I did a double-take when looking over the speaker profiles for An Event Apart’s upcoming events.
Did you see the difference as well? Here’s a side-by-side comparison to better illustrate the point.
Hmmm… I wonder if everyone looks ten years younger after attending an AEA event or is just the speakers.
Still recovering from my month-long World Tour (more on that later) which wrapped up in Austin for the annual SXSW Interactive conference. This, I believe, is my fifth year attending SXSW, but it was the first year I didn’t speak, which was a decision I made to let me enjoy more of the conference.
One thing I enjoy is the annual Web Standards Project meeting as it’s usually as much of a Who’s Who as the first one, which I think was the largest Web design and development braintrust ever assembled. (You probably won’t see something like that anytime soon.)
During this year’s meeting, The Web Standards Project took ideas and questions from the audience, and announced the Street Team’s bookmark initiative:
How many outdated web design and development books are lurking in your local library, school or college, waiting to corrupt an innocent mind? Want to warn the unsuspecting of these hazardous materials while encouraging librarians to update their shelves? Join the WaSP Street Team by downloading and printing copies of these bookmarks (PDF 3.4MB). Then place these bookmarks in harmfully outdated books.
On the bookmark is a link pointing containing a list of recommend books that The Web Standards Project have approved.
I’m happy to note that included on the list are two of my recent books: CSS Cookbook and Adapting to Web Standards. Also, all the books on the list are located on Design Library site, which also include books I also personally recommend.
So, if you’ve got an outdated Web design book or, if you happen to be going to a local library, take a few bookmarks with you and check out their Web design books.
Molly E. Holzschlag’s free Train the Trainer program is a small, focused gathering for those who are in education, technology training, or work with a company where they can provide in-depth training for their teams.
Topics include HTML, XHTML and CSS technology principles as well as project management ideas, code reviews and one-on-one time. And let’s not forget the free swag, too!
The swag packages include a free copy of Microsoft’s Expression Web software, IE7 water bottle and stickers, a copy of CSS for Designers, a copy of Transcending CSS, and a copy of the CSS Cookbook.
All in all, it comes out to over $500 dollars in free stuff.
Not too bad for a free workshop, eh?
Thanks to Microsoft, Lynda.com, PeachPit and O’Reilly for sending us the karma points to pass onto others.
It’s not every day a well-known, highly regarded Web professional gives away their hard-earned knowledge and precious time for free. Nonetheless, that’s what my good friend, Molly E. Holzschlag, is doing in her Train the Trainer (T*t) workshop series.
For almost every weekend starting in mid-September and ending in October, Molly is hosting six educators for the free two-day workshop in Tucson, Arizona.
If you happen to get one of the 24 golden tickets to her workshop, you’re a lucky one as the workshop itinerary is impressive:
On the last T*t workshop that takes place October 27–28, I’m flattered to aid Molly in presenting my talk on IE7 and CSS, “Releasing CSS: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love IE7”.
Also, I’m looking forward to the lunch discussions where I hope I won’t make the participants poorer by giving them my two cents regarding any Web design or development questions or concerns they might have.
For more information, check out Molly’s post about Training the Trainer.
Hope to see you there!
I’m packing up and getting ready to head to Las Vegas for Microsoft’s MIX07, dubbed a 72-hour conversation with “some of the most successful and innovative practitioners on the Web”.
This is the first time I’m attending. I’ve been anxiously awaiting this event after hearing about last year’s event.
Anyone else planning on attending?
After four years of attending SXSW Interactive, one picks up certain habits or routines. For me, one routine is to shy away from panels or presentations that would tell me what I already know and seek out interesting panel(s) that I wouldn’t normally attend.
Last year’s Second Life panel blew me away and gave me insight into a different Internet culture that I didn’t know was happening on the Internet.
This year I ducked into the Using RSS for Marketing panel. I already know what RSS is, but are people really using it for marketing? If so, in what ways?
Of the panels I saw this year (which, granted, weren’t as many as I would have liked) this was the one was the most well-paced, information-packed.
Below are my notes from the panel.
If you attended SXSW Interactive this year, I would love to hear what panel you fond to be the biggest surprise.
How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love IE7
Originally uploaded by chasingfun.
It’s only the first day of SXSW Interactive 2007 and you can tell how popular this event has become over the last few years. Thankfully, I had the pleasure of talking earlier today regarding CSS and IE 7 to a sizable portion of the largest SXSW Interactive conference I’ve every seen.
The slides from the talk, “Unleashing CSS: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love IE7″, are available as a PDF (~2MB).
In my talk, which was shortened for time, I glossed over the finer details of IE7 and some CSS tricks. If you would like to know more about the talk, please take a look at my ebook, Releasing CSS, available from O’Reilly. In the ebook I go through some of the main points I made in my talk as well as cover the basics of the new things one can do in IE7.
Today starts the day of a guest blogging stint I’m doing over at Sessions.edu. Their new-ish blog is geared for design students and has already covered a broad range of topics.
Later this week, I’ll be in Austin taking part once again in SXSW Interactive and doing a little book signing as well. Hope to see you there!
Last week I had the privilege of speaking at WebVisions in Portland. It was my first time at WebVisions and Oregon as well. What impressed me with the conference was the breadth of expertise that was present for such an intimate two-day conference nestled in the beautiful landscape.
As requested, you can download the slides from presentation. These aren’t the exact same slides I showed. I revised them slightly during one of my worst flights on Delta.
For those who don’t know, I’m 6′7″. I didn’t get an exit row on a midnight flight back home and the dude in front of me reclined his seats into my knees for the next four hours. Instead of seething hatred at a fellow man, I attempted to put that energy into somewhat practical use. Thank goodness for laptops.
While I wasn’t happy about the trip back, I am happy to report that one of my predications from my talk came true. Less than a week after my presentation the announcement came out: Microsoft to Push IE 7 via Automatic Updates.
Does this mean you need to drop everything you are doing and test your web site right now? Honestly, I wouldn’t. For a couple of reasons. One is that even with the next version coming soon, we are still talking about unreleased software. The other reason? Well, if you were in my presentation, you’d know.
After my presentations, I always like it when people come up and talk to me. Not because I usually remember to brush my teeth, but because I like to help people solve web problems if I can. This recent time, however, I felt bad that I couldn’t solve one particular person’s problem on the spot.
On the very long flight back, I gave some more thought to the problem and quickly whipped up a solution to How to Keep Content within a Second Column Vertically Center in Relation to the First Column. As proof that I’m not quick on my feet, the solution is an easy one: shackling.
What’s Shackling? It’s a term I use for absolute positioning a block level element within the context of relative positioned parent element. And let’s face it, that’s a mouthful.
To check out the fix, see the solution. Of the two readers I have on my blog, I hope the person that asked about the problem is one of them.
For those that stayed towards the end of the talk, I put on display a little demo that wasn’t IE7 compatible, but I think is cool nonetheless. Combining pseudo-classes :hover on block level elements and :target, it’s a page that was put together so I could test some of IE7’s capabilities. When the test was created, I was excited by the over hype of IE7 that I actually thought it would handle CSS3 selector. Sadly, IE7 fails :target, but the presentation degrades gracefully so the CSS can be applied without having to worry about IE wonkiness. Try it in Firefox or Safari and then in IE for fun and profit.
Lastly, I want to give my thanks to Brad, the whole crew at Hot Pepper Studios and Nick for putting on a good conference. It’s one of the best.
In July, I’ll be at WebVisions 2006 in Oregon. WebVisions explores the future of design, content creation, user experience and business strategy to uncover the trends and agents of change. My talk will cover CSS and what Internet Explorer 7 for Windows means for web developers: