The Event Apart conference series is the top-notch gathering for people who make websites. Making its way across various cities in the U.S., the Event Apart tour stopped in Washington, D.C., which I was fortunate enough to attend. The speakers themselves were amazing but interacting with the attendees in real-time during the talks opened a whole new level to the experience. Below are some of the best tweets I curated from each of the sessions. All of which came from afeedapart.com, the official feed aggregator for An Event Apart.Web 2.1: The Medium Comes of Age by Jeffery ZeldmanZeldman started things off with a presentation covering the history of communication from the printing press to HTML5, and everything in between. In 2010, standards based design is no longer fringe, HTML5/CSS3 are viable technologies, and the mobile web is taking shape.The death of the web is greatly exaggerated. @tomkrukIf the web is dead, then print must be mummified. @Merlaak“There are 241 newsgroups on 1986. 240 are porn…” @grum_dot_comZeldman calls the telegraph The Victorian Internet @eduiconfR. Cailliau – leading man’s best friend. Worked with Tim Berners-Lee to invent the web. @mad_sunshine1991 AOL… remember 9600 baud modem? = yuck @lavinia“there’s a history of the internet being ugly and being designed by people who can’t design their way out of a paper bag” @ashleyjoost1993. Mosaic. We’ve come a long way. #aea http://yfrog.com/jcem8mj @eTapWebI remember using MOSAIC on my Amiga 500, wondering why “forms” are not showing… @tomkrukAnd you had to PAY for Netscape @cityrider49Netscape Gold FTW! @tomkrukZeldman breaking down landmark moments in web history: “1995 brings us the tiled background” @mattmediadc“IE no longer sucks, IE is awesome” – Zeldman, #aea … hear it from the man! @franksedivy1998 — internet traffic doubles every 100 days @ashleyjoostthe phrase “best viewed…” should be left to history @cityrider49dot com bust = coming off a coke bender @tonyvia2000 dot com bubble burst brought us benefits: people were forced to learn standards, improve their skills to make a difference. @mihswatThe CSS Zen Garden changed my professional career… Design for the web became a whole different concept @mattmediadc“you can’t burn every house down because we have this new idea for architecture” @TheTrozXHTML 2.0 was burning every house in the world just to propose a new architecture. @mihswat“HTML5. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” @eTapWebObject Oriented CSS by Nicole SullivanNicole developed a technique for managing CSS called Object Oriented CSS. The basic premise is to recognize visual patterns and mark them up consistently. Consistent markup results in more compact and efficient CSS code to style which in turn results in more manageable code and faster performing websites.If you write CSS for any site of significant size or traffic you MUST hear @stubbornella talk on OOCSS. This is my second time listen. @aebsrReason for CSS optimization, CSS Blocks progressive rendering @eduiconf42% of Alexa’s Top 1000 don’t gzip CSS. 44% have more than 2 files. 56% serve with cookies. 62% don’t minify. 21% have > 100k of CSS. @mihswat“Our sites are choking on the amount of CSS we’re throwing over the wire.” @eTapWebOOCSS makes me intellectually erect @grum_dot_comObject oriented CSS sound a lot more complicated than it really is. @kingkool68wow around May 2009 FaceBook had over 700 CSS files that totaled more than 1.9Mb @160mph“If you fighting your CSS, your architecture failed” @franksedivyFacebook has all of their headings bold. Non-bolded headings looked weird to users. @kingkool68People aren’t viewing your home page or reading your about section anymore. It’s all Google hit-and-runs, and it’s changing our design. @brian_klaasCss objects were better for humungo sites like Facebook. Seems overkill for smaller, simple sites. @kingkool68Dust-me Selectors to find unused css. http://www.sitepoint.com/dustmeselectors/ @chrismjonesA ‘giant pink heading’ should not become a ‘small blue heading’ when placed in another part of the site. @phejElements should be styled globally, avoiding area-dependent declarations in CSS. Rules should be predictable, avoid overwriting them. @mihswatLove how @stubbornella uses the story of the lady who swallowed a fly in relation to CSS @candiRSXWriting CSS to correct previous bad CSS is the legacy of the old woman who swallowed a fly. It makes sense when @stubbornella says it. @achelliosNicole Sullivan’s Grids on github – http://wiki.github.com/stubbornella/oocss/grids @MerlaakClassing elements with element