meyerweb.com

I’m a bad conference organizer.

Why? Because we opened the An Event Apart 2010 schedule for sales back in, um, flippin’ November, and I never mentioned it here. Cripes, I never even posted when we announced the lineup of cities. I could go through the great big long sob-story list of reasons why 2009 was really tough and blah blah blah, but when you get right down to it, I fell down on my job.

Okay. So. Time to correct that.

(deep breath)

Hey everyone, check it out: the complete tour schedule for An Event Apart 2010! Woohoooo!

1. Seattle: April 5-7, 2010 (yes, three days; more on that anon)
2. Boston: May 24-25, 2010
3. Minneapolis: July 26-27, 2010
4. Washington, DC: September 16-17, 2010
5. San Diego: November 1-2, 2010

We’ve got a pretty killer lineup, if I do say so myself. You can get the mostly-complete list from our opening-of-sales announcement last November. It lists the people we had confirmed at the time; there have been a few additions since then. Check out your city of choice to see who’s going to be there! (But always remember that speaker lineups are subject to change: speakers are people too, and life has a way of interfering with schedules. I myself had to withdraw from An Event Apart Boston last year due to a family emergency.)

The price to register for these two-day, one-track Events is the same as it was in 2009, and there are educational and group discounts available for those who are interested.

But wait, I just said “two-day” when the first show of the year is clearly three days. What gives?

Seattle is the site of our first-ever A Day Apart, a full-day workshop that can be attended on its own or as part of a full three days of Event Apart ecstasy. And the inaugural Day Apart will be nothing less than a detailed plunge into HTML 5 and CSS3 with Jeremy Keith and Dan Cederholm. Jeremy handles the markup; Dan gets stylish. It’s going to be fantastic. I’m going to be in the back of the room for the whole day, soaking up as much as I can.

If you want to attend just the workshop, it’s $399 for the whole day if you buy an early bird ticket (available through March 5th). The price goes up $50 when early bird ends, and another $100 if you show up at the door. But I wouldn’t recommend that last, because I don’t think there will be any tickets available at the door. Again: if you show up unannounced on the day of the workshop and ask to buy a ticket, we will most likely have to turn you away, because I expect that there won’t be any seats available.

On the other hand, maybe you’d like to experience more than just one day of AEA goodness. Maybe you’d like to go whole hog and attend both the two-day Event Apart and the subsequent Day Apart, soaking up all the knowledge and enthusiasm and camaraderie that typifies An Event Apart. And who could blame you? If you do that, then the total early bird price for all three days is $1,190, whereas buying the event and workshop passes separately would total $1,294. That’s right: you actually get slightly more than $100 off the cost of the workshop if you attend all three days, over and above the early bird discount. (Or you can think of it as getting $100+ off the cost of the conference. We’re not fussy.)

As it happens, these three-day passes have proved quite popular. So if you want to get your hands on one of those—or on any Seattle tickets, whether one, two, or three days—I wouldn’t wait too long. Our internal analyses suggest that there will come a time, some time before the doors open on April 5th, that the ability to buy a ticket will cease to be. It may even pine for a fjord or two.

As for the four shows that come after Seattle, well, they’re looking pretty popular too.

I know I say this every year, but I’m really excited about what we’ve got planned for the year. Jeffrey and I constantly and (we hope) consistently strive to create an event that we ourselves want to attend, and that’s absolutely true of the shows and workshop we have planned in 2010. I can’t wait to hear what the speakers and attendees have to share. Hope to see you there!

I am now a Fray Contributor. Official, for real, badge and everything—check the sidebar on the home page. My completely and in many ways unbelievably true story of beginnings around an ending, “A Death of Coincidence”, appears in Issue 3: Sex & Death.

This is a huge deal for me. I still have a little trouble believing it.

For a long time—as in, for more than a decade—I’ve had “participate in Fray” as one of those little deferred dreams we all carry around in the background. I certainly could’ve submitted pieces all along, either for the original site or one of the live events, and might even have been accepted. The thing is, I wasn’t dreaming of simply getting a piece accepted and checking an internal to-do box. I wanted to participate the right way, by my own internal reckoning. That meant not only vying for inclusion, but doing so with a worthy story, one that felt right.

