blogZero

Epilogue

I have been described as a "generalist" (I won't mention any names), or a jack-of-all-trades, or my preferred term—factotum (at least when it comes to Web development). No wait, in pretty much everything I do. In school I fancied art as much as math and reading as much as doing. I hung out with the freaks and the jocks. You get the idea.

So, as usual at conferences, I try to mix it up. After the initial speeches and the obligatory introduction of sponsors, I waited for the board to fill up with sessions. Yeah, yeah, why haven't I done a session? I guess I skipped out of public speaking class in school.

Where to start? How about something really geeky...so I opted for To Cloud or Not? AWS, EC2, S3 vs. Host your own Site, moderated by Tony Primerano of AOL. There were some really smart people in this crowded room and the topic brought on a stimulating discussion.

For the second session I decided on "Design 101 for Non-Designers." Not much here I didn't already know, but interesting nonetheless.

For lunch they brought in enough pizza to feed a small army. I even overheard later someone saying something about homeless shelters in the area. In Georgetown? I don't think so.

After lunch it was back to geektown for a session on Torvalds' version control system Git. After dumping CVS for Subversion and getting tired of even that, I found this package worth looking into, especially for smaller/personal projects.

For the 2:00 session I normally would have jumped at one titled "MySQL Optimization," but I'd already heard Barry's presentation at the DC PHP Developers group, so instead I sat in on "Is your Website Accessible?" Again, not much here I didn't already know.

For the next session I decided on "Flash-based Weblogs." What the hell is a flash-based blog (I wondered)? I guess no one else did either because the presenter never showed and the few people that waited around for it drifted out.

Ok, running out of steam now..."SQL Basics and SQL Injection" was next on my list. I did learn something new here, the SQL comment [--] trick to force the rest of the query to be ignored. Interesting. Validate and escape your user inputs folks!

Finally, I sat in on "Open-source Based Maps, OpenLayers and PostGIS." Now this might have been really interesting except the presenter couldn't get the projector to work which is a little frustrating when you are talking about something like creating maps. Sigh.

No bar hopping for this kid, I caught the train home. Thanks for the pizza and the free t-shirt though.

Continued from BarCampDC2: Prologue.

Well boys and girls, in just one weeks time those who can make it will be jetting down to Austin, Texas for the South by Southwest 2006 Interactive Festival. If you are lucky enough to have the whole week off you can stick around for the music and indy film festival as well. I've never been to Austin myself, but I have an old friend who lives there. So I will also be taking the opportunity to hang out with him, and he knows the area well so maybe I can coax him into stopping by to share some tips on good places to eat and the famous local music scene.

I thought I would take a few moments to share with everyone what panels I find interesting and what parties I will be attending. Some of these overlap, or may fill up fast so there is no guarantee I will be at all of them. Except for the parties of course, since there will be some people at each I am looking forward to meeting in person for the first time, not to mention the free food and drinks. Oh what fun it will be to snap pics of drunken digerati and upload them to Flickr so I can post them to this blog later.

Saturday, March 11th

• How to Bluff Your Way in DOM Scripting [Jeremy Keith]
• Creating Building Blocks for Independents [Tantek Çelik]
• Starting Small: Web Business for the Rest of Us [Nick Finck]
• South by Northwest [Blue Flavor, Newsvine]

Sunday, March 12th

• Making Web 2.0 Accessible [Derek Featherstone]
• Flickr, Upcoming.org, and del.icio.us in the company of Yahoo!

Monday, March 13th

• Web Standards and Search Engines: Searching for Common Ground [Molly Holzschlag]
• CSS Problem Solving [Dave Shea]
• Microformats: Evolving The Web [Tantek Çelik]
• WaSP Task Force Panel: Getting the Job Done Right [Drew McLellan]
• Ambient Findability [Peter Morville]
• Design Eye for the List Guy [Keith Robinson]
• WaSP Annual Meeting [Jeffrey Zeldman]

Tuesday, March 14th

• RSS: Not Just for Blogs Anymore [Christopher Frye]

Note that each panel consists of several speakers, all of them worthy of mention. I am simply listing the person I am most familiar with. Parties are indicated in green (is there really any need to post links to the sponsors of the second one?)

I'm looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Following up on a concept by Jacques Distler, Gez Lemon has posted an article and an amazing little Greasemonkey script that not only exposes any accesskeys that are used by a Web site, it also allows you to edit them the suit your preferences.

Greasemonkey is a most remarkable extension, and could prove incredibly useful for empowering people with disabilities, particularly cognitive difficulties, as it provides a convenient means to repurpose content according to the needs of the visitor.

Well said. Visit: Greasemonkey User Script to Manage Access Keys to learn more and install the script.

Nice work guys!

I look forward to Russ Weakley's periodic postings of Web Standards related links to the WSG mailing list. At long last, there is an archive available online for your edification.

When the Web Standards Group mail list was created in early 2003, I began been sending posts to the list with web standards-based links for people to read. For some reason the subject of these posts became "Some links for light reading". Over the years quite a few people have requested that these posts be placed online somewhere for easier searching.

Thanks Russ!

Today, Mozilla announces the official release of Firefox version 1.5, and along with it a brand new Web site with a .com domain. Among the many new improvements are:

• An improved software update system which runs unobtrusively in the background.
• A redesigned and easier to use Preferences/Options system.
• Faster forward and backward page navigation.
• Reordering of browser tabs via drag-and-drop.
• Improved pop-up blocking.
• Accessibility improvements for users with physical impairments.
• Even better security features.
• Privacy features that allow you to clear sensitive data (cookies, form data, passwords).
• Support for new standards and technologies including SVG, CSS, and Javascript 1.6.
• Better support for the Mac OS X platform.

You can learn more, download, and install it from http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/.

What are you waiting for? The best open-source, open-standards, cross-platform Web browser just got a whole lot better!

This just in:

In addition to contributing code that will make it possible for Web pages to be automatically narrated or magnified, and to be better navigated with keystrokes rather than mouse clicks, IBM is contributing Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language (DHTML) accessibility technology to the upcoming Firefox Version 1.5. This will allow software developers to build accessible and navigable "Rich Internet Applications" (RIAs) -- a new class of applications that are particularly visual and interactive. DHTML will also allow users to efficiently navigate content more easily using keystrokes rather than a mouse.

This is being done in support of ongoing work at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative, and as part of IBM's commitment to open standards and open source.

Links:

• IBM: Accessibility Center
• Mozilla: Accessible DHTML Technology Preview
• internet.com: IBM Donates Code to Firefox