names (“.h1″) is one step removed from or similar. @jgarberhmmmm…not sure about @stubbornella rec. on eg h3.h6 Isn’t that sort of hacky? Shouldn’t we re-examine design first? @ryanhoonlavertyAmong Alexa’s Top 1000, there’s a site with 511 declarations setting styles for h1-h6. Facebook used to have 958. @mihswatAfter a CSS rewrite, there were only 25 declarations. @mihswatAmen to the underscore hack. I use it all the time. @kingkool68Avoid styling IDs. IDs are for JavaScript. @mihswatstyling IDs messes up specificity @eduiconf“You should definitely suffer if you use hacks” @chrismjonesNot sure about this ‘not styling IDs’ and have class driven styles .that on top of the things aren’t semantic (.h1, .h2 etc…) … :/ @franksedivy“AVOID !IMPORTANT – except on leaf nodes” Good advice!! @JudyBad“I try to get specificity out-of-the-way so my cascade can really shine.” @andysherryagree with not using !important, disagree with not styling IDs. style IDs if they’re used sparingly or if “lead nodes”. @courcelanStyling using IDs, !importants, and too many nested elements is like fighting whose CSS rules are going to win. @mihswatwho knew? the way I wrote CSS as a n00b was on the right path – lots of class selectors and few element/ID selectors! @raelehmanI think OO CSS takes the art and craft away from CSS and gets it ready for consumers world! @franksedivyThe blinking cursor says, “You don’t remember anything.” (Referring to the command line) @MerlaakFind and replace is really why I use Dreamweaver as my coding tool of choice. No need to figure out grep. @kingkool68See how many times a declaration if when your css from command line. grep -r font-size . | wc -l @chrismjonesHmm, @stubbornella‘s OO approach to CSS preso has some good QA tricks, but her philosophy has too much scaffolding for general use @talbsFeeling a little weird about @stubbornella‘s approach to object-oriented CSS, but liking some ideas about finding duplication. @graphicsgirlOOCSS sounds like the best approach for Facebook, but not most sites we design and build. @graphicsgirlafraid newbs will get the wrong idea with @stubbornella‘s methodology and not consider scale/context/semantics @talbsI found taking the general idea from this presentation and building a custom framework for our approach to build sites worked great @aeaattendeeLooking at CSS in a way I never have thanks to @stubbornella @TheTrozFacebook reduced CSS size by 19% and HTML size by 44% after optimizations @mihswat* and _ hacks > conditional statements @160mphBeen using OOCSS for the past year and a half. Have never found a site that did not benefit. @chrismjonesThe CSS3 Experience by Dan CederholmDan emphasizes that sites don’t need to look and behave exactly the same in every browser. Case in point, he owns http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/ and http://dowebsitesneedtobeexperiencedexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/. CSS3 is available in modern browsers today and suitable for non-critical elements of a design. His presentation consisted of several demos showcasing how CSS3 could be used to sweeten interfaces.Things We Left On The Moon: http://css3exp.com/moon/ (CSS3 demo site.) @zeldmanDesigners “pimping out” the message in a bottle – Dan Cederholm at ‘An Even Apart’ @sgstevens08Cederholm discussing progressive enhancement re: delivering info & determining UX based on capabilities of new devices @dinalewWebsites don’t need to look the same and don’t need to be experienced the same in every browser. @mihswatWill have to download IE9 beta. Just got a round of applause here. @mad_sunshineCSS3 rules you may use right now: border-radius, text-shadow, box-shadow, opacity, RGBA, multiple backgrounds. (IE version >= 9) @mihswathaha, I’m seeing a bit too much excitement about IE9 from speakers, and an equal amount of hate from attendees. @aebsrCritical vs. Non-critical elements. It currently makes the most sense to apply CSS3 to the latter. @eTapWeb-moz and -webkit, IE9 is now using border-radius. What do you think of that? @MattTurnureCheck out the background as you resize the browser window. Fun! http://silverbackapp.com/ @sgstevens08parallax effect IS pimping out the bottle. @ryanhoonlavertyMultiple background images in CSS3. Check out http://silverbackapp.com or http://css3exp.com/moon/ and resize your browser window. @eTapWebCSS3 gradient generator: http://www.westciv.com/tools/gradients/index.html @shiotaImpressed @stubbornella isn’t heckling @simplebits for using ID selectors in all his CSS examples. @lincolnwebsMobile First! by Luke WroblewskiLuke covered designing Web applications for mobile platforms first before the desktop. This helps you focus a website down to its bare essentials and functionality. The mobile web is exploding, and in some cases, is the only access someone has to the Internet.