There are strong reasons to prefer either one.  In Washington DC, we’ll have our second-ever A Day Apart, a full day of in-depth learning with Jeremy Keith and Ethan Marcotte taking on the topics of HTML5 and CSS3, respectively.  We ran A Day Apart in Seattle earlier this year as something of an experiment, and it was such a huge hit that we immediately decided to add it to a future show.  We settled on Washington DC for a variety of reasons, not least of which was that the hotel had the space available to add a third day.  So far as we know it’s the last time we’ll do A Day Apart in 2010, so if you’re interested, it’s the place to be.

San Diego, on the other hand… well, it’s San Diego!  In November!  It’s also the last chance to see our 2010 lineup of speakers, who’ve been consistently hitting it out of the park with insightful thinking and bold challenges to the status quo.  We may never again see this particular combination of pure smarts and talent, so if you can’t make it to DC (or you’d rather just hit the beach in advance of Thanksgiving) then come on down.

From mobile design to advanced CSS to the latest in HTML5 to smart content to wonderful design, the sessions at AEA this year have been outstanding.  The audience feedback has been really incredible, almost overwhelming.  If you haven’t seen this year’s lineup, you should really consider checking it out.  We’d love to see you there!

(P.S. Want to hear more about An Event Apart’s origin story, growth, vision, and future?  Tune in to The Big Web Show this Thursday at 1pm Eastern U.S.!  I’ll be a guest along with Andy McMillan—he of the fabulous Build Conference of Belfast—talking about web conferences and more.  And if you miss the live show, don’t worry; there will be a lovingly edited version up shortly after we’re done taping.)

Many people have asked if the slides will be available.  Indeed so:  head on over to the session page, which I encourage attendees of the talk to visit so that you can leave a rating or comment on the session.  The 5.4MB PDF of my Keynote slides is available there whether you attended or not.

While I was at the conference I was also interviewed by Mac Slocum on the topics of the HTML and Flash, and that’s been put up on YouTube along with interviews with Brady Forrest and Ge Wang (both of whom are awesome).  I haven’t watched it so I don’t know how dorky I come off but I’ll bet it’s pretty dorky.

I indulged in a little good-natured ribbing of Adobe at the front of the interview (I kid because I love!) but the rest of it is, as best I recall, a decent distillation of my views.  I’m hoping to get a few more detailed thoughts written and published here in the next week or two.

Many thanks to Brady Forrest and the entire Web 2.0 crew for having me on stage and getting me out to San Francisco.  It’s always a great place to visit.

Now, hard drives and bandwidth may be cheap, but when you have four hundred plus attendees all trying to download the same 175MB PDF at the same time, the venue’s conference manager will drop by to find out what the bleeding eyestalks your attendees are doing and why it’s taking down the entire outbound pipe.  Not to mention the network will grind to a nearly complete halt.  Whatever you personally may think of net access at conferences, at this point, not providing net access is roughly akin to not providing functioning bathrooms.

So what’s the answer?  ShrinkIt is fine if the slides use lots of vectors and you’re running Snow Leopard.  If the slides use lots of bitmapped images, or you’re not on Snow Leopard, ShrinkIt can’t help you.

If the slides are image-heavy, then you can always load the PDF into Preview and then do a “Save As…” where you select the “Reduce File Size” Quartz filter.  That will indeed drastically shrink the file size—that 175MB PDF goes down to 13MB—but it can also make the slides look thoroughly awful.  That’s because the filter achieves its file size reduction by scaling all the images down by at least 50% and to no more than 512 pixels on a side, plus it uses aggressive JPEG compression.  So not only are the images infested with compression artifacts, they also tend to get that lovely up-scaling blur.  Bleah.

I Googled around a bit and found “Quality reduced file size in Mac OS X Preview” from early 2006.  There I discovered that anyone can create their own Quartz filters, which was the key I needed.  Thus armed with knowledge, I set about creating a filter that struck, in my estimation, a reasonable balance between image quality and file size reduction.  And I think I’ve found it.  That 175MB PDF gets taken down to 34MB with what I created.

If you’d like to experience this size reduction for yourself (and how’s that for an inversion of common spam tropes?) it’s pretty simple:

1. Download and unzip Reduce File Size (75%).  Note that the “75%” relates to settings in the filter, not the amount of reduction you’ll get by using it.
2. Drop the unzipped .qfilter file into ~/Library/Filters in Leopard/Snow Leopard or /Library/PDF Services in Lion.  (Apparently no ~ in Lion.)

Done.  The next time you need to reduce the size of a PDF, load it up in Preview, choose “Save As…”, and save it using the Quartz filter you just installed.

