podcast and sticking to it.
Dave Rupert stop by the show to talk about ShopTalk Show, Aside Quest, and figuring out the format for your podcast and sticking to it.
Show Description****************Jennifer Robbins stops by ShopTalk Show to talk about her recently updated book, Learning Web Design - what's been updated, who the book is for, and what's changed since she first published the book. Listen on Website →Links***** LearningWebDesign.com ArtifactConf Jennifer Robbins at O'Reilly Media Matt Marquis Ben Frain on Using CSS Shapes Sponsors********
MJS 026 Chris Coyier This week’s episode is a My JavaScript Story with Chris Coyier. He is from the ShopTalk Show and CodePen. Listen to learn more about Chris! How did you get started programming? Chris has an atypical story. good time in life. He is from a small town in Madison, Wisconsin and had a very privileged upbringing. He went to a nice high school that had a programming elective in his high school. He took a class that taught Turbo Pascal and loved it. He had a lot of fun doing it and became set on doing it in college. How do you go from that to professional web developer? Have to give up on it first. He almost got a degree in university management computer systems, which was more management focused than programming focused. He tried and gave up on Java. He then tried graphic design and ended up getting a degree in that. He got into digital prepress at print jobs where he designed documents. It was fun but it was not as fun as being a “real programmer” would be in his mind. He then got a job at an agency doing web developer work. During this time JavaScript was not on his radar. How do you get from front-end work to building something like CodePen and starting a front-end podcast? He has made his career his hobby. He loves doing this stuff. When he was building websites for the first time he started CSS tricks. It became really fun. He grew it over ten years. Because it’s his career and hobby he got better over time. All of his time was spent helping friends, writing, or at conferences. He then decided to build CodePen with some of his friends. What are you working on these days? Chris wants to be careful not to be working on too many things at once. His top priority is CodePen, which he says is hard to keep up with what developers want there. The second priority is CSS tricks. He likes to publish quality articles for people to read. This third priority is his podcast. What’s the thing you’ve done that you’re the proudest of? CodePen is what has been so continually rewarding. This last month he is all money accounted for. He is really proud of CodePen because they made a company from nothing. He and his coworkers have made the podcast over a decade of growing an audience and it feels entrepreneurial. Charles’ most proud thing is the decision to go full time with his podcast for the last year and a half. Picks Chris: CodePen https://codepen.io/ ShopTalk www.shoptalkshow.com Alien Covenant http://www.alien-covenant.com/ Charles: www.getacoderjob.com React Native www.reactnative.com www.gocd.org JS Dev Summit https://jsdevsummit.com/ Links GitHub https://github.com/chriscoyier Twitter https://twitter.com/chriscoyier https://chriscoyier.net/
MJS 026 Chris Coyier This week’s episode is a My JavaScript Story with Chris Coyier. He is from the ShopTalk Show and CodePen. Listen to learn more about Chris! How did you get started programming? Chris has an atypical story. good time in life. He is from a small town in Madison, Wisconsin and had a very privileged upbringing. He went to a nice high school that had a programming elective in his high school. He took a class that taught Turbo Pascal and loved it. He had a lot of fun doing it and became set on doing it in college. How do you go from that to professional web developer? Have to give up on it first. He almost got a degree in university management computer systems, which was more management focused than programming focused. He tried and gave up on Java. He then tried graphic design and ended up getting a degree in that. He got into digital prepress at print jobs where he designed documents. It was fun but it was not as fun as being a “real programmer” would be in his mind. He then got a job at an agency doing web developer work. During this time JavaScript was not on his radar. How do you get from front-end work to building something like CodePen and starting a front-end podcast? He has made his career his hobby. He loves doing this stuff. When he was building websites for the first time he started CSS tricks. It became really fun. He grew it over ten years. Because it’s his career and hobby he got better over time. All of his time was spent helping friends, writing, or at conferences. He then decided to build CodePen with some of his friends. What are you working on these days? Chris wants to be careful not to be working on too many things at once. His top priority is CodePen, which he says is hard to keep up with what developers want there. The second priority is CSS tricks. He likes to publish quality articles for people to read. This third priority is his podcast. What’s the thing you’ve done that you’re the proudest of? CodePen is what has been so continually rewarding. This last month he is all money accounted for. He is really proud of CodePen because they made a company from nothing. He and his coworkers have made the podcast over a decade of growing an audience and it feels entrepreneurial. Charles’ most proud thing is the decision to go full time with his podcast for the last year and a half. Picks Chris: CodePen https://codepen.io/ ShopTalk www.shoptalkshow.com Alien Covenant http://www.alien-covenant.com/ Charles: www.getacoderjob.com React Native www.reactnative.com www.gocd.org JS Dev Summit https://jsdevsummit.com/ Links GitHub https://github.com/chriscoyier Twitter https://twitter.com/chriscoyier https://chriscoyier.net/
MJS 026 Chris Coyier This week’s episode is a My JavaScript Story with Chris Coyier. He is from the ShopTalk Show and CodePen. Listen to learn more about Chris! How did you get started programming? Chris has an atypical story. good time in life. He is from a small town in Madison, Wisconsin and had a very privileged upbringing. He went to a nice high school that had a programming elective in his high school. He took a class that taught Turbo Pascal and loved it. He had a lot of fun doing it and became set on doing it in college. How do you go from that to professional web developer? Have to give up on it first. He almost got a degree in university management computer systems, which was more management focused than programming focused. He tried and gave up on Java. He then tried graphic design and ended up getting a degree in that. He got into digital prepress at print jobs where he designed documents. It was fun but it was not as fun as being a “real programmer” would be in his mind. He then got a job at an agency doing web developer work. During this time JavaScript was not on his radar. How do you get from front-end work to building something like CodePen and starting a front-end podcast? He has made his career his hobby. He loves doing this stuff. When he was building websites for the first time he started CSS tricks. It became really fun. He grew it over ten years. Because it’s his career and hobby he got better over time. All of his time was spent helping friends, writing, or at conferences. He then decided to build CodePen with some of his friends. What are you working on these days? Chris wants to be careful not to be working on too many things at once. His top priority is CodePen, which he says is hard to keep up with what developers want there. The second priority is CSS tricks. He likes to publish quality articles for people to read. This third priority is his podcast. What’s the thing you’ve done that you’re the proudest of? CodePen is what has been so continually rewarding. This last month he is all money accounted for. He is really proud of CodePen because they made a company from nothing. He and his coworkers have made the podcast over a decade of growing an audience and it feels entrepreneurial. Charles’ most proud thing is the decision to go full time with his podcast for the last year and a half. Picks Chris: CodePen https://codepen.io/ ShopTalk www.shoptalkshow.com Alien Covenant http://www.alien-covenant.com/ Charles: www.getacoderjob.com React Native www.reactnative.com www.gocd.org JS Dev Summit https://jsdevsummit.com/ Links GitHub https://github.com/chriscoyier Twitter https://twitter.com/chriscoyier https://chriscoyier.net/
Kris Van Houten: @krivaten | krivaten.com | Q2 Show Notes: 00:55 - Kris' Interest and Passion for Accessibility 06:07 - Using Ember for Accessibility: Pattern Adoption 10:13 - Context Switch Awareness and Managing Focus 12:08 - Asynchrony and Desired Interaction 14:04 - Building a Form Input Component 19:05 - Things That Are Hard to Catch 22:41 - Assistive Browsers? 28:17 - Making Things Accessible From the Start Resources: Building for Accessibility by Nathan Hammond @ Wicked Good Ember 2015 The A11y Project: Web Accessibility Checklist WCAG 2.0 checklists Why Don't Screen Readers Always Read What's on the Screen? Part 1: Punctuation and Typographic Symbols Mozilla Accessibility Kris' Blog Post Series on Accessibility: Part 1: What is accessibility and why should we care? Part 2: A Primer on Accessibility Part 3: Getting Our Apps Ready for Accessibility Part 4: Building an Accessible Icon Component in Ember Part 5: Building an Accessible Input Component in Ember Part 6: Building an Accessible Alert Component in Ember Part 7: Building an Accessible Numbers Component in Ember Part 8: Building an Accessible Currency Component in Ember Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 72. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer here at The Frontside and podcast host-in-training. With me today is Wil. WIL: Hello. CHARLES: Hey, Wil. Today, we're going to be talking about accessibility in single page applications with Kris Van Houten who is a developer at Q2. Hey, Kris. Thank you for coming on the show. Today, we're going to talk about something that I know a lot of people's minds here and probably elsewhere on the internet, it's a topic that's getting a lot more attention, which is a good thing and that's accessibility. We're going to explore the niche of accessibility as it applies to single page applications. Now, you're a frontend developer at Q2, what initially got you interested in and passionate about accessibility in general? KRIS: I honestly feel my path to passion in this area has been a little bit unorthodox in a number of ways. I basically started out in total apathy of this topic and over the last year, it has turned into a genuine interest of mine. About three years ago, I remember listening to an episode of ShopTalk Show with Dave Rupert and Chris Coyier and they kind of went on this large rant about accessibility and why more developers need to be concerned and compassion about it. Dave Rupert was talking about his contributions to the accessibility project and I'm sitting back and thinking to myself and this is back then, obviously, "Why would anyone who is blind want to use anything that I'm working on." I basically balked at the idea and disregarded it entirely. At that time, I was just getting my feet wet with Ember working on an application with a company here in Cincinnati and we had these conversations about, "I notice that we put this action or a clickable event on a div element, should we not be doing that? Is it that not something that we should be doing?" I remember sitting back and having this conversation and saying, "The ads been crawled by SEO and Ember isn't yelling at us for doing it. It still works fine so what the heck? Let's just go with it." Basically, every single app that come into since then has basically adopted that same mindset even before I joined the team so I know it's not just me who is thinking this. A lot of developers that have been exercising the same way of doing their code. CHARLES: Right, it's the path of least resistance. Everybody's got a job to do. Everybody's got features to deliver so that practice can be very easily self-perpetuating, right? KRIS: Exactly and I think a lot of developers just don't understand the semantic difference between a div or a label or a button or a link and how browsers can actually treat these difference HTML attributes or HTML tags differently because of how assistive technology can utilize them for per person's benefit. That's where I was a little over a year ago basically. When I first started at Q2, that first week, I got pulled into a discussion about design patterns which is another passion of mine and somehow, that turned into me joining a group that was to establish to figure out how to tackle the task of making our large app accessible. Basically, we had a company come in, audit our application and we got a big fat F for accessibility so it's something that we said, "We need to start tackling this problem." Being that, I just started at the company that week, I was going to tell them no but internally, I was panicking and saying, "I got to figure out what is this whole accessibility thing is and why it's important." I started looking for books, articles on the topic and trying to basically flood myself with information. Two things that really transformed my way of thinking was actually a talk given by Nathan Hammond at that Wicked Good Ember in 2015, where he shows an example of building an application without accessibility in mind so basically, doing what I was doing before which is we're adding actions to div tags, we're not really caring about semantic HTML, we're just making the feature or the application work. But then what he does, which I think is super powerful is he pulled up a colleague of his who is blind and had him try to use the application. He just goes through and you can see the struggle and he's actually vocalizing and talking about where he's [inaudible] with this application. Long story short, Nathan comes back up and makes a few adjustments. DHTML has [inaudible] up again and