“Web products should be designed for mobile first, even if no mobile version is planned.” @eTapWebdesktop internet devices: 1 billion, mobile devices: 10 billion @tonyvia“50% of people who were new to the web last year were on mobile devices.” @eTapWebWhy build mobile first? More growth and future users. @tyraleMobile Web growth has outpaced desktop Web growth 8x. Smartphone sales will pass PC sales in 2011. @mihswatMobile is the new black @JudyBadGreat mobile products are created never ported. @kingkool68mobile stats from #lukew http://lukew.com/ff/ @eduiconf“27% of searches on Yelp! come from 4% of users (i.e. the users who access Yelp! via iPhone.)” @zeldman“Designing for mobile forces you to focus and prioritize.” @eTapWebMoving from desktop to mobile… First remove 80% of the crap @tyraleDesign for mobile first and you will get down to the things that matter. @mad_sunshine“everything else on this page needs to pixelate and die.” @courcelanMobile devices’ limited screen size makes you focus on what’s important – main features, straight communication. @mihswatUse vector to design for the web, build with css3 it will scale automagically! @tyraleMobile design is all about adaption @kingkool68for mobile, make the content the UI @rkunboxed100ms delay results in 1% sales loss for Amazon ($191 Million) @eduiconfGoogle says 500ms delay drops search traffic by 20%. Wonder what our 8,000ms server hangs do. Cough. @itmaybejjoptimize for mobile:speed eg, eliminate redirects & use app cache for local content storage @dinalewMobile is quick bursts, and mostly at home on usage. @tyraleYour mobile is with you all the time, so designing for mobile means designing something that can be used all the time. @zeldmanOnly make content and web apps that are useful to people all the time @halvorsonPeople spend only about 2 to 4 seconds on a webpage using a mobile device. Optimize your site for this behavior. @mihswatdesign = constraining until an elegant solution presents itself @laviniaMany users will interact with mobile devices using one hand and one thumb (one-handed touch), so the UI has to be simple. @jessicaivins1 million per day = touch based phone purchase @laviniamobile: must accommodate “french fry fingers” @JudyBadwow. ’1.1 billion consumers with Nokia devices in 2009′ @westerndave8-10mm = average human finger pad , so design for 9mm touch area @laviniatouch me = Touch Gesture Reference Guide http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1071 @westerndaveHovers are not intentional, clicks are @eduiconfgreat stat: People spend only about 2 to 4 seconds on a webpage using a mobile device. Optimize your site for this behavior. @laviniaHovers are not intentional. Just because a user’s mouse has paused somewhere doesn’t mean they expect to see a menu. @zeldmanmost devices use wifi for location (gps is narly indoors) @laviniaYes! Hover cannot be considered an intentional interaction on a mobile device. I activate them accidentally on my *desktop. @kissaneYelp’s augmented reality feature boosted their sustained traffic by 40 to 50 percent @mihswatWonderful presentation from Luke Wroblewski. This really jives with a lot of stuff that get talked about in IxD these days. @iwilsonjrMessage and Medium: Better Content by Design by Kristina HalvorsonKristina sure knows how to develop a killer content strategy. A website’s message carries through to other places on the web than just the main website. Customer support, social media, and meta data should all echo the tone of the main message. And there is a lot more to a good content strategy than determining what text goes on the front page. How will this content be produced? Who will update it? How often will we add new content?Kristina Halvorson (@halvorson) asked us to sing Happy Birthday to her son. How sweet… @shiota@halvorson on two of my favorite topics: teeth & content strategy! @dinalewhaha. User-scented content. “Smells like user.” @ryanhoonlavertyContent strategy plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of content that people care about. @eTapWebwebsite content: stop talking about what you do and talk about what your users want. hello user-centered content @dinalewcontent requirements ≠ content strategy @tonyviacontent strategy = content (substance + structure) & people (workflow + governance) @tonyviamessaging is not a mission statement, brand promise or tagline @eduiconfnobody cares about your mission statement [so true!] @tonyviaFirst second visiting a website is an emotional response @kingkool68user forms an impression of your site in ONE SECOND (load time + design) & decides to trust you or not within 10 seconds @tonyviaIn 1 second user should have an emotional response. 