If you’re the hands-on type who’d rather set things up yourself, or you’re a paranoid type who doesn’t trust downloading zipped files from sites you don’t control (and I actually don’t blame you if you are), then you can manually create your own filter like so:

1. Go to /Applications/Utilities and launch ColorSync Utility.
2. Select the “Filters” icon in the application’s toolbar.
3. Find the “Reduce File Size” filter and click on the little downward-arrow-in-gray-circle icon to the right.
4. Choose “Duplicate Filter” in the menu.
5. Use the twisty arrow to open the duplicated filter, then open each of “Image Sampling” and “Image Compression”.
6. Under “Image Sampling”, set “Scale” to 75% and “Max” to 1280.
7. Under “Image Compression”, move the arrow so it’s halfway between the rightmost marks.  You’ll have to eyeball it (unless you bust out xScope or a similar tool) but you should be able to get it fairly close to the halfway point.
8. Rename the filter to whatever will help you remember its purpose.

As you can see from the values, the “75%” part of the filter’s name comes from the fact that two of the filter’s values are 75%.  In the original Reduce File Size filter, both are at 50%.  The maximum size of images in my version is also quite a bit bigger than the original’s—1280 versus 512—which means that the file size reductions won’t be the same as the original.

Of course, you now have the knowledge needed to fiddle with the filter to create your own optimal balance of quality and compression, whether you downloaded and installed the zip or set it up manually—either way, ColorSync Utility has what you need.  If anyone comes up with an even better combination of values, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.  In the meantime, share and enjoy!

Translations

• Belorussian courtesy Patricia Clausnitzer
• German courtesy Andreas Beraz

Update 2 Aug 11: apparently there have been changes in Lion—here’s an Apple forum discussion of the problem.  There are two workarounds described in the thread: either to open and save files with ColorSync Utility itself, or to copy the filter to another folder in your Library (or install it there in the first place, above).

Update 27 Mar 12: edited the Lion install directory to remove an errant ~ .  Thanks to Brian Christiansen for catching the error!

You can get the details at the CW site, and note the special price for the first quarter of the seats.  That’s right, this will be a small, intimate workshop, with plenty of chances for questions about and challenges to what I’m saying.  Previous workshops have featured some really great conversations among everyone there, and I expect the same this time around.

I had meant to blog this before life intervened and took me out of my wifi cloud (and more on that soon), so time is a little more of the essence than usual—if you know someone who you think might be interested, pass the word on, willya?  Thanks!

The most recent is a short clip from one of my presentations at An Event Apart back in April, debug / reboot, where I comment at my usual pace on the suppression of quotation marks in my reset styles and why I think relying on browser-generated quotation marks is a bad idea.  You also get to see my hair before it got to be the length it is now, which is even longer.  There’s a complete transcription on that page, by the way, courtesy Mr. Z.

Then there’s the vaguely silly one, in which I attempt to debug my clothing while sitting in my living room.  The main takeaway here, I think, is that my speech patterns on stage are just about the same as those in “regular life”.  Pity my family.

So there’s me in the movies.  It’s nowhere near as epic-ly mëtäl as some other folks’ videos, but I suppose we all do what we can.

Right now, though, I want to mention a few pieces of news from the conference world.  After that, it’s back to steeling myself to upgrade WordPress while stomping out the problems I have with my current install and also, I hope, finally getting it set up to do version-controlled upgrading henceforth.

Right.  The news.

• The early bird deadline for An Event Apart Boston 2008 is next Monday, so don’t wait much longer to register if you’re a fan of discounts.  If not, that’s cool too.  Maybe you like to pay more.  We’re not here to judge.

• If you’re on the opposite coast, there’s also An Event Apart San Francisco 2008, whose detailed schedule was announced this morning.  It will be two days jam packed with greatness from Heather Champ, Kelly Goto, Jeremy Keith, Luke Wroblewski, Dan Cederholm, Tantek Çelik, Jeffrey Veen, Derek Featherstone, Liz Danzico, Jason Santa Maria, Jeffrey Zeldman, and your humble servant.  You’ve still got some time to register with the early bird discount, but I wouldn’t put it off forever, because there’s no way to know when the last seat will be sold.

  (And if you aren’t subscribed to our mailing list, then you’re already behind the times:  subscribers got word of the detailed San Francisco schedule yesterday, ahead of everyone else.  Because they’re on the ins, as the kids are known to say.  Don’t let them have all the fun.  Sign up today!)

• At the beginning of June, I’ll be giving a keynote plus a bonus session to be named later at the Spring <br/> Conference in Athens, Ohio.  For years they’ve been trying to get me to come down there, and every year I had some insurmountable scheduling conflict.  It almost happened again this year, but they were really fantastic and actually worked the schedule to accommodate me, for which I can’t thank them enough.  Come on down and take a <br/> with us!