it's night and day difference just by changing the markup and by dropping in the Ember A11y add-on which helps with focusing the browser in certain areas of the content. He's able to totally transform how's individuals able to use the app. For me, that was a super powerful to come in and see that and see someone actually struggle with a website that they were trying to use. I think, [inaudible] where I always saw accessibility was it will only affects people who can't see and I think that's the other area where I've really started to have that paradigm shift was when I realized that this isn't just people who can't see. It's for people who have motor difficulties, who can't use a mouse and how to use a keyboard instead. People who have various vision issues, whether that's cataracts, colorblindness, glaucoma, dyslexia, some in these effects, not just DHTML but also affects color contrast, the fonts that we're using that impacts every area of application design and development and that's where I started to realize that that was where the paradigm shift happened in my mind where I started thinking to myself we really need to start talking about this more and getting other developers on board in general on this. CHARLES: It can be intimidating, especially when it feels like on a single page application, your divs have to do more, so to speak in the sense that it feels that your HTML is fatter. It's not just a thin layer but your HTML is actually part of the UI. KRIS: Exactly, yeah. CHARLES: When it comes to having this paradigmatic shift that you're describing, when you're looking at your single page applications, are there any insights into the general structure of the application that you feel like you've gained that are foundational, they kind of transcend accessibility? I guess, what I'm saying is, is there any way that you become like a better developer or been able to recognize foundational patterns because of having these insights surrounding accessibility? KRIS: I've been working with Ember for about three or four years now, basically since it was still in beta. Over the last several years, I have started to accumulate a lot of knowledge as to how we can utilize Ember to do a lot of the heavy lifting for us. When I started getting more passionate about the area of accessibility, first question that came into my mind are how can we use Ember to do some of the heavy lifting for us. For example, some of the things that I had done was go through and start working on developing a couple of components that basically cover a lot of things that I find ourselves doing [inaudible] a lot. Whether that might be a component to just plain icon on a page or a component to display input on a page. What we're able to do is using Ember, we can say, "Here's the icon I want to display but if I don't happen to pass in an aria-label attribute, for example. The component will add the 'aria-hidden=true' for me. Being able to really utilize the power of Ember to do some of that stuff for us on the back side of things, I guess you could say it magically. CHARLES: Let me stop you there for a second and unpack that example. What you're saying is, if I'm going to put an input on the page, if I actually don't assign an ARIA role, it's going to hide it from me? KRIS: No. I was thinking of an icon components, say if I'm using Font Awesome, for example and I want this with the trash icon so I wrote a component for our specific icon library that we're using. We pass in the icon that we want to display, again that could be the trash icon and we can also pass in an aria-label attribute to add a label to that span that will be read to the user. But if we don't pass that attribute in, the component will automatically add the 'aria-hidden=true' attribute for us so basically it skips over it. CHARLES: Yes so it won't be just garbage for a screen reader or someone navigating with a keyboard. WIL: Yeah, otherwise the screen reader tries to read the content of the icon CSS which is just the Unicode. CHARLES: Right. KRIS: Yeah. What we really is trying to figure out and what I've spent a lot of my time, especially in writing my blog series on this was while we are using React or Vue or Angular or Ember or whatever, how can we utilize the power of the single page application frameworks to do some of that heavy lifting for us in the background without us needing to explicitly define everything. I'd say, especially when you work on a large team like what I work on currently, we can't expect everybody to be extremely well-versed in the area of accessibility so if we can do some of the work for them and just encourage them to adopt these components in their daily workflow, it does some of the work for us. That's what we're working on and talking a lot about at Q2 is basically this pattern adoption. CHARLES: Right so it sounds like to kind of paraphrase, whether you're working in any framework most of them have this concept of components so really leaning hard on that idea to make components at the very granular level aware of their own accessibility. Is that fair to say? KRIS: Yeah, obviously there's more I'm sure as we go for the conversation about some of the things that I've tackled in this area but long story short, being able to utilize and recognize, you have this extremely powerful JavaScript framework at your disposal to do some of work for you so why not equip to do just that. CHARLES: Yeah. I guess that falls into my next question, which is there are component level concerns and if there are other component level concerns, I definitely want to hear about them but what immediately leaps to mind is there are also cross-cutting concerns of any single page application, what's the state of your URL and if you're using a router. Some of the content on the page is going to be changing and others isn't like how do you cope with that? What are the cross-cutting concerns of an application that span components and then how do you cope with them? KRIS: I think one thing that comes to mind as you're talking is the whole area of context switch awareness. If I click a link, if I go from the home page of an application to my profile page, how does a screen reader know that that content has now changed to present this new information to the user? I know what we were able to do was we were able to drop in the focusing out with component that's put out by the Ember accessibility team, which basically whenever we render to an outlet, that's utilizing this focusing outlet component, it will focus the browser to that main area and start presenting that information back to the users. One area that was at the top of our list as we start tackling accessibility was we need to figure out this whole context switch awareness thing because -- this is back then obviously when we first got started -- back then there was no way for a user to know when the page changed so they would basically be sitting there, waiting for any kind of feedback or whatsoever to be presented back to them and it just wasn't happening. I would say, managing focus is probably one of the top level concerns when it comes to single page applications because it's a single page application so if you click a link, the page isn't completely refreshing, prompting the screen reader to present the information back to user. That's one of the key areas that I think of. CHARLES: What about things like asynchrony because a lot of times, these context switches are not boom-boom, one-two. The content on which you want to focus isn't available yet. Usually, the analog from a visual UI would be a loading spinner or a progress bar. How do you deal with those to say, "Your content is not quite ready. If you're made to wait it's because we want your content to be of the highest quality." KRIS: Sure, yeah. We were able to drop in the focusing outlet components in our application and it took care of a good chunk of the work but it seems like in our application, we're doing something that might not be as conventional as the rest of the Ember community would like them to be so we might not use the model hook as we should. It's hard for the page to know when the contents actually ready, when it's been rendered to the DOM to present back to the user. One thing that I'm currently trying to tackle right now, to figure out how we can remedy that problem. I probably say, honestly that's the challenge I'm working on right now. I don't have a solid answer to that one at the moment. CHARLES: Irrespective of how it plugs into the tool that you're using, what would just be the desired interaction there, regardless of how you make it work? KRIS: I guess, conceptually what I'd be thinking about is how can we notify the user we're loading content right now and whether that we have an alert box that has the ARIA alerts, basically attributes set on it, that we could pass in new, basically notifications to it to let the user know, "Loading content. Please wait," and then once that content resolves, focus them on that main outlet where the content has been displayed to read that content back to the user. That's how we're trying to think about tackling this issue but we haven't have a time to implement it to see how it's going to work across all the different avenues of application. CHARLES: I did want to come back at the component level. are there any other ways that you can lean on Ember or lean on React or lean on Vue, if you're using a component or in framework, just talk a little bit more about how you use those to unlock your application and make it more accessible. KRIS: One thing I can think of is a way that we can enforce better usage of the framework that we're using is one that comes to mind is a component that I worked out in the blog series that I wrote was building a form input component. Especially, when you're trying to write an accessible app, I think about how can we enforce certain patterns when other developers come in later on and want to add a field to a form or use this component somewhere else in the application. What are some ways that we can enforce that they're doing everything, using the component correctly so that way it renders accessible mark up? What I tinkered around with and we actually just landed in our application is basically a form group component to where we pass in, obviously the value that the input is bound to. But we also pass in a label that is tied to the input and whenever you hit save and the app goes to refresh, if you don't pass the label, there's an assert statement that basically fires up an error into the console and lets you know, "You're trying to use this component, you need to pass into label attribute for the purposes of accessibility and here's the instructions on how to do it." We've been kind of toying around with this idea of enforcing patterns because again, we have several dozen developers at Q2 that are working on this stuff and they're not all wizards when it comes to accessibility but how can we gradually start getting them to the place where they're adopting these patterns and best practices. I'd say, doing things like that, we are enforcing patterns in the usage of the components as well is really a key. One thing that we implement it in our testing framework is the use of a Deque Labs' aXe engine to basically go through, we can pass it a chunk of HTML and it will give us any suggestions that it has to make that content more accessible. We're using that in our test library right now, in our test build and encouraging developers as they write new components, as they go in and modify components to throw new snippets in to make sure that the content that's being spit out here is accessible and then submit your PR again. Just trying to be more hands on in that way. CHARLES: So you actually running a GitHub agent or something that's actually in the same vein as your test suite or if you're taking like snapshotting with Percy for doing visual diff so you're actually running a third check, which is an accessibility check? KRIS: Right now, we were able to land the aXe engine into our test build a couple months back so we're just slowly incrementing that over time. We have a couple challenges in the way of getting Percy implemented but that is in our list of goals to have that running as well. But one thing that I really like about aXe engine in particular is that if your check fails, it refines improvements that you should be making. The nice thing about it is also spits out a link to a page on Deque Labs website. They give an explanation of what have found and basically educates your developers for you. To me, I think that's huge because again, we can't educate every single developer and expect them to be pros at this but we can utilize tooling like the aXe engine or the [inaudible] Chrome extensions or stuff like that to do some education for us. As we work towards automating this further and further by using the aXe engine in our development side of things or using Percy on the test build as well. See, there's all kinds of stuff you can do but that's where we are right now. CHARLES: I really like that idea because in comparison with what we talked about at the top of the show, about how there's this path of least resistance that developers will follow quite naturally and quite rationally, which can lead to not accessible applications. It sounds to me like what you're doing is a establishing the same path of least resistance but having that path guide you towards accessible applications and saying, "This path of least resistance thing, it can be an asset or a liability so we might as well make it an asset." KRIS: Yeah, for sure. We sit down once a week and we talk about whatever challenges we're trying to work through in terms of accessibility. We have a weekly meeting where we sit down and talk about it. I thought one of the key topics to those conversations is how do we get the other developers that are not in these meetings more aware, more informed and more up to speed with this that they care about it, that they're working on it and it's part of their inner dialogue as they're writing out new features that are going to be deployed out to our