Posts in the Speaking Category

This morning’s panel seems to have gone well, although since I haven’t seen the audience feedback I’m basing that impression on the nice comments I got from people who talked to me afterward.  There was also a very low walkout rate during the session itself, which is always a good sign, especially in an audience as crowded as was ours.

At the Web Awards last night, where Dave Shea quite deservedly walked away with the Developer’s Resource and Best of Show awards for the CSS Zen Garden, Jennifer Neiderst Robbins‘ son Arlo got passed around between Jeff Veen, Anitra Pavka, and Steve Champeon.    It was kind of odd to watch somebody else’s child be subjected to a round of Pass The Baby, and fun to be able to watch the holders without having to worry so much about the baby.  (It’s a parent thing—when someone else is holding your baby, you watch the baby to see what it does.  And to make sure it doesn’t get dropped.)  Arlo never did make it over to me, but that’s okay.  I’d far rather hold Carolyn.  I miss her, and I miss Kat.

During the end-of-day sessions, Tantek delivered a short presentation on XFN during the panel titled “Ridiculously Easy Group Forming.”  Strangely, he was really the only one to directly talk about the easy part, although the Easy Journal portion of the panel did cover ways in which the service is easy.  The audience seemed quite interested in XFN, which was very cool.  Of course, Tantek did a great job of presenting the important core lessons of XFN in relation to social networking solutions; these were, in effect:

1. Tackle a small problem and solve it in a simple way.
2. Release the solution into the wild.
3. Watch adoption spread and tools multiply.

There were many good questions about the structure of XFN from the attendees, to the point that Tantek was afraid he’d hijacked the panel.  I told him that the audience asked about what interested them the most.  In the cheap swag department, Matt printed up stickers and badge inserts that were large versions of the “XFN Friendly” image to distribute, and I spotted several attendees’ badges marked as being friendly.

After the day’s sessions I headed to the “Long Live Webmokey!” party, where I proudly wore my Webmonkey toque and finally met some of the staff members (like Kristin and Evany) with whom I’d swapped many an e-mail back in the day.  When the smoke drove me out of doors, I spent some time chatting with Steve Champeon and Pableux Johnson, who congratulated me on Carolyn’s arrival and were curious to know why Kat and I wanted children.  Even though I’d already had to think about and answer that question last year, I realized I didn’t have any better answer for them than, “It was important to us.”

Feeling worn down, I took in an excellent Italian dinner at Carmelo’s with Molly, Christopher, and Anitra, and then retired to my room for the night.  Shortly thereafter, a thunderstorm swept in from the west, driving rain through the streets.  I spared a sympathetic thought for all the people trying to get from one of the numerous parties to another, and enjoyed the lighting flowing from cloud to cloud and silhouetting the Austin skyline.

[Sorry this update is tardy, but the internet access died on my floor of the hotel last night, and once I reached the conference cloud on Tuesday morning I was too busy saying goodbye to everyone to get online, so posting had to wait until I got home.]

• Friends Galore was published on Monday, March 15th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and XFN categories.
• There have been no replies.

So here I am in warm, sunny Austin, which has been chilly and rainy.  I actually don’t mind, as the weather is quite nice for the time of year, compared to back home.  I have similar reactions in San Francisco, which every November I’m there is chilly but feels great to me, so I’m walking around without a jacket while all the locals are complaining bitterly about how cold it is, and I scoff at them.  But anyway, SXSW04 is well underway and things are as crazy as expected.  We had a fun css-discuss / Webdesign-L / WaSP / W3C / random folks gathering at the Iron Cactus last night, and I finally got to meet SImon Willison.  Actually, I’ve been expanding my rel="met" roster quite a bit, so that’s cool.

So after that gathering, which was organized by James Craig, a bunch of us headed over to the party thrown by frog design.  Wow.  It was very loud, extraordinarily crowded, and had just the right amount of decadence.  There was this big screen on which they were projecting some kind of frog design promotional video, all quick cuts and rapid strobing and MTVesque everything, except it featured stuff on which they’d worked, including the iPod.  Then the video player crashed, and they had to reboot the system.  I got a picture with Tantek standing in front of the screen as it started up.    Thanks to the folks at frog design for giving us one of the funniest moments of the conference to date.  (This one’s for you, Scoble.)

When we entered the party, hostesses gave us little plastic cups with fake money in them.  Apparently you could gamble in the back, and with enough of this frog money could get little door prizes.  Or something.  I was amused by the fact that Tantek just walked around the party with a cup in his hand, and people kept stuffing their frog money into it.  He didn’t ask, didn’t say anything about the money one way or the other; he just kept being given more for no apparent reason.  Considering who employs him, that seemed somehow appropriate.

On Friday night I made a pilgramage to the throne of Lord British, or at least the temporary throne set up in Room 18AB of the Austin Convention Center.  Richard Garriott (whose works claimed many, many hours of my youth) and Warren Spector (ditto) talked about the current and future state of electronic gaming.  That was definitely enjoyable, as both men were good speakers and had just-different-enough views on the industry to make the session interesting.

I was encouraged to hear that they’re moving toward making online games less massively multiplayer, allowing people to find groups of friends and then let those groups continue playing without having to interact with the rest of the people online.  That sounds antisocial, but it’s actually more social than the current games.  I’ve avoided online games largely because I don’t want to have to deal with all the pre-teens killing my avatar and crowing about how I’ve been “0wnz0r3d.”  Sorry, kids, I have better things to do with my time.  If I could play interesting games with a restricted group of friends, though, I might be seriously tempted.  If Half-Life 2 comes out for Xbox with a good multiplayer component, that plus Halo 2 will probably be just about all she wrote.

