Mattfarina - Updates from Ed Ross

Mattfarina
- 26 Feb 2011
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Welcome to Blatant Follower Promotion, the @mattfarina episode. In this episode, Matt talks about:
- Being a father
- Drupal and his other tech passions
- His job and side projects
- His use of social media
- Online communities compared to the church
- The Geeks & God podcast
- The things he would like to promote:
  - DrupalCon Chicago
  - His book: Drupal 7 Module Development
    
    Buy on Amazon US
    
    Buy on Amazon UK
- Responsive web development (vs mobile specific sites)
- And more!
mattfarina.mp3

(download)

Click here to download:
mattfarina.mp3 (33.48 MB)

Matt online:
- Matt on Twitter
- Matt's blogs:
  - Engineered Web
  - MattFarina.com
- Matt's Flickr photos
- Matt's Drupal profile
Matt and his baby:

Feedback

Thanks to Jon Butler (interviewed on the jonwitout episode) who asked on the techmate episode about why I leave feedback and other comments to the end of the shows. I have answered this question in a separate post: "Why Leave Feedback Till After The Interview?", so please post your comments on that question there.

Please add any feedback for this week's episode in the comments section below.

Tip of the week

My tip this week: subscribe to the Web Evangelism Bulletin, by @soonguy - Every month you get a large handful of links to great articles, which you should be able to appreciate if you are a non-Christian too.

Be interviewed too

To be interviewed on the show, please follow me on Twitter - my username is: @edaross .

Music on the show: "I dunno" by grapes (licensed under CC Attribution (3.0))
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about 1 year ago mattfarina (Twitter) responded:

I did a little more checking on non-profit web development rates (I was a little curious after we talked). I saw a range of $35 USD through $150 USD. The range seemed to be based around the size and complexity of the projects the person/org takes on, level of experience, and what they are doing. For example, software engineers tend to be more expensive than we designers.
I imagine there are some who are lower than this and still some who are higher.

about 1 year ago Edward Ross responded:

Thanks @mattfarina for that. I've also found an article you might find interesting about media queries vs mobile sites: http://goo.gl/Bp47M You'd still say it is just OK to go for making the normal desktop site smaller rather than presenting different content (except if the client is paying more?)?

about 1 year ago mattfarina (Twitter) responded:

I still think media queries are very useful. Before I explain why let me address the performance issue and mobile.
Mobile is not the only place where performance is important. Browsers like ie6/7 suffer from slow JavaScript, screen drawing, and only a couple parallel downloads. We need performant front ends for more cases than just mobile browsers. This is an area that is often overlooked and something I'm speaking on at DrupalCon Chicago.
Context is important in mobile content. The way people use the site will change based on content and you need to understand the context and how you direct people to that. But, what is mobile? Is it an iPad? Just an iPhone? Where do you braw the line? I use my phone a lot from the couch where I'm not on the go. What about other people like me?
The devices people use are not cut and dry. A lot of what people think people are doing on the desktop may not be true. Sometimes a mobile specific site makes sense. Sometimes you can take the regular content and repurpose. And sometimes you think you need a mobile site because because you are starting to understand how your users use the site and realize your main site has it wrong.
For example, my personal site could easily use a responsive design. There is no need for a mobile site.

about 1 year ago Jon Butler responded:

This may be slightly off topic, but I find the Posterous mobile site could have been better designed, mostly because you cannot add comments to a post when using the mobile site. I personally find it easier to browse and use posterous mostly from my BlackBerry. And therefore have to use a PC in order to add comments to posts, it seems this issue is not the same as with Wordpress. The Wordpress sites seems more friendly to mobiles and even offer an app for BlackBerry.
Are mobile apps more important that mobile friendly sites now?
I rarely if ever use twitter or facebook mobile sites and tend to only use the apps.
Enjoyed the interview by the way. May be a little techy for me at times but great hearing what Matt had to share.
Thanks for talking about what comes at the end at the end Ed.

about 1 year ago Edward Ross responded:

Thanks @jonwitout I've emailed @posterous about the non-commenting from mobiles thing, and will let you know what they say. Posterous have apps for iPhone and Android, but I think they are mostly for post creation rather than reading. (It doesn't work on the version of Android I have - 1.5 - so I can't test it).
I think the money is in apps at the moment, but eventually people will see there is more long-term profitability and sustainability in the web. Just looks at Apple's recent announcements: http://goo.gl/8Xeuz taking 30% of a content producer's revenue? I don't think this will encourage many people to develop for a particular platform! Given that, and the expanding number of mobile platforms, I think people will start to just use the growing number of enhancements to the web in HTML 5 to deliver their apps via the browser rather than stand alone apps.