clients. Lots of challenges there. CHARLES: Yeah. We've talked about some of these problems that you catch, you're actually writing some assertions there on the test build so you'll actually fail if there's certain requirements that aren't met but what are the things that are more intangible? How do those come up in terms of accessibility? What are the things that you can't catch through automated testing? KRIS: Right now, some of things that we're having a hard time testing which Percy will help once we get that implemented is contrast ratios and stuff like that. That's one of the key things that comes to mind for me when I think of the things that are a little hard to catch. I think another thing that's hard to catch, especially at the aXe engine and stuff like that, won't necessarily catch is the flow of your dialogue. When I turn on a screen reader and it starts reading back this page and content to me, sure we can make it so that it doesn't read out the icons character code and a lot of stuff. It presents the information we want back to us but I think, having that information presented back to the user in a way that's legible, that makes sense to them is probably one of the bigger challenges that I've been working on a little bit. One that comes to my mind is like the reading of currencies or numbers. One thing that I found way helpful was Deque put out a very thorough article on how the different screen reader like JAWS, NVDA, Apple's VoiceOver, how they read different types of punctuation, different types of graphics symbols, how they read [inaudible], $123.50, what does a screen reader actually read back to you. That's where I've actually been spending so much of time lately is building on some components that instead of reading back what the streaming will read back by default, which should be, "Dollar sign, one-two-three-five-zero," having actually read back, "One hundred twenty-three dollars and fifty cents," so basically, writing a series of components, I would do some of that, again heavy-lifting force, in that way, our developers don't have to go in and manually add-ons aria-labels obviously. That's been a nice little challenge where something that's we are working on just testing right now and making sure it works right if there is any downsides to doing this but I want a person using a screen reader or other types of assistive technology to hear the information as I'm thinking about it. When I see $123.50, I'm thinking in my head that's, "One hundred twenty-three dollars and fifty cents," not in single digits one right after the other. Those are things that a lot of the automated software isn't catching. It's not catching like, "Your grammar is bad," or, "This isn't making any sense to me." It is catching like are you passing in or applying the attributes to HTML elements that you should be. Are you using semantic structure in your headings and stuff like that?" I think that's one of the areas where developer is need to get their hand dirty, turn on the a screen reader or use any array of different voice-over tools to actually listen to the content being present back to them to see how it's presented. CHARLES: Yeah, it's almost a difference between a syntax error versus a runtime error like we've got a lot tools that can catch the syntax errors and you can put those in and catch where you have something that's malformed but some sentences can be perfectly formed but make no sense and it takes a human set of eyes to make sure if that content is coherent. One of the things that if you're going to ship applications to people, you need to be able to try and measure as closely as possible the environments in which the people will be using your software so you can actually have an accurate measure of whether it works or not. For example, in the Ember world lately in the stuff that we've been doing with acceptance testing in React, we admit people are going to be using a multiplicity of browsers to access this application so it's very typical to use Testem or use Karma to fire up five different browsers, which if you're using BrowserStack, you can do fifty. You know, people are going to be using IE8.1 on Edge or on a Surface. They're going to be using Safari. They're going to be using Chrome and those often surface those issues but I feel like there's no access to the actual screen reader and assistive technologies to be able to make real assertions against those things. I imagine that it would be cool if there was some way that in Testem or in Karma, you could have one of your browsers be like an assistive browser that you could actually assert, I want to assert that it read it as, "One hundred fifty-three dollars and twenty-five cents," and is that on the horizon? Is that even possible? But it seems like something that we have to shoot for if we actually want to measure that these things are working if we actually want to capture data points. KRIS: Yeah, I totally agree. If you look at the documentation on W3 for how these different HTML attributes should be treated by the browser or by the assistive technology, long story short is this is not how -- in several cases -- certain screen readers are presenting the information back to you. It's not how it's treating the content. That's again, one of the areas I thought was way interesting about that. Deque article on punctuation and typographic symbols, which is like we should expect that this software is operating at this level to present this information back to user in such a way where it understands what the dollar symbol in front of a series of numbers means but it just isn't there yet. There's still work to be done. I'm hopeful for the day where our screen readers are a lot more powerful in that capacity. One that makes me a lot more hopeful about that is I don't know if it's just because I've been more interested about this over the last year but it does seem like I'm seeing a lot more people talk about accessibility. I'm seeing Apple putting out videos, talking about the efforts that they're making to make their software more accessible. It does give me hope that there's a lot more visibility on this now. There's a lot more people fighting for this cause to cause these companies to come back and say, "We're going to put more effort into this. We not just going to make a standard screen reader and ship it and just leave it there for five years and no one was going to touch it," but, "We're going to start making improvements." One thing that I did notice just over the last couple months even was that out of nowhere, we use Apple VoiceOver in Chrome, which isn't typically how people use it. They typically use it with Safari. But if you use in Chrome, it will actually read back to you as, "One hundred twenty-three dollars and fifty cents." When I came across that, I was kind of dumbfounded but then I was thinking to myself, the vast majority of people who are using screen readers aren't using this browser but that's really interesting that they're doing this now. I dream of that day where we can basically run a series of mark up through in a test or into a function and basically have to spit back, here's how screen readers going to present this back to you. I'm hopeful for that day. CHARLES: I'm wondering now like why don't major browser vendors, why is this not just a piece of a puzzle that comes when I download Firefox. Firefox has access to my speakers, why isn't there a web standard for how screen readers will treat content? Maybe there's an effort under way. KRIS: I sure hope so. Looking through documentation, we know how things are supposed to work, how we've agreed that they should work and now basically, we're just waiting for the different browser vendors and Microsoft and Apple to make the updates to their streaming technology as well as JAWS and NVDA. I'm hopeful that these changes come soon. These are improvements to the interface. CHARLES: Yeah. Any time there's a gap, you can see that's an opportunity for someone -- KRIS: For sure. CHARLES: -- To write some software that has some real impact. I know certainly, I would love to see some way to roll these things into our automated test suites. KRIS: Yeah. I searched for it but with no avail and it's a little bit beyond my knowledge of how to build something of that caliber. I hope someone else does it because I don't know how. [Laughter] CHARLES: Well, maybe in a year, maybe in two years, maybe in 10, although hopefully a lot sooner than that. KRIS: Yeah. I would judge that at the speed of things were going right now, I'm optimistic that we're going to have some much better solutions within the next year or two on this field. Especially of how much I'm seeing people talk about it now, how much it's becoming a part of the regular conversation of web development, application development. I'm really optimistic that we're going to see some strides in this area over the next couple years. CHARLES: Okay. With the time that we have left, I'm going to ask one more question. Kris, there is something that I wanted to ask you, which is let's say that I am a developer who is working on a team that is maybe it's big, maybe it's small. I've got an application or I'm starting an application and I have a desire to make it accessible. How do I establish that path of least resistance? What advice do you have for someone who's just about to take the first step on that journey to make sure that they have the outcome that they're looking for which is the most accessible single page app that they can have? KRIS: I think it's a great question. I would start out that answer by simply saying to encourage you to be somebody who cares enough to speak up and become an evangelist, become an educator and become an enforcer in your workplace for this work. You don't have to be the most knowledgeable person in the world on the topic. God knows I'm not and I still there were people come to me, asking me, "How do I make this feature, make the guidelines, make it accessible to screen readers," but I'm passionate about this topic and I'm interested in learning as much as I can about those. Step one, just being an evangelists for it. Be interested in it, care about it. I'd say, the next thing is just learn more about semantic HTML. I would say from a lot of the things that I've been trying to tackle with the application that I'm working on, just simply writing semantic markup takes care about 80% of my challenges. In just understanding what are the different elements, what are the different tags are for and how screen readers and other assistive technology see those things. To get started, I would say there's beginner, intermediate and advance stuff. I would say go to the accessibility project, which is just A11yProject.com and read through the content there. It's very entry-level. You can probably read through most of the content within an hour or two and really start to get a grasp as to what level of effort you're looking at in terms of your application. Once you get through that, if you still want to learn more, I'd say go over to Mozilla's developer network -- MDN -- and read through their documentation. On the topic, there is a little bit more exhaustive but it's still really easy to read and really easy to grasp. Based on a content they have shared there, I'd say more of an advance level is actually go through all the documentation on the W3. It's a lot more verbose, it covers a lot more of use cases, it has a lot more suggestions and just stuff ready to go over. I'm still working through that information. There's so much of it but I would say that's as a good place to get started with understanding the different attributes, what they're for and just the importance of writing semantic HTML. I would say some definitely good things to start tinkering with to find some of the low-hanging fruit in your application would be to use some of the assessment tools that are already out there. You have the [inaudible] little JavaScript snippet that you can put in your Chrome favorite's bar or you can use the aXe engine or if you even have an aXe Chrome extension that you could pop up in your application to basically give you report on some of the areas that you should be looking to make some improvements. I think it's important to view accessibility kind of like how a lot of bloggers view SEO, is that there's always more work to be done, there's always improvements you can make but the key is to take those first steps and start making those improvements. One of the nice things about the accessibility project and there's a couple other websites out there that have some of the lists, they basically have a checklist for you to go down. If you're just getting started with accessibility, they have a checklist of all the first things that you should be covering to get your app started in that realm, to start making those improvements. I know you guys do links in the show notes. I can definitely send you those things to those items to get people started. Another thing I find myself doing a lot is while we're talking about something in our chat at work in or just go off in the code pin and mock something out in HTML and then see how the screen reader reads our content back to me and then kind of tinker with it and do a little bit of self-discovery in how this all works together. There's a lot of options out there. I know just threw a lot at your listeners but I'd say, it all starts with being someone who cares about the topic and cares enough to start asking others to care as well. CHARLES: I think that's a fantastic answer and a great note to end on. But before we go, obviously we will include those things in the show notes but also the other thing that we're going to include is a link that you actually, I understand, have a series of blog posts related to all of the things that you've been talking about, which we'll also include. KRIS: Awesome. Thanks. CHARLES: Everybody, go read it. Thank you so much Kris for coming and talking with us about accessibility. I think you're right. It is a topic that's gaining a lot more traction and a lot more mind share in the mainstream that can only be a good thing.
Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) returns to the show to chat about his most recent publication ‘Practical SVG'. Chris walks us through the ins and outs of working with SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). Chris is most known for on the web for masterminding codepen.io (an in-browser social code application), creating & maintaining css-tricks.com, and podcasting on ShopTalk Show & CodePen Radio. Resources Practical SVG - https://abookapart.com/products/practical-svg About the Practical SVG book - https://css-tricks.com/wrote-book-practical-svg/ ShopTalk Show - http://shoptalkshow.com/ CodePen Radio - https://blog.codepen.io/radio/ CodePen - http://codepen.io/ The Web Platform Podcast 27 - http://thewebplatformpodcast.com/27-building-codepen The Web Platform Podcast 58 - http://thewebplatformpodcast.com/58-scalable-vector-graphics GruntIcon - https://github.com/filamentgroup/grunticon IcoMoon - https://icomoon.io/ SVGO - https://github.com/svg/svgo SVG Reference Cheat Sheet - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Element D3 - https://d3js.org/ Sara Soueidan SVG articles - https://sarasoueidan.com/tags/svg/
If you've thought about starting a podcast but haven't yet, this episode is for you. I want to address some of the reasons and fears you might have that are keeping you from starting a podcast or any kind of creative output that can help you grow an audience and establish you as an authority in your field. My goal is to break you out of the mindset that you might be in (the one that is keeping you from starting), and motivate you to start taking the steps towards launching your podcast. Key Takeaways: Start a podcast about whatever you are most passionate about. If you care about it, talk about it. You won’t run out of topics. The longer you podcast, the more things you’ll find to talk about. What community do you want to become a part of? What community are you already a part of, and do you want to become known as an expert? You don’t have to understand everything about making audio sound good before you start. You don’t have to get editing right the first time. Improve as you go. No one is going to kick you off the internet if you mess something up. After you get over the initial learning curve, you will get faster. Like anything else, the more you do it, the easier it becomes. We all have an equal amount of time in the day. It’s up to us to decide how to use it. In my brainstorming and research for this episode, I went through my email archive, searched Google, and asked folks what was keeping them from starting a podcast. Here’s the list of things I kept seeing pop up. 7 Reasons People Don’t Start a Podcast: I’m not sure what to podcast about, or what topics I should cover. I don’t know anything about recording or editing audio. I don’t have enough money to buy good gear. It seems like so many people are already podcasting. Why would anyone care what I have to say, and how do I stand out? I don’t have the time. I’m not good at speaking. I don’t know anything about making a website or podcast hosting. Roadblock #1. I’m Not Sure What to Podcast About, or What Topics I Should Cover. I get this. I was asking myself this question for about a year before I finally started my podcast. I was worried that after a few months I would run out of things to talk about. I was also worried that the topics I covered wouldn’t be interesting to my audience (more on that later). I have a few questions for you to help to you figure out what you should be podcasting about. First, what are you passionate about? What do you spend most of your time thinking about? What are you constantly excited about learning about? What do you love spending your time on? Start a podcast about whatever you are most passionate about. If you care about it, talk about it. There are so many examples of people make great podcasts that I could bring in, but I just want to mention a couple so you can see examples of people who have found success by podcasting about their passion. Chris Coyier has two podcasts; the Shoptalk Show and CodePen Radio. Both are focused around his passion, which is web design and development. He loves learning about web design, so he started the Shoptalk Show with another guy who loves web design, Dave Rupert. They talk about web design and interview people who love talking about web design. They invite their audience to ask questions about web design so they have more to talk about. This is one of the reasons their show is so successful: the hosts are passionate about web design and they’ve consistently shown up every week for the past three years to talk about what they love. Ryan Young (from the punk band Off With Their Heads) start a podcast called Anxious and Angry back in March of 2014 because he wanted to share his struggles with depression, anger, and the difficulties of being a independent touring musician. He’s obviously passionate about music, but like so many people (especially in punk rock, it seems), he struggles with self-destructive tendencies. So he talks about those things, and asks listeners to write in questions or share their struggles. He also interviews other musicians and highlights music from bands that he likes. Graham Cochrane from TheRecordingRevolution.com and Joe Gilder from HomeStudioCorner.com are both passionate about writing, recording, mixing and mastering music. They have created huge communities of people who share their passion because they share everything they learn and ask their audience what they’re struggling with. You won’t run out of topics. The longer you podcast, the more things you’ll find to talk about. What I’ve realized in my short time of producing a podcast is that the more I do it, the more topics I find to share. I feel like after ten shows, I’m just starting to see the tip of the iceberg of the topics that I could do podcasts about. I believe there are two reasons for this. Since I’ve committed to producing a show every week, I’ve started capturing topics as I come across them. I’m following and listening to people who share my passion for podcasting to see what they’re talking about. I get inspiration from them, I learn from them, and then I share what I’ve learned in my own words; through the lens of my experience. I’m becoming part of the broader conversation about podcasting. As I produce more and more content, people are beginning to see me as an expert in this field and they’ve started asking me questions. This keeps me grounded and connected to what my audience is struggling with and what they’re interested in. I encourage this by asking for questions and feedback. I want to know what other people are thinking and what their opinions are about the things I share on my show. What community do you want to become a part of? What community are you already a part of, and do you want to become known as an expert? If you start a podcast about whatever it is you’re passionate about, you’ll build relationships. You’ll make new friends. You’ll get new work opportunities. The same will be true for the people that become a part of your community through your podcast. Who is Your Audience of One? I heard a question the other day that I really liked. Who is your audience of one? The idea is that you should create your podcast for one other person. Have a clear idea in your mind about who that person is, and what they are interested in. Chances are, if you are passionate about something there are plenty of other people out there who are equally passionate about it. My audience of one is someone interested in learning about podcasting. So I ask myself, if I was hanging out with someone who was interested in podcasting, what kinds of questions would they ask me? What would we talk about? What would they be interested in hearing me talk about? If you have a business, or if you’re some kind of professional or aspiring professional, what can you talk about that would help potential clients? What stories can you share? What could you teach someone who is brand new to the field? What could you teach or share with someone who is at or around your level of expertise? These are the things I keep in mind when preparing for my shows, and I think if you think about those questions, they’ll help you find and shape the message of your podcast. Should I Create Content for Potential Clients or Other Professionals Who Share My Passion? Brent Galloway asked: With the content I produce, should I be concerned with it attracting two different audiences (other designers and potential clients)? Most of my content will be design oriented, but my site’s primary goal is to bring in client work. This is tricky: Should you podcast or create content for the other people who share your passion or for potential clients? I think creating for the other people that share your passion will attract clients that want to work with people who are known for being an expert. If the client skims your list of podcast or video titles and they see the wealth of knowledge you’ve shared, they will trust that you have experience, and they’ll feel confident that you are capable of solving their problems for them. This will help you attract the right kind of client as well: Clients who want to hire you for your expertise and not because you’re the cheapest option. Roadblock #2. I Don’t Know Anything About Recording or Editing Audio. I talk a lot about the importance of audio quality because I believe high-quality audio is one of the most overlooked factors in why some shows are more successful than others. I want you to have a successful show, and sounding great can help your show be successful and grow. What I don’t want is for you to wait to publish anything until you have the perfect setup and the perfect sound. You’re not ever going to get there. I know, because I’m already looking at upgrading microphones and I’m constantly looking for ways to improve my sound. You don’t have to understand everything about making audio sound good before you start. You don’t have to get editing right the first time. I’m going to share a short story here about my drumming career, how I got started, and how it relates to podcasting. When I started playing drums at 12 years old, it was because I was intrigued by them. I wanted to learn how to play this instrument that had so many different pieces and sounds. I wanted to participate in a band; be the guy who held down the rhythm. There were so many things I didn’t know. I didn’t know any of the brands of the companies that made drums and cymbals. I didn’t know anything about how the size of the drums affected the way they sound. I didn’t understand or have much control over the dynamics of my playing. I certainly didn’t have any idea of how to make a living as a musician, but that didn’t keep me from getting started. The very first step was pick up the drumsticks. After that, I learned a few common rhythm patterns (called rudiments), then I sat down behind a drum set and I learned how to play a couple of basic rock beats. Eventually, I learned how to play entire songs. Fast forward 13 years and almost 10,000 hours or practice later, and I was playing in front of hundreds of people, getting paid money to play drums. I’m telling you this because you have to take that first step if you want to get better. Then you have to take the next step, and the next step, and you have to keep taking steps. What is the First Step in Starting a Podcast? The first step to starting a podcast is deciding what you want your show to be about. The more specific, the better, as you'll need to be able to quickly describe what your show is about in order to convince people to listen to it. After you’ve decided on your show topic or focus, try recording a practice episode. Find a quiet room, pick up your iPhone (or whatever smart phone you have), open the voice recorder app, and hold it a foot from your face (microphone pointed at you). Talk for 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, an hour. If you aren’t used to talking out loud to your phone, it might feel a little weird at first, but it’ll get easier over time. Recording practice episode is a great way to get comfortable with recording. Roadblock #3. I Don’t Have Enough Money to Buy Good Gear. At some point, you might want to upgrade microphones, but you don’t need a $500 setup to be a podcaster. You can get started for almost nothing. When I started playing drums, I had a pair of sticks and a little practice pad. After a year, my parents bought me a used $300 drum kit (it was crap). After ten years, I had upgraded to over $2000 worth of professional gear, but that professional gear wouldn’t have made me a better drummer in the beginning. I had to learn how to play drums before the gear even mattered. Professional gear will not make you a professional podcaster. Improve as you go. No one is going to kick you off the internet if you mess something up. You don't have to get everything perfect the first time, or even the first twenty times. It’s a journey, not a pass/fail test. The important thing is to start and then keep going. If you care about getting better, you’ll find ways to improve and get better as you go. Roadblock #4. It Seems Like so Many People are Already Podcasting. Why Would Anyone Care What I Have to Say, and How Do I Stand Out? “No one is going to care” is just an excuse we tell ourselves because we are afraid of rejection or not receiving attention. There are tons of people out there that need the knowledge you can share. Maybe you won’t start off with thousands of listeners, but everyone has to start somewhere. If you clearly define the “why” of your podcast, other people who share your interests will find you. This is the beauty of the internet. When you start, you might be podcasting to no one. That’s ok. Keep going. Go out and find the questions that people in your audience are asking. Don’t have an audience yet? Think about what kind of people you want in your audience, and then find out what they’re asking or looking for. Roadblock #5. I Don’t Have the Time. This is true for all of us especially if you are motivated, if you have a lot of projects and passions, if you have a family or a full time job. It’s hard to find time. It’s hard to make time, but that’s what you have to do. Eric Friedensohn said: The main thing that is keeping me from starting a podcast is that I can see how much work goes into making a good one, and it’s pretty daunting. Lately I have been sticking to mediums and platforms that are working for me, rather than jumping into a whole new world and adding that onto my weekly plate. Podcasting does take time, but there are different levels of commitment and how much time each episode will take you. One of the guys I mentioned earlier, Joe Gilder (who does the Home Studio Corner podcast), gives himself an hour to produce each episode. 