When Fray relaunched as a themed quarterly, I took notice. I often work better when I have something to work against; constraints energize me more than they chafe. The first issue’s theme, “Busted!”, called to mind a few childhood incidents, but nothing really coalesced. There was nothing that said, “I’m a Fray piece; write me.” The second issue’s theme, “Geek”, left me with far too many options. I couldn’t hook onto anything with the right vibe.

Then issue 3’s theme was announced, and I knew exactly what I was going to submit. No rumination of possible narratives, no idle exploring my past for ideas, no doubt at all. I knew, and it was right.

In fact, it was a piece I’d already written, except for the ending. The ending I had used was certainly good enough, and was certainly the right ending for the time and place I wrote and performed it. But there had always been a different, nearly unbelievable ending to that story and I’d always held it back, kept close to myself, never quite sure why. Now I know why. It was the piece that made that story a Fray story.

If you want to read it, you’ll need to pick up Issue 3 of Fray, which you can of course do very easily. You can pick up issues 1 and 3 together for a great price, or become a subscriber and get issue 3 as your first. Any of those would be awesome. Or, I suppose, you can wait until the piece is published for free on the Fray site, though I should tell you that it could be a long while until that happens.

I can’t thank Frayer-in-Chief Derek Powazek enough for including me in Fray. I am quite literally as proud as I was when my first book was published. I’ve passed a personal and professional milestone, and far from just ticking off a checkbox on some internal to-do list, I’m basking in the glow of a dream fully and properly fulfilled.

It wasn’t what I would call unseasonably cold, but then the season was mid-autumn and the afternoon wind along the river did cut the skin a bit. I kept my leather jacket zipped up all the way as I made my way back to the hotel with shopping bag in hand. Brisk, I might have said back home, or even chilly. Not winter yet, but you could feel it coming in the snap and shift of the air.

I crossed the last street before the hotel, keeping an eye on both the short-cycle light and the short-tempered traffic. Not that there was any particular reason for them to be short-tempered—it was a Sunday afternoon and there were hardly any cars on the bridges and roads that grid the downtown area—but I knew from experience that pedestrian intimidation was something of a sport for the locals, and I really didn’t feel like tempting fate, or at least somebody’s ideas about what constituted a bit of fun.

Having threaded through the small bunch of oncoming pedestrians and reached the relative safety of the sidewalk, I came upon a large man with two children in tow, all bundled against the cold in parkas and scarves and hats. He asked if I had a minute, and I immediately knew what was coming. Sure enough, it came out: the request for a dollar, some change, anything I could spare. I glanced at him, at the children, back at him. Something for bus fare, he said. They’d missed dinner at the Mission the night before, he said. Just a little help, anything I could do, he said.

How many times had I heard this before? I gave the usual excuses about not having any cash, I only travel with credit cards, so sorry, had to go.

And went, the wind biting into my cheeks as I strode to the hotel’s front door, the overhead heater blowing a curtain of warmth across the entryway. Into the lobby. Into the elevator. Thirty floors into the air. And in my sight, still, the children looking at me. The boy of maybe eight, looking up at me curiously. The girl of six, peeping at me warily from behind the man’s bulk. Props? Accomplices?

Did it matter?

I stood at the counter of the lobby gift shop, stacks of nutrition bars in my hands. A bottle of water in the side pocket of the jacket I had yet to shed. An apple in the other. My credit card between two fingers, ready for the attendant to take.

Through the doors, into the cold wind under the canopy, the plastic shopping bag weighing down my hand. I reached the sidewalk and there they were on the same corner, looking like they were getting ready to cross the street. I caught the man’s eye, signaled him to wait. As I approached his face shifted, softened, something like relief warring with shame melding into a curiously childlike expression.

“God bless you,” he said to me, and I chose to believe that he meant it. The little boy smiled up at me, a tiny edge embedded in the corners of his mouth. The girl still peeped warily, maybe even more so now. The man and I were shaking hands, looking squarely at each other for a moment. I told him to make sure to get the kids to that Mission dinner. I could think of nothing else to say, because it was the only thing I was thinking. Get the kids fed, keep them as healthy as possible, no matter what else.