10 seconds, understand your primary message. 2 minutes, secondary msg. @eTapWebReminded of how some of the traditional #ux roles/deliverables can suffocate copywriters’ creativity/skills. Preach on, @havlorson. @talbsInclude maintenance requirements for key pages – great content strategy idea @graphicsgirlConsistency inspires trust in your readers. @JudyBadconsistency inspires trust in your readers @laviniaVisiting every page of your site with its main message in mind helps to see if you’re communicating it the right way with consistency @mihswat#aea is really driving home the importance to collaboration across roles/disciplines to tackle those important grey areas of an experience! @talbsAnd your FAQ page is inconsistent. Where’s the fun, Ben & Jerry? @mad_sunshinepet peeve: “contact us” page hiding phone/address 10 layers deep. after all, that’s all we want from “contact us” page 99% of the time @sarahdippityWorkflow and governance are crucial for good content strategy. @kingkool68“whats our facebook strategy?” “that depends… what are you trying to do, who’s going to do [keep up with it]?” hear, hear. @courcelanWhat is your social media strategy? Is it successfully delivering your message? Or do you have a Twitter just for the sake of it? @mihswatPage descriptions. Tweets. Facebook posts. Google results. Your message should be consistently delivered everywhere. @mihswat@halvorson‘s talks on content strategy are ALWAYS timely and poignant. Maybe because content strategy is a never-ending struggle… @ryanhoonlavertyAnatomy of a Design Decision by Jared SpoolJared pointed out that every site on the web came to be from a series of decisions. He has identified 5 styles to design decisions and when each style might be appropriate for a given project. Oh and university homepages feature images of girls under trees way too much.Seen it before, but it’s easy to forget just how awesome http://havenworks.com/ is… @davidocoulter“it validates” – Jared Spool (sarcastically referring to havenworks.com) @SethBlanchard“Someone actually designed this on purpose. This way.” – @jmspool on a particularly egregious web design specimen. @alykatSites like havenworks.com or arngren.net went over design decisions. Now that’s something to think about. @shiotaJared is talking about the famous 37signals vs. Donald Norman “celebrity deathmatch”. @shiota“Self design works great when you’re designing something for your own use, or for use by people just like you.” @eTapWebCrappy and unhelpful error messages are the perfect way to frustrate your user. @shiotaUnintentional design happens on its own. Works great if user will put up with whatever or we don’t care about support costs. @eTapWebAirline websites: helping AEA speakers make their point since 2005 @ryanhoonlaverty“Genius design: when we’ve previously learned what users need. We’re solving the same problems repeatedly.” @eTapWeb“Activity Focused Design: designing for new activities unfamiliar to us.” @eTapWebWell @jmspool‘s talk includes a reference to @lingscars‘ website http://www.lingscars.com… and well, just check it out. @hellogeriJared is comparing Six Flags map to Disney World’s map. Both amusement parks, yet totally different maps. Each with its own focus. @mihswatDisney. Someone has thought about what happens between the rides. Thinking about the experience. @mad_sunshineexperience is the stuff that happens around usage. @lavinia“User experience is what happens in between activities” @simplebitsUniversity website traps — girl under trees. WOW! So many of them… @mad_sunshineOMG I can’t search – the search box is on the left [side]! @raelehmanRule #17: Always put the search box in the upper right @grum_dot_comHmm. design style guides and guidelines never work. @mad_sunshineInformed Decisions > Rule-based Decisions @160mphRule-based decisions prevent thinking. Informed decisions require thinking. @sarahdippityDesign is about the exception cases. If everything was always the same, we would not be interested in this work. @beepInstead of spreading dogmas/methodologies, try spreading tricks/techniques. People will learn, think, and won’t struggle with rules @mihswatSummary Of An Event Apart DC Day 1 by Russell Heimlich