45 minutes to prepare and record, and then 15 minutes to edit, write basic show notes and publish. I know he can do each episode in an hour because he has experience and has his workflow down, but it is possible to record and publish an episode in less than a couple hours. After you get over the initial learning curve, you will get faster. Like anything else, the more you do it, the easier it becomes. Charli Prangley said: What’s holding me back from starting a design blog (which I really want to do to start trying to get client work) is all my other projects I’m committed to and LOVE doing. I thought this was interesting, so I just wanted to bring up a few questions: What if you could get better clients if you blogged consistently for a year? What if you could work with people you look up to and respect? Do you currently have any projects that you aren’t super stoked about? Do you foresee yourself wanting to transition into something else later down the line? I’m not here to convince you to start a podcast or a blog. If what you are doing is working well for you, that’s fine. Keep doing it. If you have plenty of money but are short on time, you can hire people to help you with editing, show notes, and admin work. A lot of people hire podcast editors and assistants to help with their podcasts. They spend maybe an hour each week preparing for their show, then they record, and after that, they don’t have to do anything else. The show gets fixed up and published. There’s no rule that says you have to record an hour long podcast and write 5,000 words of show notes. When you’re just starting out, it’s ok to limit your show to 15 minutes or less. As you get better and more experienced, you might find yourself wanting to do longer shows. Podcasting is a Good Investment of Your Time I heard a great story recently on the Mac Power Users podcast. The author of a popular blog about Apple called Daring Fireball – John Gruber – described how he got a full time job from someone who was a reader of his site. So if I told you that if you invested an hour or two of your time every week to create a podcast it would eventually lead to better job opportunities or new clients, would you invest that time? Something else to consider: Are there things that you could give up to create time for podcasting? How much time are you spending browsing social media or Reddit? How much TV do you watch every week? We all have an equal amount of time in the day. It’s up to us to decide how to use it. Roadblock #6. I’m Not Good at Speaking. Friend of the show Brent Galloway posted his first Youtube video today. We were talking about it in the chat earlier, and Sean said something to Brent that I thought was really profound, so I want to share it with you here. Sean said (to Brent): It’s crazy, you probably feel like you’re just sort of sticking your neck out there and you see all the things you need to improve and do better, but for every one Brent, there are 99 others who just sit back and passively listen. You are the 1% of people who are actually doing and you’re so far ahead. I know what it feels like to be dissatisfied with your voice. Recording a podcast is hard. You want to do a good job so you’re stressing about it. After you record, you listen back and you think, this is terrible. I can’t believe I messed up that word. I can’t believe I talked in monotone for 15 minutes. Sean is right. If we put ourselves out there, if we try, if we create stuff, there are going to be 100 other people that are going to consume what we make, but they aren’t going to be creating themselves because it is hard. It is a risk and it is scary putting yourself out there. If you feel like you aren’t a good speaker, I encourage you to go listen to episode 9 of this podcast, What If I Don’t Like My Voice? You find tons of useful information there. Also check out the work by Roger Love. He’s created a lot of great content about speaking publicly. Roadblock #7. I Don’t Know Anything About Making a Website or Hosting. The good news is that you don’t have to have a full website to start a podcast. Simplecast is $15/month and will give you everything you need. No coding, graphic design or complicated setup required. Q&A: Garrett asks: I’m afraid (the thing I make) will take off (because it will) and then people will start looking into my history and they’ll find my high school livejournal that I can’t remember the password for. I wouldn’t worry about it too much. I think we all have those old embarrassing blogs. The good news is that most people are not going to care enough to go digging around in your past. If they do, it’s probably because they really like you and they want a deeper connection. They probably have old embarrassing blogs of their own. I wouldn’t worry about the tiny number of people that might go snooping around just to dig up dirt; those people are jerks and no one likes them anyways. Ben Toalson asks: I don’t have time to do a podcast AND a weekly blog AND a weekly newsletter AND a weekly vlog. What should I focus on? Ben, you are already doing three of those four things, which is more than what most people do. For those of you who don’t know who Ben Toalson is, he’s the co-host of the seanwes podcast, and he does a show with his wife called In the Boat With Ben (a podcast on balancing family life with a creative pursuit). He does a weekly podcast, but he also writes extensive show notes (what I would call a blog post), and sends those show notes out to an email list. That’s how we do things on the seanwes network. You can do something similar with your show. It is a lot of work, but it’s easier than producing three separate pieces of content every week (podcast, blog post, email newsletter). Start with writing, then repurpose that content for different mediums as much as possible. Sarah asked: My husband and I did about 30 episodes of our podcast but now it’s at a standstill (because of me). Not sure if I want to continue with it. Not really gaining traction (that I know of) and also I’m not sure what I’m trying to get out of it. I think he was more into it than I was. How long should it take to start receiving feedback, comments and a little more traffic from a podcast if done regularly? If you create a show that isn’t gaining traction or resonating with anyone, I would take a hard look at the content. Are you addressing topics that your audience are interested in? Are you asking for feedback and questions? Are you having conversations with people about the topics? Regularly producing a podcast isn’t good enough if you aren’t creating content that resonates with people. If your podcast is extremely niche, there may not be that many people who share your passion and are also interested in listening to your podcast. You should also take a close look at audio quality and SEO. If you have a podcast and you’re doing a good job with your titles (they should be something your audience would want to click on), but you aren’t writing much in terms of show notes, you’re missing out on organic search engine traffic. I’d recommend checking out episode 5, How to Supercharge Your Podcast and Increase Its Value With Writing. There’s a lot of good advice in there about why show notes are important, and how you can create them. Let’s talk audio quality for a minute. Some listeners have a higher tolerance for poor audio quality than others. If you are recording with an iPhone or a built-in laptop microphone, you may lose listeners because your audio quality isn’t great. Most of those listeners probably won’t let you know, either. They are just going to turn off your podcast and forget about you. There are too many other podcasts out there with great content and great sound quality. You don’t have to have a super-expensive mic, a professional recording studio, or an audio engineer to mix your show, but you need to have a decent mic and know how to record at proper gain levels and do the basics of post-production (editing, mixing, noise removal, etc). Satvik asks: My clients are pretty specific: CEOs of growing startups with complex accounting needs. How do I figure out the best way to reach them? Should I focus on podcasts, blog posts, videos or referrals? First, word of mouth referrals are the best way to get new clients. Having your client’s friends recommend you is really powerful. As far as content goes, start by identifying what your clients are interesting in learning about. What problems are they having? What are they struggling with? What do they want to learn about? Can you create content that gives them some new insight or shows them how you solved a problem? Start with writing. Write a blog post about how you solved a problem for one of your clients. Write as many of those blog posts as you can, because that will attract clients that are searching online for those answers. Turn those posts into podcasts and then video. Cool Stuff to Check Out: Recommended Gear: https://kit.com/thepodcastdude Podcast: https://thepodcastdude.simplecast.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/thepodcastdude Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/thepodcastdude Successful Podcasting: http://successfulpodcasting.com Simplecast Blog: http://blog.simplecast.com/
02:43 - Dave Rupert Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Paravel 03:42 - Chris Coyier Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog CSS-Tricks CodePen 06:24 - The ShopTalk Show and Podcasting @shoptalkshow “What do I learn next?” => “Just Build Websites!” Question & Answers Aspect 23:19 - Tech Is A Niche Paul Ford: What is Code? 29:51 - Balancing Technical Content for All Levels of Listeners Community Opinion 38:42 - Learning New CSS Tricks (Writing Blog Posts) Code Golf 41:54 - The Accessibility Project Adventures in Angular Episode #027: Accessibility with Marcy Sutton Anne Gibson: An Alphabet of Accessibility Issues 56:02 - Favorite & Cool Episodes ShowTalk Show Episode #091: with Jamison Dance and Merrick Christensen ShopTalk Show Episode #101: with John Resig ShopTalk Show Episode #157: with Alex Russell ShopTalk Show Episode #147: with Tom Dale ShopTalk Show Episode #123: Special Archive Episode from 2004 ShopTalk Show Episode #166: with Lisa Irish ShopTalk Show Episode #161: with Eric Meyer Picks FIFA Women's World Cup (Joe) Winnipeg (Joe) The Martian by Andy Weir (Joe) Zapier (Aimee) SparkPost (Aimee) dev.modern.ie/tools/vms (AJ) remote.modern.ie (AJ) Microsoft Edge (AJ) StarFox Zero for Wii U (AJ) Hot Plate (AJ) untrusted (AJ) Skiplagged (Dave) Judge John Hodgman (Dave) Wayward Pines (Chris) Sturgill Simpson (Chris) The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time (Dave) The Adventure Zone (Dave) React Rally (Jamison) Matsuoka Shuzo: NEVER GIVE UP (Jamison) DESTROY WITH SCIENCE - Quantum Loop (Jamison) Serial Podcast (Chuck) Ruby Remote Conf (Chuck)
02:43 - Dave Rupert Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Paravel 03:42 - Chris Coyier Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog CSS-Tricks CodePen 06:24 - The ShopTalk Show and Podcasting @shoptalkshow “What do I learn next?” => “Just Build Websites!” Question & Answers Aspect 23:19 - Tech Is A Niche Paul Ford: What is Code? 29:51 - Balancing Technical Content for All Levels of Listeners Community Opinion 38:42 - Learning New CSS Tricks (Writing Blog Posts) Code Golf 41:54 - The Accessibility Project Adventures in Angular Episode #027: Accessibility with Marcy Sutton Anne Gibson: An Alphabet of Accessibility Issues 56:02 - Favorite & Cool Episodes ShowTalk Show Episode #091: with Jamison Dance and Merrick Christensen ShopTalk Show Episode #101: with John Resig ShopTalk Show Episode #157: with Alex Russell ShopTalk Show Episode #147: with Tom Dale ShopTalk Show Episode #123: Special Archive Episode from 2004 ShopTalk Show Episode #166: with Lisa Irish ShopTalk Show Episode #161: with Eric Meyer Picks FIFA Women's World Cup (Joe) Winnipeg (Joe) The Martian by Andy Weir (Joe) Zapier (Aimee) SparkPost (Aimee) dev.modern.ie/tools/vms (AJ) remote.modern.ie (AJ) Microsoft Edge (AJ) StarFox Zero for Wii U (AJ) Hot Plate (AJ) untrusted (AJ) Skiplagged (Dave) Judge John Hodgman (Dave) Wayward Pines (Chris) Sturgill Simpson (Chris) The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time (Dave) The Adventure Zone (Dave) React Rally (Jamison) Matsuoka Shuzo: NEVER GIVE UP (Jamison) DESTROY WITH SCIENCE - Quantum Loop (Jamison) Serial Podcast (Chuck) Ruby Remote Conf (Chuck)
02:43 - Dave Rupert Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Paravel 03:42 - Chris Coyier Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog CSS-Tricks CodePen 06:24 - The ShopTalk Show and Podcasting @shoptalkshow “What do I learn next?” => “Just Build Websites!” Question & Answers Aspect 23:19 - Tech Is A Niche Paul Ford: What is Code? 29:51 - Balancing Technical Content for All Levels of Listeners Community Opinion 38:42 - Learning New CSS Tricks (Writing Blog Posts) Code Golf 41:54 - The Accessibility Project Adventures in Angular Episode #027: Accessibility with Marcy Sutton Anne Gibson: An Alphabet of Accessibility Issues 56:02 - Favorite & Cool Episodes ShowTalk Show Episode #091: with Jamison Dance and Merrick Christensen ShopTalk Show Episode #101: with John Resig ShopTalk Show Episode #157: with Alex Russell ShopTalk Show Episode #147: with Tom Dale ShopTalk Show Episode #123: Special Archive Episode from 2004 ShopTalk Show Episode #166: with Lisa Irish ShopTalk Show Episode #161: with Eric Meyer Picks FIFA Women's World Cup (Joe) Winnipeg (Joe) The Martian by Andy Weir (Joe) Zapier (Aimee) SparkPost (Aimee) dev.modern.ie/tools/vms (AJ) remote.modern.ie (AJ) Microsoft Edge (AJ) StarFox Zero for Wii U (AJ) Hot Plate (AJ) untrusted (AJ) Skiplagged (Dave) Judge John Hodgman (Dave) Wayward Pines (Chris) Sturgill Simpson (Chris) The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time (Dave) The Adventure Zone (Dave) React Rally (Jamison) Matsuoka Shuzo: NEVER GIVE UP (Jamison) DESTROY WITH SCIENCE - Quantum Loop (Jamison) Serial Podcast (Chuck) Ruby Remote Conf (Chuck)