As I turned into the recessed, canopied area that sheltered the hotel’s front door, I glanced back at the street corner. The three of them were waiting to cross toward the small park to the north, the gift shop’s white bag ludicrously small in the big man’s hands, and then they were occluded by the building’s corner. I walked back through the wall of warm air, into the dim lobby and out of the bright outdoors, thinking that there was every chance I’d been suckered, and knowing that it didn’t matter.

So Louisiana Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell has gained national notoriety for refusing to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple, referring them instead to another justice to have the marriage performed. His action has, of course, provoked a great deal of condemnation. Pretty much every elected Louisiana official above Mr. Bardwell (and plenty of them to either side) in the administrative hierarchy has called for his removal from his position. That goes all the way up to Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, who said:

“This is a clear violation of constitutional rights and federal and state law. Mr. Bardwell’s actions should be fully reviewed by the Judiciary Commission and disciplinary action should be taken immediately – including the revoking of his license.”

As for Mr. Bardwell himself, he has claimed not to be racist, but instead concerned for the biracial children that result from mixed-race marriage. Of all that he’s said, though, I was particularly interested by the following:

“I didn’t tell this couple they couldn’t get married. I just told them I wouldn’t do it.”

It interested me because it’s exactly the kind of reasoning that underlies “conscience protection” laws that exempt medical professionals who wish to refuse participation in abortion, or dispensation of contraception.

So now I’m very curious to know whether what pro-life groups have to say about what this man has done and how he’s done it. Or, for that matter, what Governor Jindal himself now thinks of the bill he recently signed into law.

Last week, I got an interesting inquiry from Velda Christensen:

@meyerweb *wondering just how many of your followers follow @zeldman and vice-versa*

I had no idea. Furthermore, I didn’t know of a tool that could tell me. So I built one: Followerlap.

As it turned out, the Twitter API made answering the specific question pretty ridiculously easy, thanks to followers/ids. All it takes is two API requests, one for each username. The same would be true of friends/ids, on top of which I suspect I’ll fairly shortly build a tool quite similar to Followerlap.

Since I announced Followerlap’s existence on (where else?) Twitter, I’ve had a few repeated (and not unexpected) bits of feedback.

• Why not list the common followers? Because followers/ids returns a list of numeric IDs. Resolving those IDs as usernames would require one API hit per ID. If there are 15 followers in common, that’s not such a big deal, but if there are 1,500, well, I’ll run out of my hourly allotment of API requests very quickly. Maybe there’s a better way; if so, I’d love to hear about it, because that would be a great addition.

• Why can’t I find out how many people follow both Stephen Fry and Shaquille O’Neal? Past a certain number of followers, somewhere in the 200,000–250,000 range, the API just dies. You can’t even count on getting a consistent error message back. There are ways around this, but I didn’t want to stress the API that way, so it just fails. Sorry.

• How can I link to a specific comparison? At the moment, you can’t. I hope to make that happen soon, but I decided that a tool this simple should have a similarly simple launch. Ship early, ship often, right? Anyway, it’s on the list of things to add soon. Use the new “Livelink to this result” link underneath a result. (See update below for more.)

So that’s Followerlap. Any other questions? I’ll do my best to answer them in the comments, though for a number of reasons I may be slow to respond.

Update 6 Jul 09: as noted in the edited point above, livelinking of comparison results is now, um, live. So now you can pass around results like the number of people who follow both God and the Devil (thanks to Paul M. Watson for coming up with that one!). I call this “livelinking” because hitting a result URL will get you the very latest results for that particular comparison. “Permalinking” to me implied that it would link to a specific result at a specific time, which the tool doesn’t do and very likely never, ever will.

It’s taken me slightly more than a month to write this post. It’s about people at their best.

Last month, just after speaking at a conference in Amsterdam, my laptop was stolen.

Actually, to be more painfully accurate, my laptop case was stolen—and inside it at the time was the laptop, my mobile phone, and my wallet. Plus the usual assortment of stuff that goes into a laptop case.

Because I still remember to this day advice Tantek gave me just before we boarded a bus to Narita airport, I had my passport on me. I happened to have picked up my camera to take some pictures of the conference hall. My clothes were still in my hotel room. Everything else was gone.