• Come mid-July, I’ll be in sunny Philadelphia for the Higher Education Web Symposium co-teaching a full-day workshop on “CSS Tips & Techniques” with the incomparable Stephanie Sullivan.

• And in the realm of the not-absolutely-guaranteed-and-therefore-underspecified:  come late September, it looks like I’ll be back in Destin, Florida; and I just might be making my way to Japan in early November.

Plus of course there’s An Event Apart Chicago 2008 in October, but you already knew about that.  The detailed schedule will be published in mid-July, and with that lineup of speakers, I’m already shivering with anticipation.

Okay, that’s all I have for the moment.  Hopefully that upgrade/fix/control thing will go less bumpily than I fear, and I can get another post out before all those shows have passed into memory.

Notacon straddles, like a Colossus built entirely out of recycled motherboards, backtech chips, and loops of soldering wire, the middle ground between regular conferences and BarCamps (though Notacon predates BarCamp by a couple of years).  It’s not free to attend, but it is very inexpensive.  What it lacks in slick advertising and corporate sponsors, it makes up ten times over in raw, unfiltered geekiness and fascinating material.  This is the kind of event where presenters will hold forth on the depths of digital security, the physics of wireless networking, homebrew chip architecture, the coolness of HyperCard, online society dynamics, and more.  There’s a running contest called Anything but Ethernet, where you get bonus points for having one of the links in your network architecture incorporate barbed wire.

Yeah.  It’s like that.

The speakers will be as wildly diverse as the audience.  The lead engineer for the C64 Direct-to-TV (a C64 in a joystick!); the man behind The Daily WTF; some of the folks putting out 2600 magazine; the woman behind CrochetMe.com; and many more.  I’ll be there as well, talking about the bleeding edge of CSS and web design, ripping apart some recent projects of mine at top speed while discussing where I think we’ll be in three years.  Plus Drew Curtis of FARK fame will be back, as he always is, this year sponsoring a FARK party.  The mind fairly boggles.  Boggles!

As you’re no doubt gathering by now, it’s hard to describe Notacon in a quick, concise summary—and that’s a big part of what makes it so awesome.  For my contemporaries: see you there!  To you future historians: okay, you missed out, but drop everything right now to find out when the next one is and I’ll see you there!

• Boston, June 23–24
• San Francisco, August 18–19
• Chicago, October 13–14

Now you can pick the show that best fits your schedule, fiscal year, or both, and book your seats early.

One of the things we’ve always striven to create is top-notch events for (as the motto goes) people who make web sites—covering design as well as code, architecture in addition to scripting, the big picture along with the nitty-gritty.  Focusing on that vision served us and our attendees very well in 2007, and it continues in 2008.  Just check out the list of speakers and topics for New Orleans:

• Andy Clarke, author of Transcending CSS, presenting “Underpants Over My Trousers”
• Aaron Gustafson, co-author of AdvancED DOM Scripting, presenting “Progressive Enhancement with JavaScript”
• Robert Hoekman Jr., author of Designing the Obvious, conducting “On-the-Spot Usability Reviews”
• Cameron Moll, author of Mobile Web Design, presenting “Good vs. Great Design”
• Brian Oberkirch, Publisher of Like It Matters, presenting “Kick it Like Pelé”
• Jason Santa Maria, designer at Happy Cog, presenting “Good Design Ain’t Easy”
• Dave Shea, co-author of Zen of CSS Design, presenting “Living, Breathing Design”
• Stephanie Sullivan, co-author of Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3, presenting “Design Challenges, Standards Solutions”
• Jeff Veen, design manager at Google, presenting “Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps”
• Aarron Walter, author of Building Findable Web Sites, presenting “Findability Bliss Through Web Standards SEO”

And, as always, your hosts:

• Eric Meyer, author of CSS: The Definitive Guide, presenting both “The Lessons of CSS Frameworks” and “Debug / Reboot”
• Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing With Web Standards, presenting both “Understanding Web Design” and “Web Standards: The Return of the King”

You can get more details on the New Orleans event page, including descriptions of the sessions and details on how to get the special room rate at the conference hotel, the Hilton New Orleans Riverside.

While we don’t yet have speaker lists nor schedules to announce for the other three 2008 shows, we’re working to finalize them and hope to have at least some information out shortly.  I can already say that all the shows are at the same high level, though of course each event has its own unique flavor.