Key Takeaways (the TLDR Version): Start with the end in mind: What do you want to achieve with your show? How will you know if you've been successful after a year, or two years, or ten years? What are your goals? It helps to clearly define the answers to these questions before you start. When you start a podcast, you need to think about how you can provide something valuable to your listeners. Ask yourself, “What kind of person am I trying to reach, what are our common interests, and what am I going to give them? What do I want my show to do for them?” In order to start a podcast, you'll need: A overall topic or theme for your show, and a plan for the structure/format for your first few episodes A title, short description, and square cover art (3000x3000px jpg) for your show A way to record and edit audio so you can create MP3 audio files for your episodes (You'll want to use one microphone for each person, more on that later) Podcast hosting (an online hosting service (like Simplecast) for your audio files and an RSS feed so you can get your show into Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcast apps & directories) While podcasting isn't a quick or easy way to make money, you can make money with a podcast by selling advertisments, getting sponsors or partners, asking people to support you directly through Patreon (or some other tipping service), selling services or products to your audience, and so on. While the majority of podcasts being produced currently do not make enough to provide a full-time living, that doesn't mean you can't make money with a podcast, and there are plenty of other valuable things that you'll get from podcasting, including personal development, new skills, friendships, and more. Podcasting is a great way to build an audience: You’ll become known as an authority in your field, you’ll learn more about what you podcast about, you’ll build new relationships and make new friends, and you’ll gain a better understanding of your audience and what they want. The most common podcasting mistakes are usually related to producing shows with poor audio quality, not clearly defining your goals for yourself or your audience, or expecting big results right away. Now that you've got the outline for what you'll need to do to start a podcast, all you need to do now is take action. Set aside some time for planning. Write out your goals and the topics for your first ten episodes. Set up your gear and record and edit a practice episode. It's easy to spend hours and hours reading tutorials and listening to other people talk about podcasting, but the best way to get better is to just start doing it yourself. For my backstory and more about why I'm starting this podcast, check out the trailer for this show. My guest for this first episode is Sean McCabe, who produces online courses for creative professionals at seanwes.com. Aaron: Let’s talk about how we met. It was at a Dribbble meetup in fall 2013. We got introduced and you said you wanted to start a podcast. I asked what it was going to be about, and you said design and creativity. Why did you want to start a podcast? Sean: I had a lot of experience with client work, especially in the design world, and I was starting up my own business, but I had a lot I wanted to share on client work and professionalism in general. The reason I hadn’t done it before that point was because I wanted to be out of client work before starting a podcast about it. I wanted to do a podcast where I talked about design, client work, and professionalism, all in the context of business and creativity. Aaron: At the time, I was very interested in learning about those things. When we started the podcast, you were—and still are—very focused on providing value to the listeners. I was still in learning mode. I was more interested in learning and I was less focused on providing value. I've learned that when you start a podcast, you need to think about providing something valuable to the people listening to you. Sean: Now, when you say providing value, what do you mean? What’s the alternative? Aaron: In a lot of podcasts, I see that they’re not focused on what they’re giving, it’s more like they’re just hoping for attention. They’re not thinking about what the audience is going to get out of listening. Sean: It’s kinda like, “We’re just gonna show up and we’re gonna talk,” but they’re not thinking about what they’re going to give the listeners in exchange for their time, or the reason they’re showing up and talking. Aaron: Exactly. You have to ask yourself: What is someone going to take away from this podcast? When you start with that question, it changes everything. Sean: For this episode, we’re talking about who you are, who I am, why we’re doing this, and how podcasts changed out lives. What people might not know is that you started with an outline. We’re starting off with who you are, how I fit into this, why someone should start a podcast, who is the show for, what topics you’re going to cover in future episodes, and at the end you have takeaways. So you’re coming into this asking yourself, “Why should someone listen to this? Who am I trying to reach, and what am I going to give them?” I like how you’re starting this. Most people just jump straight into the gear. “Oh, you want to start a podcast? Let’s talk about mics.” I like that you’re taking one step back even further than that, and asking, “Why are you doing this?” Good Reasons to Start a Podcast 1. You can build an audience Aaron: First, you can build an audience. You’ll become known as an expert in your field if you share what you’ve learned. We know Sean as an expert hand-letterer because he’s podcasted about it and written a whole course about how to make a living as a hand-letterer. I was doing a little reading yesterday in preparation for this show, and I came across an article about why you shouldn’t start a podcast. The post basically said, “Podcasts aren’t a very effective way to reach people.” A bunch of people left comments saying, “But we found and started trusting you because of your podcast.” So I do think podcasting is a very effective way to build trust with your listeners. Sean: It’s very intimate. I don’t know about you, I think you have pretty good mic technique, but I’m about three inches away from my microphone. How many people do you allow to be three inches from your ear? I’d think most of them are pretty close to you, so it does have this kind of intimacy. 2. You’ll learn more about whatever it is you’re starting a podcast about Sean: Hang on; I thought you had to be an expert to teach stuff on a podcast. Aaron: Would you call me an expert at podcasting? Sean: I think of you as one. Aaron: Right, but that’s mostly because I started a website about podcasting and you know I’ve worked on podcasts full time for over a year now. There are still so many things I don’t know about podcasting. There are so many more things I’m going to learn because I’m starting this podcast about podcasting. This applies to anything you start a podcast about: You’re going to learn more about it. How many episodes of the seanwes podcast have you done now, 160? Did you have any idea when you started of all the different topics you were going to cover? All the things you were going to learn about and share? Sean: No way. Not even close. I had a few topics prepared, but there was no way I had 160 episodes of information to share with people, all I did was start off with a commitment to show up and podcast. You don’t have to be an expert to start a podcast. Aaron: Knowing that you had to show up and podcast twice a week put you in a learning mindset; as you’re going through the week, you’re paying attention to things, you’re writing stuff down, and you’re thinking about what would be good to put in your podcast. Sean: It changes your mindset. I’m glad you brought up the learning thing. So many people think, “I shouldn’t start a podcast. I’m not good enough, I’m not smart enough, I’m not expert enough.” You’re saying start a podcast to learn. I’ve had my mindset changed because I started a podcast. Everything is an opportunity to teach something. You see the world in a different sense; this is something that I could teach. This is something I could bring to the show. 3. Starting a podcast will help you make new friends Aaron: Another great reason to start a podcast is you’ll make new friends. Sean and I met because he was interested in starting a podcast. It turned into a close relationship that has benefited me in so many ways. In fact, he built a whole online community around his podcast. Tell me a little bit about that. Sean: The Community is a group of people who are, essentially, entrepreneurs—people in various stages of wanting to forge their own path, starting their own business, do their own thing, freelance, sell products, or teach other people. Maybe they’re still in a day job, but they’re working towards that. The Community is a bunch of people who have similar mindsets of sticking with their values, professionalism, and encouragement. It’s a very positive atmosphere. We stream all of the shows on the seanwes network live to the Community. Every weekday we have a show, there’s a topic, and everyone comes together to discuss that topic. We also have the live chat and mobile app available 24/7, so there’s people constantly connecting and discussing things. Aaron: This all happened because you decided to start a podcast. I know you had Twitter and Instagram followers, and people who emailed you, and that’s all great, but think about how many people have met and become good friends because of your podcast. You’re one of my clients now, but I’ve met other Community members, including Adam Martin, that have become clients as well. I’ve met so many people just from this one podcast. If you think about providing value and you care about your listeners, even if you just have 20 listeners in the beginning, get to know them and open yourself up to growing those relationships. It can be life-changing. Sean: You were talking about number of downloads, or someone was saying that podcasting is not really effective; but podcasts are so engaging. It’s very intimate. If you have 20 listeners, that’s incredible. That’s 20 people that allowed you to come three inches from their ear. You probably don’t have that many people in your life that are willing to listen to you, so for the people just starting out, don’t get caught up in the numbers. I say show up every day for two years, and don’t expect to see any results in that time. I didn’t discover some of the best, and my favorite, podcasts and TV shows until at least two years into it. I didn’t listen or watch from the pilot episode, like maybe some people are doing with this show or TV shows. A lot of the ones that end up being my favorites have been around for a few years by the time I listen. I get excited and I go back and I binge listen or I binge watch all of the episodes and I’m really into it. Now, I’m engaged. I remember this one podcast, I went back and listened to all of it—I think it was 90 or 100 episodes. They had this community (this was before I had my own community) and I was ready to join. I was so on board with what they were talking about. By the time I caught up, he’d been doing it about two years, and he said, “We’re moving on. We’re going to be doing other things. We’re not going to be doing the podcast anymore, thanks for listening.” I was so disheartened. I felt so let down. I had just discovered it, it was so new to me. Of course for him, he’d been showing up for two years. It felt like he’d been doing it forever. That’s what it feels like when you’re a podcaster or you’re a blogger and you’re showing up and you’re not getting those downloads or you’re not getting those numbers. Even if it feels like you aren’t getting results or as many downloads as you'd like to have, keep going. Do it for the people that are going to discover you in two years. Aaron: Do it for the five people that are listening and really like what you’re saying. Sean: They’re your ambassadors! If you don’t care about those people because the numbers aren’t big enough, you’re never going to get there because those people are the ones that are going to spread the word. Aaron: That leads to a better understanding of the people in your audience. If you start a podcast with them in mind and engage with the people that are responding—having conversations and asking them questions—you’re going to start to learn what they’re struggling with, what they’re having a hard time with, what they like about your show, and maybe what they don’t like about it. If you’re open to that conversation, you can start to refine and tailor your content to the people giving you feedback. Sean, people think you read minds because they ask a question and then you actually listen. People in the chat go crazy and ask, “How’d you know I was thinking about that?” and you say, “Well, you asked the question yesterday.” The key to a successful podcast or blog is doing it for the reader, not just showing up and writing or talking about only what you want to write or talk about. Which makes total sense when you think about it; you’re not the one that’s going to be reading your blog posts, the other people are! You want to write or podcast about what they want to hear. Show Up for 2 Years and Don’t Expect Results Sean: I still have this mindset. We have hundreds of people in the Community, I have nearly a million downloads on the podcast, and I’m still expecting no results. To me, the seanwes podcast is just getting started—we’re only 18 months in. We haven’t even started yet. That’s where my mindset is. Are we scaring people away? Were we supposed to tell them to show up and do two episodes, not two years? Aaron: No, I think this is something people don’t think about. I’ll say that this is intimidating to me, showing up for two years. Even thinking about showing up every week for two years is intimidating. You start to doubt yourself, or at least I do. I think, “How am I going to come up with a great show every week?” You really just have to go for it. I’m going to do it; I’m going to spend the time to prepare, and show up and listen to the people that engage with me. If someone asks me a question in the chat, if someone sends me an email, I’m going to pay attention to that. I’m going to use that to fuel future episodes. I’m getting to know my audience, I’m building relationships. That’s why I’m podcasting. Sean: And if you don’t have the answer to a question, you’re going to go find out. You’re gonna learn. Aaron: That way, it benefits me, too. It’s a win/win situation, but it’s still scary. I know you’ve had struggles with showing up. You’ve shown up on a Tuesday and said, “Guys, this is hard today.” Sean: I don’t know what I’m talking about on tomorrow's show, but I’m gonna show up and figure it out. Aaron: The cool thing is that now you have this community of people, your audience, that you can go to. You can ask them, “What are you guys struggling with? What should I do a show about?” They’re gonna tell you, and you’ve got some options there. That’s way different than sitting alone in your room and wondering what you’re going to do a show about this week. It’s gotta be about the audience. It’s gotta be about providing value, and building relationships. Who Is This Show For? Aaron: This episode is titled How to Start a Podcast, but there are so many things to talk about and while I can't cover everything, I do want to give you an overview of what the process looks like, and what topics I’m going to cover in future episodes. This show is for anyone who wants to start a podcast, but also for people who already have a podcast and want to make their show better. There’s going to be some overlap for people who are interested in audio in general, because the skills I’ve learned from editing podcasts have helped me when making video, when recording interviews, bands, demos, etc. I’m going to be covering a lot of stuff like that, in addition to other things I think will be helpful to podcasters. Topics I’ll Cover On This Show 1. Gear You have to record yourself talking, so I’m going to be talking about microphones. Sean: I’m interested in hearing how you address that, because there’s always the interesting “quality vs cost” issue. Aaron: People should invest in great microphones, but I realize that’s not a reality for a lot of people, so I want to go