I can’t really describe the feeling. Maybe you’ve felt it. Shaking and stunned and self-blaming and nakedly vulnerable. All that magnified by the complete loss of funds and communication with my family.

And the data. The lost data. I have backups, but they’re never as current as one would want. (Which reminds me: if you aren’t backing up, and you aren’t doing so regularly, learn from my loss and start.) Besides, at that moment, as the full realization of what had happened slid coldly into my gut and started its slow, merciless expansion throughout my entire body, I didn’t think “Oh, I have backups until that date, and all my work mail is on the mail server, and I’ve been uploading the best pictures to online services.” Those things didn’t occur to me. They were completely blocked by the continual, sickening, endlessly looping thought: IT’S ALL GONE.

And that’s when people started pitching in to help me out.

In addition to helping me look for the case in hopes that it had just been moved somewhere non-obvious, Khris Loux of JS-Kit let me call home from his iPhone without a second thought, so I could tell Kat what had happened and get her immediately started on contacting banks and credit card companies. And the honest concern in his eyes helped snap me back from near-paralysis, touched by the regard coming from someone I’d only met an hour before.

Then Gabe Mac, having heard what was going on, came up to me with a fully charged mobile phone I could borrow so that I could remain in contact with my family until I went home. He didn’t ask me how I would get it back to him, because I don’t think it had occurred to him. He just said, “Eric, I have a spare phone. You need it. Take it.”

So I did. And much, much later that same night, it was nearly a lifeline.

Throughout all this, Boris and Patrick, the conference founders, were working to find out if one of the tech crew had accidentally picked it up, or it had been turned in to venue staff. And when it became inescapably clear that the case was well and truly gone, they sent one of their staff to get a SIMM card for the phone Gabe had loaned me and 200 euros in cash so I could get home. Just did it, because they could see that I would need those things even when I couldn’t. They also arranged a ride for me to get to my evening’s social appointment.

That appointment was with Steven Pemberton and his lovely family, who fed me a great dinner in their fabulous top-floor flat and were more than gracious about my disordered mental state. After dinner, Steven took me to the nearby police station and acted as translator as I filled out a report. And then he loaned me use of his home phone to call a couple of credit card companies that I had to speak with personally in order to make sure my business credit cards were cancelled.

It wasn’t the relaxed evening of dinner and shop talk I’d been hoping to have, but I did several things that needed to be done and Steven made it possible. And we did get in a tiny smidgen of (very interesting) shop talk near the end.

At every step of that evening, someone was there to help push me forward, help me lower the unexpected barriers just a little bit, help ease the situation however they could. So many people coming together to help out someone they’d known for years or never before met. Thanks to them all, I was able to get home without further incident. Thanks to them all, I had a major yang to the theft’s yin, a powerful reminder of just how good people can be.

Thank you, all.

At last—at long, long last!—the results of the A List Apart Survey 2008 are available, along with the anonymized raw data we collected.

There are a great many reasons why it took so long to get this out the door. A big part is that it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort, which means it happens in our “free time” (and there the word “free” has a couple of meanings). I say it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort because the detailed analysis is actually done by a pair of professional statisticians, who are paid for their time and expertise. They did a great job once more, and did it in a reasonable time frame. It just took us a while to get them the data to analyze, and then a while longer to take their report and findings and process them into report form.

The biggest change this year is that we’re publishing the results as HTML+CSS instead of a PDF. This greatly increased the challenge, because it was important to me that the data be presented using styled tables, not images. That’s easy like cake if all you’re doing is putting them up as visual tables, and we certainly do that for some of the figures. In the other cases, where we have bar charts of varying kinds, things got difficult. I managed to devise solutions that are 99.9% effective, and I’m both proud of and frustrated by those solutions. Proud, of course, because I managed to wring three-stack bars out of table markup; frustrated because of the markup I had to construct to make them possible. I think this report represents more than half my lifetime usage of the style attribute, but unfortunately there’s no way (using just CSS) to say {width: content;}.

So why not use JavaScript to do that, or to just replace the tables with canvas-drawn charts? I did consider both, but decided that I would push as far as I could with plain HTML+CSS.