This past weekend I got to attend WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, my first WordCamp ever. This years conference took place at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore City. The venue was a little tricky to get to and the parking situation was a bit limited, but once I got there I had a great time. The place was packed with all kinds of different people who shared one common interest — they all love WordPress.The camp was divided into two tracks; beginner and pro. I spent the whole day in the pro track and my summary of the talks are below.Scott Kingsley Clark – WordPress as a CMS Scott Kingsley Clark led off the first session of the pro track with WordPress as a CMS. His talk covered how to add more fields to the edit screen besides the usual title, post, tags, and categories we’re all used to seeing. He walked through using a plugin called Pods CMS, which he is a co-author of. To me, it seems a little over complicated. I like to use custom meta fields to extend the data contained in posts or pages. For a non-technical user who isn’t comfortable writing PHP, Pods CMS seems like an acceptable solution to get them up and running.Brad Williams – WordPress Security I’ve listened to Brad many times as a regular on the SitePoint podcast so it was good to actually meet him in person. His talk (slides available) on WordPress security was well attended as securing a WordPress install is applicable to every blogger. The tips Brad dished out would help anyone lock down their blog with such methods as checking your file permissions, deleting the admin user, changing the prefix on your database tables, and (most importantly) staying up to date with plugins and core updates.At the end of his talk he mentioned a list of plugins to help with WordPress security.WP Security Scan – Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions.WP-MalWatch – performs a security scan of your WordPress installation nightly looking for evidence of foul play and if WP-MalWatch finds it, a dashboard widget will tell you were you should take a closer look.ServerBuddy – a plugin that tests server configuration to analyze the quality of your hosting & server configuration, and seek out problems with compatibility with various WordPress themes and plugins.Exploit Scanner – searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious.WordPress File Monitor – Monitor files under your WordPress installation for changes. When a change occurs, be notified via email.Login Lockdown – records the IP address and timestamp of every failed login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range.For lunch a group of us went across the street to Tambers, an indian burger place. Their burgers are perfectly normal but the last page of the menu had indian dishes. Weird. I also got a chance to meet Lokesh Dhakar, the author of the original lightbox script. He’s a smart guy.Andrew Nacin – Undiscovered APIsPhoto by Nick WhitmoyerAfter lunch, Andrew Nacin gave a talk (slides available) about functions and APIs that aren’t as well known about among developers. Since they aren’t well documented, the only way to learn about them is reading the source. I really got a kick out of his talk because I had been looking at some of these functions for a project of mine. Some neat functions includewp_remote_request – to download files to your server from the web. WordPress uses this internally to download updates, themes, and plugins from within the admin screen.wp_handle_sideload – lets you add a file to the media library that is already located somewhere else on your server.oEmbed – allows the embedding of media by simply including the URL in a post. WordPress makes it easy to add your own oEmbed providers.add_feed – lets you make your own feed. Andrew demonstrated how to make a JSON feed of your blog posts with just a few lines of code.It is no wonder Andrew knows all of this stuff, he’s one of the seven core contributors for the WordPress project.I liked in-depth technical talks like this. I was probably one of the few people who this didn’t go over their head.Jacob Goldman – Customizing WordPress AdminPhoto by Nick WhitmoyerCustomizing the back-end admin screen of WordPress is a big selling-point for Jacob’s consulting business. He feels the admin screen should be as simplified and tailored to the clients need as possible. And contrary to what others might say, WordPress makes it simple to tweak the admin screens.Much of what Jacob talked about was removing sections like menu items that aren’t used and the default widgets on the dashboard. He added his own custom widgets to the dashboard to point to a contact form if the clients need more help. Speaking of help, you can also customize the contextual help menu tab that appears on practically every page. Adding your own help text is a great way to avoid people asking you the same questions over and over. At the least, you can tell them to check the help tab on the page you have a question with. WordPress also lets you customize the look and feel by adding your own stylesheet and overriding the default styles.Jacob’s talk was inspiring for cleaning up the backend. He put a sample theme file that you can copy and paste from into your own theme.Jane Wells – Closing KeynotePhoto by Nick WhitmoyerTo wrap up WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, we had the opportunity to hear from the head user experience leader for WordPress, Jane Wells. The keynote was delivered over Skype… from within a moving car! The video was a little blocky, but given the circumstances it was easily forgiven. Some of Jane’s keynote was about the upcoming improvements to WordPress. But most of the talk was gossipy Gnu Public License cruft. It wasn’t that interesting to re-hash the same stuff every other blog was blabbering about a month ago.So that was WordCamp Mid-Atlantic. A huge thanks goes out to Aaron Brazell for organizing the whole thing and all of the sponsors for making the event possible. I look forward to attending other WordCamps in the future and maybe even hosting a talk of my own.WordCamp Mid-Atlantic by Russell Heimlich