Those of you who attended one or more of our shows in 2007 (yes, we did have some repeats!) may be wondering if the shows will be the same, especially since we’re returning to some cities we visited last year.  The answer there is “not at all”.  Every show of 2008 is a mix of new and returning speakers, and we’ve done our best not to repeat speakers within a given city between 2007 and 2008.  The exceptions are myself and Jeffrey, of course, but we’re both doing new talks this year.  Simply put, if you loved AEA in 2007, we’re pretty confident you’ll love it even more in 2008.

• I’ll be doing a short bit on microformats at the Cleveland Web Standards Meetup.  If you’re in the area and interested, please do sign up for the group!  We’ve been growing quickly and, having shifted our meeting place to the Tri-C West campus, now have room for a lot more growth.  We’re also moving beyond simple gathering, with some great ideas for helping out local organizations and sharing knowledge and skills.  Even if you can’t make this month’s gathering, you should still join up so you’re in the loop.

• I’ll be delivering the keynote at the first annual CIW Partner Conference in Destin, Florida, at the end of September.  No official title for the talk as yet, but the general theme will be how we’ve gotten to where we are, what I see as the best ways to train the next generation of web designers and developers, and the best tools currently available to current designers/developers.  I may also participate in a panel, depending on exact scheduling.

• In mid-October, I’ll be on stage at the first Voices That Matter: Web Design conference in San Francisco (which will make my second trip to the city in the space of three weeks).  We’re looking to do sort of an open “Conversation With…” format with lots of audience questions and commentary, which is a little unusual for me.  Jeffrey and I did a conversational session with Brian Alvey at ‘Meet the Makers’ back in the day, but I haven’t really done a Merv Griffin since.  Should be fun!

• Then, in mid-December, I’ll be doing three hours of CSS at Web Design World Boston.  It will pretty much be like it was last year: a mix of deep dives into obscure (yet important) corners of CSS, assessments of current trends, fun with cutting-edge techniques, and open-format Q&A.  We’ll have three hours (with breaks) to play around, so that’ll leave plenty of time to wander into the weeds and come back mostly intact.

I’m starting to do some rework on the sidebar here on meyerweb, and a “coming soon” list is one of the things I have in mind.  Those of you who actually do drop by the site will probably notice the sidebar mutating over time, since I’m going to do my reworking live and in public.  That sounds so much more grandiose than the reality of fiddling with markup and making mistakes, doesn’t it?  It’s editing 2.0!

To those who do decide to attend, I make this pledge: I will not wear the blue-shirt-with-tan-slacks combo again.  This I swear.

• Tim Bray, father of XML, director of web technologies at Sun Microsystems, and Tim Berners-Lee W3C appointee;
• Andy Budd, user experience lead at Clearleft, co-founder of d.Construct, and author of CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions;
• Mike Davidson, founder and CEO of Newsvine, former art director and manager of media product development for ESPN and the Walt Disney Internet Group;
• Shawn Henry, director of education outreach for W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), research appointee at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and author of Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design;
• Shaun Inman, award-winning designer and developer, inventor of Inman Flash Replacement and the curiously successful stats package Mint;
• Jeffrey Veen, designer manager at Google, founding partner of Adaptive Path, and W3C invited expert on CSS before most of us knew the acronym;
• Khoi Vinh, design director at NYTimes.com, author of Subtraction.com, and former partner at Behavior LLC;

It’s great being here, and I love seeing everyone, but in all honesty I’m starting to think about leaving a day or three early.  I miss my wife and daughter.  A lot.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to apologize to anyone I inadvertently ignored, insulted, or misidentified on Friday.  I was dead tired, having had to get up at 3:30am to catch the first leg of my trip to Austin.  As I’m sure you know, when the alarm goes off at 3:30am, it isn’t ringing at the end of a full night’s sleep.  In my case, not even close.

So I spent yesterday in kind of a moderate-functioning daze, and kept mistaking people for other people.  Three times (that I know of) I put the wrong name to a face, and these are people I’ve known for a while.  Seriously, at one point I identified Brian Alvey as Aaron Gustafson.  After I introduced him to someone else as Aaron, I then proceeded to talk with him about what he’s been doing at AOL and about his house in the suburbs of New York City.  After he excused himself to go grab something to eat, someone asked me who it was, and I told them it was Aaron and that I worked with him on A List Apart.  I swear this all made perfect sense to me at the time.  There was absolutely no sense of mental discontinuity whatsoever.

It was only two hours later, when I ran into Aaron at the Big Bag pickup desk, that I realized what had happened.  What went through my head was pretty much, “Hey, you’re… not who I was talking to earlier.”

So if I did something like that to you, I’m really sorry.  I got a ton of sleep last night and am now back to my usual level of not being able to remember people’s names.

Some of you may recall that I prophesied, a few weeks back, that we’d sell out on February 28th—and so we did.  Go me.  I feel like a regular Edgar Cayce.