Tour de Frantic
Published 16 years, 6 months past
I am, as ever, woefully behind on posting. (Then again, maybe it’s not just me: Greg Hoy recently tweeted that it’s happening all over.) I still want to follow up on line-height: normal and also on a closely related topic that emerged in the comments. And I will. Eventually.
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.
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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.
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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!)
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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
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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.
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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.
Comments (9)
That event in Athens looks interesting, considering it is nearby. I’ve put in the request at work for permission to attend. Maybe I’ll see you there!
Have you ever consider planing any events like this outside US? I always hear about this events and I would love to be in one, but the chances of me going to US or you guys organizing any event in my country (Mexico) are very low, anyway best of luck.
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Bridget: that would be awesome! I’ll actually be driving down the morning of the conference (due to inescapable scheduling conflicts) and plan to stay through the following morning, so maybe we’ll get a chance to hang out in Athens. Which is the story of my life: I only get to hang out with fellow Clevelanders when I’m in other cities.
Juan: we’ve considered it, but honestly the European Union is a more likely spot for us if we do go abroad. Although I really, really like the sound of An Event Apart Acapulco.
Sunny: thanks for the link! I sort of suspected there had to be a plugin like that, and I appreciate the pointer. I’m pretty sure I’ve got all the pieces in place to do the upgrade; all I need now is to run a database backup and I should be all set.
I was hoping that Europe was ‘the opposite coast’ you were referring to.
I concur with Juan Zamudio, there are so many interesting events that simply don’t happen in other countries, such as Mexico in his case, or worst in Peru as my case, where there’s hardly any at all… I don’t know if its good business wise for you, but have you ever considered webcasting your event, or at least some of the central key conferences? I’m sure people would flock to see them on your site…!
I concur with the others in wondering when these Even Apart gigs stop becoming US-centric. For example, all those names you drop in the San Fran event…I know those people travel outside of the US for other conferences and such, so…
Europe is a likely place, at least at first, and since you have web pros from the tops of Norway to the the bottoms of Spain and Italy I would offer that the first location be somewhere in the middle of the pie. Why not Strasbourg, France. It’s small enough to make it easy to get around for the event and after socials (the tram system is stupid easy and efficient), and large enough to be very interesting to first-timers. The latter is part of the magic too because I’ll bet a lot of people, even Europeans, don’t make it to Strasbourg.
Another good bet would be Brussels, Belgium, but then, like any big European city, you’ve just made inner-city commuting 100 times more difficult.
Regardless of where, the real point is when?
In theory, we’d absolutely love to bring AEA to other countries. In practice, there are a lot of obstacles to overcome to make it happen. Not all of them are obvious before you really get serious about the idea.
So I can’t say when—or, to be completely honest, even if—we’ll have events outside the US. I’d like to do so. Jeffrey would like to do so. But then there a lot of things we’d like to do that can’t or won’t happen for any number of reasons.
Sorry if I sound overly pessimistic, but I’ve made statements of intent in the past on this subject, and every single one of them has not come to pass. I’m just glad I didn’t make any actual promises, because I was hyper-opposed to breaking promises even before I became a parent.
You’re certainly right, much harder done than said by the likes of me.