One of the best things about a 45 minute commute each way by train is you can watch some TED videos for inspiration. Here are some of my favorite talks from the series. Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds Temple makes the case that there is a little autism in all of us. Its what makes great minds and needs to be celebrated.

Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight What happens when a brain scientist experiences the very thing she has been studying? Jill talks about her experience during a massive stroke which she knows all about.

David Blaine: How I held my breath for 17 min David goes into detail about the great lengths he took pushing his body to the limit of oxygen deprivation.

Lewis Pugh swims the North Pole This guy is tough. To help spread awareness to global warming, Lewis swam in the icey waters of the North Pole in nothing but a speedo.

Kevin Kelly tells technology’s epic story Kevin explains how technology evolves like a cell or a meme.

Hans Rosling: Asia’s rise — how and when Hans has a thick Sweedish accent that you would expect from a great mind. Here he predicts the exact day when India and China will outstrip the US as the economic powerhouse of the world. I marked the date in my Google Calendar.

Willard Wigan: Hold your breath for micro-sculpture Willard makes incredibly detailed sculptures out of single grains of sand. His patience for his work, which can be inhaled without thinking , is really mind blowing.

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This past Saturday, November 14th, a hundred DC tech enthusiasts gathered at the Martin Luther King Library to create their own conference. Topics were suggested by participants and the group at large determined the schedule. It was a BarCamp at it’s best!

This year’s BarCamp had a few twists. The word ‘Twitter’ was banned and anyone violating that rule had to pay a dollar to the Twitter swear jar which was donated to charity. The other rule was no PowerPoint slides which was an effort to promote group discussions and participation over lectures. I got to catch up with former co-workers from USNews as well as other DC tech-heads I met at other local events. The entire event including lunch was free of charge thanks to the generous sponsors who helped make BarCampDC possible. The pizza was quite good.

Some of the talks I went to included:

