Head Conference, The Virtual Conference

Over the weekend about 100 people were hanging out in my apartment. 

They weren’t there for a Halloween party or to give me tips on interior decorating (I’m keeping the Coolio poster no matter what anyone says). 

The crowd was viewing me through my webcam on my laptop while I was presenting in my apartment as part of the Head Conference, a virtual conference.

Think of it as a string of webinars (if you can stomach such a term) set to the schedule and diversity like any other Web conference. It was billed mostly as a green conference since attendees and speakers didn’t have to burn jet fuel to reach a singular location.

I viewed it as a nice, geek-filled weekend at home logging onto the Internet and getting quality content without the burden of sifting to find the good stuff.

Dodging into the different virtual rooms reminded me of an actual conference just as if I was leaving one room to go to hear another speaker in another room at “real” conference. 

Sessions ranged from web standards, accessibility, web application development, Flash, Flex, to scalability. So the chances were high you would learn something new rather than being shown Web design presentation cliches that seem to crop up in conferences these days.

Designing Around CSS presentation at Head Conference

For my presentation, I covered the topic of Designing Around CSS. Specifically how common, everyday CSS techniques can be used to build something relatively complex if and when used appropriately. I had great time interacting with the crowd by telling my stories, answering questions, giving away books and hopefully instilling some inspiration to the one hundred in my apartment.