over the options. Like, if you only have $100, here’s what you need to buy. 2. Recording I'll be convering how to set the levels right for your mic, what programs you can use, how to record interviews over Skype, etc. 3. Editing Aaron: How do you edit a show without making it sound all chopped up and unnatural? Should you edit at all? I know there are a lot of podcasters that don’t think you need to do much editing. I don’t agree with that. I don’t think you have to cut out every little bit of silence, or every filler word or mistake. People have a natural way of speaking, and that’s fine, but there are things that you can cut out. Editing is about respecting the listener—cutting out super long pauses, or things they don’t need to hear like coughs, etc. It’s about polishing. It’s saying to the listener, “I care about this enough to give you the listener the best version of this that I can.” Sean: A lot of people might think that edited podcasts are super highly produced and it doesn’t sound natural, but people often say they don’t even realize this show is edited, and you say that’s kind of the point. Aaron: If someone listens to something that I edited and they notice the edits, then I’m not doing a good job. Sean: How do you like that, Aaron? If you do your job well, no one knows you exist. Aaron: I’m good with that. I follow some of the Twitter accounts of the shows I edit, and nothing makes me happier than to see someone saying, “Oh my gosh, the Shoptalk Show sounds so good, they’re doing a great job.” They don’t ever mention me, but I know they’re talking about my work. They don’t know they’re talking about my work, but I know what the show sounded like before I did the editing, mixing and mastering, and it makes me happy. The point is to make your listeners happy. I’m going to be going into a lot of depth about editing content, mixing and mastering, plugins, etc. 4. Writing and Preparing Show Outlines Aaron: I’m also going to be doing some shows about writing and preparing show topics and outlines. I’d like to have Sean on the show to talk about that topic, because he does a lot of preparation for his shows. Sean, you said something a couple weeks ago: start with the takeaway in mind. That really resonated with me. What’s the takeaway? It could be anything from how to launch a WordPress blog to how to design a header image for your blog posts. When you start with a single idea—a takeaway—you can get a whole show out of that idea. Break it down, write a couple of headlines or bullet points, then expand on that. It turns into an outline, similar to what I have right now. Sean: We’ve gone pretty far off of this outline, had side discussions, and none of this is scripted. A lot of people don’t want to prepare their show because they think it’ll sound scripted. We’re not talking about writing every word, we’re just saying have a takeaway so it’s not just showing up, turning on the mic, and hoping we get something out of it. You actually have a purpose for being there, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have these little explorations and adventures along the way. Podcasting doesn’t have to be about being ridged and lifeless. Aaron: I love those side rails. It’s natural. You don’t have to stick to the script, this is a conversation. In some ways, it’s a live performance. We do it live and we’re streaming to people right now. You should be flexible, but you have to prepare beforehand. You have to know what you’re going to talking about, and what you’re going to be providing to the listeners. Sean: You want to have these little magical moments of spontaneity, but you can’t have spontaneity without structure, because then you have chaos, you have anarchy. Plan, not 100%, but plan a good amount of it, then within that structure you can have spontaneous moments. 5. Writing Great Episode Notes Aaron: I’m also going to do a show about writing episode notes, since they're great for a lot of reasons. 6. Sticking With It & Showing Up Aaron: I’m also going to be doing some episodes about showing up and sticking with it. It’s important to show up consistently. So just to recast: This is a show for people who want to do podcast, or have started a podcast and want to make their show even better, whether that’s gear, workflows, mindset, or motivation. Q&A Q: What’s the single most common mistake people make when starting a new podcast? Sean: I actually answered this in the chat earlier, but I wanted to know if you had another answer. I guessed that you would say, “Not preparing beforehand.” Was I right, or do you have a different answer? Aaron: You’re right, but I want to expand on that a little bit. It’s actually two things. You do need to prepare and plan out your show, but you also need to learn enough about recording audio to make something that sounds good, or at least something that sounds ok. When you start a podcast, you only have one shot to make a good first impression. Sean: We’ve got a couple of questions that are related to this. Cory asks, “Is it more important to just get started, and iterate, or to get started right?” Sarah asks, “What is the level of audio quality that you consider the minimum to start?” There’s this balance of getting started with whatever you have vs. having one chance to make a good first impression. Where do you fall on that spectrum? Aaron: You do need to prepare for the show. Write an outline and start with an idea. Even if it’s just 10 minutes. Whatever you feel comfortable with: If you can talk about a subject or explore some ideas and give some value to the person who is going to listen, that’s good. The audio quality minimum that you need to meet is you need to have some kind of microphone that is not the built-in microphone on your laptop or Apple ear buds. Also, make sure you record in a room that doesn’t have a lot of echo. You need to record in a quiet room that’s as “dead” as possible. Sean: If you’ve got a laptop, even a closet will work, because the clothes will absorb the echo. Aaron: You need to record in a quiet place without a lot of background noise. Make sure you don’t have AC running, fans, dogs barking, etc… Try to record in the quietest place possible. You'll need to learn about setting input levels. Some USB microphones have gain knobs, some don’t, and then if you have an XLR microphone (like the Shure SM7B mics that we’re using), you need to learn how to set the input gain levels right on whatever interface you’re using, so that your levels aren’t too hot or too quiet. That’s the starting point: Have an idea of what you’re going to talk about and then be able to record some audio that doesn’t sound terrible. Sean: That’s a decent answer without going super deep, which I’m sure you can and will dedicate entire shows to answering. Q: If you’re coming at podcasting from blogging, how do you adapt your mindset to the new medium? Aaron: If you’re coming to podcasting from blogging, you’re in a good spot. If you have a blog post, you can adapt that content to a podcast very easily. You can take the topic and turn it into a podcast epiosde. You could even just read the whole blog post like a script. Some people will enjoy hearing you read your blog post even more than reading it themselves. Different people like to consume content in different ways. Q: How long should my podcast be? Why are so many shows about an hour long? Can shorter or longer shows work and reach big audiences? Sean: There’s no golden rule that says you’ve got to hit 22 minutes, or you’ve got to go an hour and a half for anyone to care. It’s different for everyone, it’s different for every show. My answer—and this is the same for newsletters, blogs, landing pages, podcasts, etc.—is make it as long as it needs to be. Don’t force it to be 20 minutes if you have more valuable stuff to say, and don’t force it to be more than an hour because you think that’s what the more successful shows do. Share it with people, that’s why we invented to pause button—they can watch it, listen to it, or consume it whenever they want. They can stop at any point. Give it all to them and let them consume it the way they want to. If you have a lot to share, make it long and if you don’t, make it short, but don’t worry about it. If you have valuable information, don’t worry about going over some arbitrary threshold. Aaron: There have been a few podcasters that have asked me to cut an hour-long show down to 20 minutes. My first question is why? Why would you make this shorter if there’s good stuff? Why not focus instead on making it be the best show it can be; including everything that’s valuable and discarding or editing out the things that aren’t? Sean: I know that’s a rhetorical question, but I think the answer in people’s heads is, “Well, because so-and-so does it.” The successful shows they listen to are 20 minutes long, so they think that’s how long a show should be. The people that are thinking they need to make an hour long show are listening to hour long shows that are successful, and they don’t know about the ones that aren’t. It’s just a skewed confirmation bias; it comes as a result of looking to other people and trying to imitate their success when really, you should just be making the show you need to make, with whatever you have to offer to your audience. Aaron: I know that this first episode is going to be longer because you and I have a lot to talk about. But it’s a lot different when you are doing a solo show, or depending on who your co-host is. Either way, focus on making it good and make it only as long as it needs to be. Q: Should I have a co-host? Sean: Coby asks, “Is it more effective to get a dialog going by having a co-host or guests?” Aaron: It is easier. When you started the seanwes podcast, you were thinking about doing it solo. I said that I thought it’d be easier for you if I joined to ask questions and bounce ideas off you and have a conversation. What’s helped me (with starting a solo show) is thinking about what questions I’ve already been asked in emails. I started an email newsletter a few months ago. I started writing content for it, writing blog posts, and I asked people for their questions about podcasting. Some people responded, so I saved those questions, and made a note to do shows about them. That’s kind of a dialog, but I do think it’d be a little easier if I had a regular co-host. Sean: It definitely makes it easier. That’s not to say solo shows can’t do well. I think they can, but you can’t really beat a super good dynamic between people with complimentary personalities and perspectives. It’s so engaging, it’s so fun to listen to. It’s also kind of hard to create that magic. Like with Ben and I, if you go back and listen to the earlier episodes of the seanwes podcast, we didn’t have that magic. It takes time to develop that and to be able to riff off each other. It’s going to take practice, but it definitely helps having someone else on, and it helps to have a structure. Like we said, leave room for people to tell stories. You don’t have to script it all. Maybe have some planned questions, and some sort of conclusion in mind so it’s more cohesive. Aaron: You and I have complimentary personality types. You’re a little more introverted, thoughtful, and you plan ahead more. I’ve picked up some of these good habits you have, but I’m much more likely to speak before I think. When you’re choosing a co-host, I think it’s important to keep those things in mind. I’ve joked with my friend Cory Miller before about being the co-host on his new podcast, but I actually don’t think I’d be a good fit for him because our personality types are so similar. I think he’d be better paired with someone who’s a little bit more introverted. Sean: It’s like any kind of partner, whether it’s marital, business, or co-host. You have to think about that, and treat it kind of like a marriage. Q: Should I do my podcast in seasons? Aaron: Brent asks, “Showing up is very important, but what are your thoughts on podcasting in seasons? What if I’m interested in sharing content through audio, but don’t see myself becoming a full-time podcaster? Would audio snippets be a good medium? (e.g. a blog post in audio format?)” Aaron: I say do whatever you want and whatever makes sense for you, but... I’ve been having an ongoing discussion with my band about consistency. I’ve been trying to push them towards putting out content on a regular basis, because I’ve seen how well it works for podcasters, for people who do video, and for other bands. A typical release cycle for bands is an album once every couple of years, but I see that the bands that stick in people’s minds and have really engaged audiences are the ones that are putting out stuff on a regular basis. I would love to be in a band that puts out a song every week, like Jonathan Mann, who put out a song every day. How much attention does he get for that? I mean, we have the technology! There is nothing holding us back from recording a song every week. Sure, it may not be super high quality and it might not sound like it was recorded in a professional studio, but by doing something consistently and showing up and putting it out on a regular basis, you get better at doing that thing. If you want to grow an audience, if you care about making a name for yourself and a show that’s successful, then you need to show up every week. Sean: There’s nothing holding you back except your lack of commitment, and your planning to have pauses or seasons where you’re not committing. People think in weekly terms. Their life resets, they watch TV shows every week, it’s how they think. If you’ve got a show that’s every other Wednesday, or the second Wednesday of the month, that confuses people. You don’t want your audience to have to think. You have to simplify it for them. Wednesday: new show. Tuesday: new show. That way, they know what’s coming. People crave this. They want reliability and routine. They want to listen to their podcast or watch their show. Once they’re in, they’re in. They’re hooked. You’re three inches from their ear. You have an opportunity to speak a message to them and provide value. If you want to grow an audience, show up consistently. Instead of doing what’s cool, or what other people are doing, or doing what’s easy, or planning on not showing up, how about start with a commitment to show up consistently? That’s where your audience is going to come from. If you have a season, and you stop providing value, everything resets. Sure, you’re going to have some die-hards that discover you later, but it affects their perception of your brand and how committed you are. Next Steps: Now that you've got the outline for what you'll need to do to start a podcast, all you need to do now is take action. Set aside some time for planning. Write out your goals and the topics for your first ten episodes. Set up your gear and make a practice episode. It's easy to spend hours and hours reading tutorials and listening to other people talk about podcasting, but the best way to get better is to just start doing it yourself. If you have any questions or want to say hi, you can send an email to aaron@thepodcastdude.com or leave a voicemail at 817-381-8219. Feel free to ask questions or just say hi. I'll respond as soon as I have a free minute. Finally, there's a fantastic blog post series from Simplecast called Everything You Need to Start a Podcast. I'd highly recommend bookmarking that and referring back to it as often as you need it. And remember, no one gets everything right the first time. You're starting on a journey, so forward progress and taking action is pretty much always better than perfection. Good luck and happy podcasting. Cool Stuff to Check Out: Recommended Gear: https://kit.com/thepodcastdude Podcast: https://thepodcastdude.simplecast.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/thepodcastdude Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/thepodcastdude Successful Podcasting: http://successfulpodcasting.com Simplecast Blog: http://blog.simplecast.com/
On this episode, I continue the interview Chris Coyier. Chris is the creator of CSS-Tricks.com, Codepen.io, and hosts Shoptalk Show with Dave Rupert. In this second part of a two-part interview, Chris and I talk about getting good at being a musician (or at cutting hair), why we rewrite code we've already written, and lots of other necessary things. Mentioned: ShoptalkShow.com Codepen.io css-tricks.com DeveloperTea.com Don't forget to subscribe, rate/review on iTunes, and get in touch! Twitter: @developertea - https://twitter.com/developertea) Email: developertea@gmail.com If you are enjoying the show, would you consider buying me some tea? http://www.developertea.com/buy-me-tea
Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier), creator of CSS-Tricks & Codepen speaks with The Web Platform Podcast of buiding the Real Time Code Editor based on CodeMirror, Codepen.io. We go into what designers, educators,and developers are doing with this service and how we can best utilize codepen in our own work. We also focus on the UX and features of the service that have led to it's success on various levels. Chris is a well known author, speaker and is the podcast host of ShopTalk Show. Resources Codepen.io - http://codepen.io Contribute to the Open Source parts of CodePen - https://github.com/CodePen Chris's Twitter - https://twitter.com/chriscoyier Rachel Smith's Story - http://codepen.io/rachsmith/blog/last-year-i-joined-codepen-what-happened-next-will-blow-you-away Shop Talk Show - http://shoptalkshow.com/ CSS Tricks - http://css-tricks.com/ The Lodge - http://css-tricks.com/lodge/ A video intro to Codepen - http://vimeo.com/66335155 CodeMirror API - http://codemirror.net/ ACE Editor - http://ace.c9.io/ PubNub -http://www.pubnub.com/ Ana Tudor's Pens - http://codepen.io/thebabydino/ Chris Coyier's Pens - http://codepen.io/chriscoyier/ Rachel Nabors Pens - http://codepen.io/rachelnabors/ Rachel Smith's Pens - http://codepen.io/rachsmith/ Panelists Rachel Nabors - Master Web Animation Wizard, speaker & her own boss at Tin Magpie Rob Simpson- Senior Front End Developer at Capco Danny Blue - Front End Developer at Deloitte Digital Erik Isaksen - UX Engineer at 3Pillar Global Sponsors Sticker Mule (@stickermule)Custom Stickers that stand out above the rest NovaAngular (@NovaAngular)The Angular JavaScript Meetup in Herndon, VA. Contact them for speaking engagements online or in person - novaangular@gmail.com
On this episode, I interview Chris Coyier. Chris is the creator of CSS-Tricks.com, Codepen.io, and hosts Shoptalk Show with Dave Rupert. In this first part of a two-part interview, Chris and I talk about how he got started with CSS Tricks. We also talk about what it's like to make such a massive amount of freely available resources. Mentioned: ShoptalkShow.com Codepen.io css-tricks.com DeveloperTea.com If you are enjoying the show, would you consider buying me some tea? http://www.developertea.com/buy-me-tea
Chris Coyier is not a stranger to most of us web workers. He’s a designer at CodePen, a writer at CSS-Tricks, and a podcaster at ShopTalk. He uses WordPress on all three of his primary projects. For years, Chris has been a consistent advocate for the platform. He develops his own websites with WordPress, but his day-to-day interactions are as a user. Chris brings a unique perspective, I believe. He did some client work early in his career, but he’s been more involved in SaaS projects and membership websites; his current membership websites are on WordPress (CSS-Tricks) and Ruby on Rails (CodePen). I asked Chris about his projects, his perspective on various aspects of WordPress, and the community around it. I enjoyed learning from him, and I hope you do too: http://s3.amazonaws.com/PostStatus/DraftPodcast/chris-coyier-post-status-draft.mp3 Direct Download What have you learned from working on membership websites? It’s just a good dang business idea. Chris was sold on the idea of membership websites from his tenure at Wufoo and SurveyMonkey (where he worked once they acquired Wufoo). He uses Pippin Williamson’s Restrict Content Pro for managing The Lodge on CSS-Tricks. At CodePen, they spend time thinking about pricing, churn, and other membership metrics. They talk about some of these things (and much more) on the CodePen Radio podcast — an awesome podcast for anyone interested in SaaS, not just CodePen. Delivering value Another aspect Chris noted about membership websites is how it makes you want to continually deliver value for customers. He always wants to make people feel like they’re getting excellent features and value for the price of their membership. Another thing he and the CodePen team are learning is prioritizing feature requests. When you are building for members, you want to build features members want; and sometimes that goes against other fixes that are less glamorous. So they are consistently trying to balance time spent on customer-facing features versus behind the scenes development. Build the feature, get the reward Chris talked about how important it is for him to build something, then be rewarded for the work he does, versus selling something and then having to build the feature for it. He experience this with his big Kickstarter project for a CSS-Tricks redesign a couple of years ago, and said that mentality was really difficult for him. What do you appreciate more now about WordPress, after using other software? WordPress comes with a lot of built-in features that many of us (I do at least) may take for granted. Need a user system? Check. Need comments? Check. Need categorization? Check. Building CodePen, Chris is able to appreciate (even more than before) just how powerful WordPress is and how much thought goes into every feature. We dove into something seemingly simple as an example: tags. It turns out that something even that simple takes a lot of thought, consideration, and user experience considerations. What it ends up as, is something you’ll have to iterate on for years to get anywhere close to how good the WordPress one works already. And that’s like the tiniest thing we could think about. Think about the login system, or something else. So his advice was to focus on simplicity and decisions when building features, because required effort grows rapidly as a feature gets more complicated. How would you compare the WordPress community to other web communities? Chris has exposure to a much broader web community than I do. I’m pretty locked into the WordPress bubble. He sees the Ruby on Rails world, the more generic web world, and attends and speaks at a slew of non-WordPress conferences every year. Even though he says he’s mostly in a WordPress bubble himself (he’s not exactly attending Drupal conferences, he notes), he thinks that the WordPress community is pretty top-notch, and hasn’t seen other communities that are “better” than the WordPress community. There’s definitely no other CMS that I’m jealous of that community. What questions about WordPress are you always seeing on the ShopTalk Podcast Chris and his co-host Dave Rupert (seriously, follow Dave and gain laughs and knowledge in life) get a lot of questions about WordPress on the ShopTalk Podcast. Some of these questions are repeated pretty frequently, and they see trends of common issues. Working locally and syncing remotely For WordPress, the most common questions tend to come around syncing the local development environment with the live environment. They’ve been recommending WP Migrate DB Pro for people trying to get around that, though Chris says he doesn’t think it’s perfect for huge websites like CSS-Tricks. I think, to a degree, the common confusion is logical. WordPress development is really centered around three different layers of “stuff”: the content (posts, pages, etc), the files in the directory, and the site management database options. I think there is plenty of room for confusion when it’s not easy to decouple website management with website content, from a database perspective. Learning more about WordPress through the lens of a different audience I used this segment to talk about other confusing aspects of WordPress. We talked about database management, the degree of PHP knowledge required for WordPress theming, using pre-processors in distributed versus custom themes, responsive images, and the asset-itis of many WordPress websites that utilize plugins that each load their own scripts and styles. Regardless of the specific issues people are having, I find tremendous value listening to ShopTalk — which is not as hardcore of a WordPress audience as I have here — where the trends of people’s struggles help reveal real struggles that perhaps we could build better tools for in WordPress. It’s also worth noting that some of the “struggles” we talked about are very modern struggles, and WordPress has been around for over eleven years. WordPress iterates pretty quickly and does a great job of supporting modern web features, but it’s rarely immediate, especially in terms of core support. But plugin support and the shear number of people innovating on top of WordPress is significant and awesome. Just build websites! So many people want to be told what to do and what to learn next. That’s for sure the #1 question on ShopTalk. In the face of lots of new and changing technology, Chris is often asked about what to do first, or what to do next. He and Dave have a core mantra at ShopTalk to encourage people to “just build websites!” The things that you learn will happen as a result of building those websites and things for other people. The degree of paralysis by analysis they see is significant, and Chris and Dave hope that people will let their experiences guide them versus a to-do list of things they must learn today. You’re desirable Another note is that pretty much everyone has something they can do to provide value to others. People surely know something from a tooling perspective that’s worthwhile; even sans-modern tools, basic knowledge of HTML and CSS — the building blocks of the web — could be a great asset to lots of business. Even more important than tooling though, is the ability to solve problems. Chris used an example of a business that sells wrenches. If you can help a business that sells wrenches to sell more wrenches, then you are able to provide that business a lot of value; so focus on helping businesses do what they do better. Learn by sharing I admire Chris’ degree of sharing what he’s learning, through ShopTalk, CodePen Radio, and for years on CSS-Tricks. He doesn’t do anything special to write about what he learns. He keeps his drafts right there in WordPress. He doesn’t take special notes. He just writes, and he often writes about what he’s learning. Over time he’s been able to refine his writing and learn what to expect, as far as feedback goes. But at the core he just writes, and through that writing he’s been able to grow his own audience and get better at everything else he’s doing professionally. Staying consistent and avoiding burnout I was curious what Chris has done to stay so consistent online and avoid burnout. It seems to me that a lot of people get temporarily motivated and quickly disenchanted. I’ve learned in my own experience with the web that any measure of success takes lots and lots of consistent effort. Chris hasn’t done a lot to think about avoiding burnout, but figures there are some things he subconsciously does to stay motivated. That may be taking extended breaks from the web and disconnecting for a trip to the woods, or shorter breaks just in the day like stopping and playing the banjo for a few minutes. Stay in touch with Chris At the end of every episode of ShopTalk, Chris and Dave give guests an opportunity to plug whatever they want. Chris’ plug for our interview was to advise folks to take some time off from building their own product and instead go into their issues list and clean up after themselves and their project — which is what Chris and team are doing at CodePen right now. He also noted that nothing would make him happier than folks going Pro on CodePen. If you teach, interact with others, or want a way to store private pens, you should definitely check it out. And it’s affordable too, at only $75 for the year. While he didn’t take the opportunity to plug much of his own stuff, you should definitely still check out his various projects. I’ve learned a ton from Chris since I started my own journey on the web. If my learning journey on the web were a university, I’ve definitely taken multiple classes from CSS-Tricks and the ShopTalk Show. Chris’ business is built on a three-legged stool right now. Check them out: CodePen – a playground for the front-end side of the web. ShopTalk Show – a podcast about front-end web design (and sound effects). CSS-Tricks – where the whole internet learns CSS. Also check out Chris’ fun about page with his life’s timeline and follow him on Twitter. I’d like to thank Chris for the time he spent with me, and I hope that if you enjoyed this interview and write-up, that you’ll share it!
Aaron Dowd is a professional drummer, web designer, and self-taught audio editor for the ShopTalk Show, the ATX Web Show, Execute, and Happy Monday (and more to come). We talk about some suggestions for editing a podcast, tips for EQ’ing guests, and the plugins Aaron uses in Logic to produce a good sounding podcast.
Aaron Dowd is a professional drummer, web designer, and self-taught audio editor for the ShopTalk Show, the ATX Web Show, Execute, and Happy Monday (and more to come). We talk about some suggestions for editing a podcast, tips for EQ'ing guests, and the plugins Aaron uses in Logic to produce a good sounding podcast.
Aaron Dowd is a professional drummer, web designer, and self-taught audio editor for the ShopTalk Show, the ATX Web Show, Execute, and Happy Monday (and more to come). We talk about some suggestions for editing a podcast, tips for EQ’ing guests, and the plugins Aaron uses in Logic to produce a good sounding podcast.
For episode 1 of Show Me Your Mic, I’m joined by Dave Rupert of ShopTalk Show fame. We talk about planning a podcast, gear that Dave has tried and attempting to keep a low budget on a high quality podcast.
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