How To Play Tetris led by John Chen. John didn’t actually think anyone was interested in his talk but we had a good-size group talking about video game politics, strategies for Tetris, and the fact that there are Tetris pros making US$100k per year in Korea. The key takeaway was being good at Tetris takes practice, practice, and more practice. And after you’ve practiced some more, you wake up one day and realize you’re good at Tetris. An Introduction to the Android Platform Gyuri Grell and Zvi Band led an introduction to the Android mobile OS platform. The talk was a little over my head as it was mostly about Java, which I know nothing about. The source code for Meetro DC, the DC Metro app demoed, can be found on GitHub for anyone to poke around and play with. I did enjoy seeing from a high level how Android apps work and shedding some light on the magic running behind the scenes. I’m really excited to see where Android goes in the future. The most thought-provoking talk I sat in was Generalist vs. Specialist led by Kelly Gifford. It was such an open-ended topic that spurred a healthy debate. From my point of view you are both a generalist and specialist depending on what level you are comparing to. For example, in your company you might be the only “web person”, making you a specialist but with so many different hats to wear in a sole-developer position, you have to do many different things making you a generalist. Like most anything in life, nothing is cut and dry black and white but a lot of gray areas. Ryan McGrath is in a unique situation at his job at Webs.com.  He is in charge of Improving the Performance of the Frontend for millions of sites hosted there.  Crufty code, too much JavaScript, and a less-than-ideal backend issue are some of the problems plaguing his pursuit for excellence. An engineer from Clearspring, which distributes billions of page views of widgets all across the web,  was in the room and provided some great insight into tuning performance for large-scale sites. They talked about some geeky stuff like serving images as base64 strings instead of binary data which can yield some performance gains. I was pretty much lost after that. The final talk of the day was about TemlarPHP, a cascading template framework built with PHP. It separates presentation from content to create websites that are easy to maintain and standards complaint with the need for a database. It was created by Shawn Brown and looked like a lighter alternative compared to the other feature-packed, and somewhat bloated, web frameworks out there.

Like the past two DC BarCamps, I gave a talk. The topic was HTML/CSS/JavaScript Tips & Tricks which I have picked up over the past few years and thought were worth sharing. I felt it was one of my best presentations as my talking points came to me naturally with code details to back up what I was saying. I was stoked to see so many people show up to hear what I had to say as well as contribute a few points of their own. Shaun Farrell managed to capture video from a part of my talk.

So as you can see there was a lot going on. There were so many other presentations I wanted to see and people I wanted to meet and chat with but there just wasn’t enough time. A big thanks goes out to the organizers (@jfc3 , @thorpus, @corbett3000, @farrelley, @patricktimony & all the others) that helped put on another great DC tech event. Other BarCamp DC Resources

barcampdc on Twitter

BarCamp DC photos on Flickr Recap by Jimmy Gardner (who took a lot of really good photos too) Vincent Gallegos: Photos and Notes (props to Vincent as most of the photos in my post are from him) Highlights from the ButtonAll Blog List of BarCamp DC attendees on Twitter The finalized schedule

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Today was a long but enjoyable day at TEDxMidAtlantic. It’s refreshing seeing so many different perspectives and open minds converge on a single stage at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Perhaps even more mind blowing is videos from every talk are already online for anyone to view. Here are 5 of my favorite, must-see TEDxMidAtlantic talks from today (sorry no direct links yet, you’ll have to scroll through and find their names):

Will Noel – Talked about restoring a book from Archimedes and sharing it with the world under a Creative Commons license. Scott Simon – Talked about his most memorable story that he covered in Sarajevo in the 1990s. Peter Agre – Story about his career in science and winning the Nobel Prize in 2003. Very funny guy. Tony Geraci – Talked about how he transformed school lunches in Baltimore City Public Schools. Marcus Ranum – Talked about how everyone on the Internet is using TCP/IP and how upgrading the whole planet earth would be hard to do.

A big thanks goes out to the hundreds of volunteers who made this event even possible. Here’s a picture from @sengseng of their standing ovation.

Other coverage of TEDxMidAtlantic:

Liveblogging from InsideCharmCity.com Writeup in Baltimore Business Journal List of attendees on Twitter

tedxmid hashtag on Twitter

TEDxMidAtlantic photos on Flickr The Stage at TEDxMidAtlantic

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Accessibility Camp really opened my eyes to how people with disabilities experience the web. The Martin Luther King Library in downtown DC was the perfect venue for this barcamp style event. The adaptive services department has all sorts of assistive technology that anyone can use and learn more about.

I met a lot of diverse people like Patrick Timony (Adaptive Technology Librarian at MLK library), Jennison Asuncion (IT Accessibility Consultant from Toronto), Jamal Mazrui (a visually impaired software developer) and about 100 others who were passionate about sharing what they know to make the web a better, and more accessible, place. Here are some of my take aways.

