In this hour and a half presentation, Nate Koechley covers professional frontend development from bare basics markup to the finer points of naming conventions. A very good watch, especially for those who may be under-familiar with frontend development.

As you may recall about a year ago Microsoft announced that standards mode rendering in Internet Explorer 8 would be opt-in only. This caused quite a commotion in the standards movement, and a short while later Microsoft backed off.

Now it seems they’ve backed off backing off, returning to opt-in rendering and taken it a step further by introducing site blacklists. For sites on this blacklist rendering will fall back to IE7 compatibility mode (which isn’t really IE7 compatibility at all), regardless of the actual ability of the page to be displayed properly.

I’ve not yet had a chance to explore this issue in it’s entirety so for now I’ll leave you with a link to the original article on blacklisting in IE8 and how it’s bad for everyone.

Earlier this year we mentioned our intention to giveaway a pass to FOWA Miami. With business picking up and all the changes with the new year, we just haven’t had a chance to open the contest.

We really wanted to make the giveaway happen, so we let the great team over at FuelYourCreativity.com take the lead and run the contest.

If you’d like to see us in Miami at FOWA, stop by http://www.fuelyourcreativity.com/win-a-ticket-to-fowa-miami/ for your chance to win.

Theme Overview

Tribble is a new theme for Shopify from Twenty Six Media/CSSRockstars. This is the first of what we hope will be many releases for the Shopify ecommerce platform. A demo is available here…

Tribble features a small foot print design accommodating a wide variety of screen resolutions. Browser tested with IE6/7 (XP), FireFox 2/3(XP/OSX), Opera 9/10, and Safari 3 (XP/OSX), Tribble exemplifies proper rendering across multiple browsers and operating systems.

Download Tribble for Shopify

Usage Info

Upload theme via the Shopify Assets panel to activate. Front page is easy to configure, see this screen shot for more information.

Releases / Updates

• 01/27/2008 Version 1.0

The CSSRockstar special this week is on Expression Engine coding.

Normally priced from $359, Expression Engine coding is now on sale for just $199 through the 19th, a savings of $60. As always payment upfront nets a 10% discount, meaning you’ll get a custom coded Expression Engine template for just $269.10, saving you a total of $89.90.

No coupons codes or special items are needed, the discount is automatically reflected while ordering. Get started now.

The CSSRockstar special this week is on WordPress coding.

Normally priced at $239, WordPress coding is now on sale for just $199 through the 19th, a savings of $40. As always payment upfront nets a 10% discount, meaning you can grab a crisp new WordPress skin for just $179.10, saving you $59.90.

No coupons codes or special items are needed, the cost is automatically reflected while ordering. Get started now.

Enjoy!

Over the next few weeks a slew of updates will be coming to CSSRockstars. Here is a taste of what you can expect…

Beginning on January 13th, we will be posting a new sale/discount every Tuesday. Each will run for seven days, and then the new sale/discount will be announced. Subscribe to our RSS Feed or follow us on Twitter to be notified.

Twitter. As of now, more or less, we’ll be twittering from time to time with status updates, sale notifications, and general industry tidbits you might have missed.

We have a marvelous new Shopify theme in the works. It’s scheduled for release within the next few days - we’re really excited about this one. Again, if you want to be notified hop on our RSS Feed or follow us on Twitter .

Following the release of our new Shopify theme, we’ll be releasing a WordPress theme, and shortly after that giving away a ticket to FOWA Miami. We expect to be giving it away on or around Feb 3rd.

The FOWA giveaway will be a contest, and we’ll announce it at least a week before the seat will be given away.

Before the end of the month we’ll be adding in live help so you can have a quick chat with our AM. It won’t replace normal support, but it will provide a quick and easy environment to get any pre/post-order questions asked.

Hello everyone.

We’ll be out of the office on Friday 8/8/08 (tomorrow). We previously posted a little blurb on our order form just to let anyone placing an order know we’d be out on Friday, but now it’s time to let everyone know. If you don’t get an answer to an email on Friday, this is why. Don’t worry though, we won’t forget about you.

We’ll be back bright and early on Monday, so don’t miss us too much.

So what will we be doing with our 3 day weekend? Partying? Boating? Hardly. Work work work! We’ve two new projects in the work, and it’s time for us to kick it into gear. Over the next three days we’ll get a design, and a prototype up and running for both services.

CSSRockstars team is proud to announce the release of our first public Wordpress theme.

Charade is full featured, social networking enabled, two column Wordpress theme. The sidebar is fully widget enabled, and features a quick configure Subscribe by Email option for Feedburner users. It’s compatible with WordPress 2.5+ and has been tested with in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6/7, Opera, and Safari.

You can preview the theme here (offline at the moment), and download it here. For help and support just leave a message in your comment below.