A few implementation notes:

• I used HTML 5 in order to step around some previously unrealized limitations of HTML 4—did you know tfoot has to come before tbody in HTML 4? I didn’t. I did not use elements like header and footer due to known problems in Firefox 2 and related browsers, which mangle pages containing those elements. Instead, I took the same path Jon Tan recommends, and classed divs using those names for later, easier conversion.

• The tables which underlie the charts do not have summary attributes. If a group of civic-minded individuals would like to write useful summaries, please let me know in the comments and I’ll let you know how best to submit them. Similarly, I did my very best to make sure all the table headers had accurate scope values, but if I botched any, let me know.

• I’m aware that Opera shows horizontal scrollbars on most chapters of the report. This is due to its refusal to apply overflow to table boxes, which according to my recent reading of the CSS 2.1 specification is the correct thing to (not) do. Every other browser I tested does apply overflow to table boxes, though, which I found most useful. I tried applying overflow: hidden to a few other boxes, and that got rid of Opera’s horizontal scrollbars, but it also cut off actual content in some other browsers. I chose a cosmetic problem in one browser over loss of content in others. The best fix I’ve devised is to wrap the tables in divs and apply overflow: hidden to those divs, but I didn’t want to rush the fix and botch it, so it didn’t make it in time for first publication. I expect to get it in shortly after publication.

• In a like vein, there are a few combo charts where a bar goes shooting off the right side of the chart in IE7. This appears to be due to some kind of width-doubling problem that’s only invoked on elements with a style attribute when the row header goes to two lines instead of being just one. Googling for an explanation yielded no joy, and a lengthy series of attempts to hack around the problem came to nothing. If anyone knows how to counteract that problem other than preventing the header text from going past a single line, I’d love to hear it. (Update: I’ve implemented the “fix” of preventing line-wrapping in the report, so there aren’t any off-the-page bars right now, but you can see an example of the problem on this test page.)

• Surprisingly, the charts mostly work in IE6. The exception is some of the triple-stack charts, where data points overlap when the rightmost sub-bars get too small, and also the double-width bars mentioned in the previous point. I don’t really have a fix for this short of upgrading the browser, but if somebody finds one, I’d be happy to test it out.

On that last point, if there are questions or suggestions surrounding the implementation of the report, we can certainly discuss them here. With regard to the survey and report itself, though—that is, the questions asked and the results we’re publishing—please direct those thoughts to the comments section of the ALA article announcing the report. I’m hoping that we’ll have the 2009 survey up within a few months, so comments on what we asked and how we asked it, what we didn’t ask but should have, and that sort of thing could well have a direct impact on the next survey. But please put those on the ALA site, where more people are likely to see them.

It’s done, it’s out, it’s yours—both the report and the data, about which I’ll soon write a little bit more. Read the report, or produce your own report using the data. Just always know that when we publish these reports, we do not mean for them to be the final word. No, what we always mean is for them to be the first words, a starting point, a place from which to grow. What comes next is as much up to you as anyone else, and I can’t wait to see what you do.

When I was in Boston earlier this month, one of the people I’d thought to hang out with was Jared Spool, and of course he was on the other side of the country while I was in his hometown. This was a bit of a downer but I figured, hey, we both speak a lot, so I’d see him again somewhere at some point.

And how right I was: the week after my return home, Dopplr informed me that he and I would both be in London for the first weekend in March. I’m there for the Carson Workshop I’m giving (and there are only a few seats left, so you should grab one while they’re still open) and he’ll be in town for reasons of his own. As will Dana Chisnell, it turns out.

How could we not act on this? So I pinged the folks at Carsonified and asked them if they knew of a venue where we could arrange some kind of meetup. They were not only glad to help out, they offered to organize the whole thing. The result: a Web Geek Gathering at the Pitcher & Piano Trafalgar on Sunday, 8 March 2009. Jared, Dana, and I are all planning to be there. You should plan to be there too. You should also RSVP because, unlike the web, there isn’t infinite available space. Not to mention I’ve heard rumors that there might be some manner of free drinks. I mean, I’m just sayin’ what I heard.

Hope to see you there!