Carolyn Kelley Klinger talked about making PDFs more accessible (PDF) by structuring documents with headers (using Headline 1, Headline 2 etc. styles instead of making the text bold and bumping up the font), adding column/row headers for data tables, supplying alternative text to describe images, and making sure anyone links are within context (no “Click Here” or “Read More” links). I was surprised at how similar preparing an accessible PDF is to preparing an accessible website.

Jamal Mazrui wants to build web apps to benefit disabled netizens. He’s afraid that as broadband speeds increase over the next few years we will see an influx of visually oriented interfaces with no accessibility in mind. The same thing happened in the mid 90’s with the move from an entirely text based DOS operating system, to a graphical interface driven OS like Windows. Today, emerging technologies like Adobe Air, Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Google Wave, Google Android, Second Life, and the Amazon Kindle have little to help handicapped users. Apple’s iPhone is fairly good when it comes to accessibility as evident by all the people who had one at Accessibility Camp. Hopefully the tech industry will learn from its prior mistake of ignoring the needs of handicapped users.

For lunch everyone got as many Potbelly sandwiches as they could fit in their bellies. Thanks to the generous sponsors who made the event not only possible, but free for everyone we were able to enjoy a scrumptious meal.

After lunch I got to see a live demonstration of Jennison using the screen reading application, JAWS, to navigate the web. Holy Cow! I can’t believe how different the web is when you can’t see where you’re browsing. It takes a while for a visually impaired user to get acquainted with a new website since every site has a different set of pitfalls. The source-order of your website, that is the order of your content with no styles applied, makes a huge difference to the experience of a blind user. If you’re fortunate enough to be able to user test your project, make sure to get feedback from a visually impaired person using a screen reader too. Other events that were going on throughout the day included Practical Ways to make Your Site More Accessible, Making Mapping More Accessible, eLearning Tools, and Online Gaming for Persons with Disabilities. It seems like everyone there had something to share.

A big thank you goes out to John Croston and Patrick Timony for organizing, the staff at the MLK library for providing an awesome venue, all of the sponsors who made the event even possible, and everyone who attended with something to share. This event really opened my eyes to accessibility and the web. Other Accessibility Camp DC links:

List of slides/blog write ups

AccessCampDC on Twitter

Next up is Bar Camp DC 3 on November 14th. a

The DC tech scene is just bursting at the seams with interesting (and free) tech events and un-conferences coming up this fall. I don’t know If I will be able to attend them all but here are a few that made it on to my radar.

Accessibility Camp DC is taking place at Martin Luther King Library on October 10, 2009. The event will cover topics and discussions about making the web more accessible.

E-mail – info@AccessibilityCampDC.org Twitter – @AccessCampDC Cell – 703-587-2458 Wiki – http://barcamp.org/AccessibilityCampDC

PublicMediaCamp will be at American University on October 17 and 18, 2009. The event aims to put 100 developers, 100 public media supporters, and 100 people who work for public broadcasting companies in a room and see what comes of it.

RSS Feed – http://publicmediacamp.org/feed/ Wiki – http://wiki.publicmediacamp.org/ Twitter – @PublicMediaCamp Hashtag – #pubcamp

TEDx Midatlantic will be held on November 5, 2009, at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD.  The event will feature presentations by many of the leading thinkers and doers in the MidAtlantic Region.

E-mail – tedxmidcontact@gmail.com Twitter – @TedXMidatlantic Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=112275396087&ref=nf

BarCamp3 is the grand daddy of all DC tech events. It will be at the Martin Luther King Library on November 14, 2009. This is always my favorite event of the year.

Twitter – @barcampdc Highlights from BarCamp & BarCamp2

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Jared Goralnick polls the audience of Bootstrap MD

Someone from Genius Rocket (lunch sponsor) distributes fliers while everyone is out in the hallway eating pizza.

Aaron Brazell, Kaitlyn Wilkins, Frank Gruber, Peter Corbett and Mario Armstrong lead the 2nd session about How to Market Inexpensively with Social Media, Events, and Creative Public Relations