• Austin City Events was published on Sunday, March 14th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.

So I’m on the book-signing schedule at SXSW04 as part of a five-person signature cage match that will last until only one person is left standing!  Er, or something.  Actually, I assume they’re going to kick us out of there by 1:15pm to clear enough space for all of Cory Doctorow‘s screaming fans.  But hey, if you have a book you want to have signed by any of us, bring it along.  I imagine you’ll also be able to buy Eric Meyer on CSS at the Borders booth where the signing will be held, as well as any of the other books listed.  This signing comes just fifteen minutes after the panel in which I’m participating, so it looks like I’ll have to dash from one to the other.

When they asked me if I was game for a book signing, I did recommend that they get copies of Eric Meyer on CSS because it seemed beyond scummy to have them stock up the first edition of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide when the second edition will be coming out within a week or two of the signing.  Hey, I’m lookin’ out for ya.  Now all I have to do is think up some witty phrases to inscribe.

(If you’re in the Austin area but aren’t going to be attending SXSW04, you can still drop by and heckle us for free by getting an iF! pass.)

In the past three weeks, I’ve tried to hack (with varying levels of success) XSLT, Perl, and JavaScript.  Since I’m no better than a middling-fair programmer in any of those languages, I suppose some confusion was inevitable, but it seems like it’s always XSLT that gets me.  Thankfully, Chriztian Steimeier provided a solution for my XSLT problem.  The way that templates get called and nest and interact with each other continues to befuddle me, but I hope that it will one day make a modicum of sense.

• Sign, Sign, Everywhere A Sign was published on Wednesday, March 10th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Books, Speaking, Writing, and XSLT categories.
• There have been no replies.

Off the road again: I’m back from User Interface 8, where a good time was (once more) had by all.  Especially me.  I don’t know exactly how I ended up with good-looking women in my lap so often, but I don’t think I’ll complain about it too much.  I have a huge collection of pictures that cry out to be shared, and a huge lack of time to assemble a gallery.  I could use iPhoto’s export-to-Web function, except I hate it.  I’ll have to dig up one of those cleaner plug-ins I’ve been hearing about and give it a whirl.

To catch up things that happened while I was away:

• A List Apart is back.  That in itself is cause for celebration, even if my article “Going To Print” no longer makes sense in the new template.  However, the real news from where I sit is the publication of “Sliding Doors of CSS” by the always brilliant and readable Douglas Bowman.  Check out the presentation, HTML source, and text-zooming robustness of this demonstration page from the article, and then read the article if you’re impressed—as I suspect you will be.  I’m seriously thinking about publishing a followup article to “Rounding Tab Corners” using Doug’s Sliding Doors technique, and comparing it to the techniques presented in the the original article.  Some have said that Doug built on my article, but that’s not true.  He came up with his approach independently, and if anything I’ll be building on his ideas, not the other way around.
• Russ Weakley published the Floatutorial, which “takes you through the basics of floating elements such as images, drop caps, next and back buttons, image galleries, inline lists and multi-column layouts.”  It does this with a simple yet powerful step-by-step approach that reminds me a bit of Eric Meyer on CSS, except it’s much more concise.  The Floatutorial joins the Listutorial in Russ’ oeuvre.
• The House of CSS (not to be confused with the House of Style) opened its doors, and the crowd went wild.  I like it.  Sure, it’s a whole lot of structural hacking to achieve a purely visual effect, but so what?  I didn’t think of it, and neither did you.  Or if you did, you didn’t bother to assemble it.  Chris Hester did, and he deserves recognition for the creativity and skills it took to do so.
• Apparently Microsoft’s recently started admitting that Longhorn will launch in 2006, as I predicted a few weeks ago.  A few people wrote to ask if I’m always so prescient.  The truth is, it didn’t take an oracle, a guru, or a clairvoyant to figure out that Longhorn was likely to be delayed by a year or more.  As I’ve been known to say every so often, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
• In a possibly related move, Microsoft has apparently decided to save time by releasing their critical-flaw fixes in groups, or what I’m going to start calling “patch batches.”  You know what to do, right?

For no apparent reason, I’ve had the song “Rhinestone Cowboy” stuck in my head all day.  Even a potent cocktail dosage of Ministry, Joe Boyd Vigil, Crystal Method, The Prodigy, and DJ Z-Trip has failed to dislodge it.  I’m starting to think that a power drill is my only hope.

• Roundup was published on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Speaking, and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

Right in the middle of the Iron Chef of Web Design presentations on Wednesday, a calm female voice announced over the public-address system, with quite a bit of volume, that due to a security situation the Moscone Center was to be evacuated.  As it turns out, the entire complex was being evacuated, not just the Moscone West building.  That’s a lot of people to dump on to the sidewalks of San Francisco all at once.  Fortunately, the hotel here has a WiFi network in the lobby, so I could check e-mail after all.

Dreamweaver MX 2004, and the rest of Studio MX 2004, has shipped and is available for download.  If you use Dreamweaver and you’re interested in CSS or stadndards-oriented design, it’s very likely worth the upgrade.  There’s a free 30-day trial, so you can always check it out if you aren’t sure.  You’ll get a chance to work with the templates I contributed and a design firm prettied up.  I spent some time talking with Macromedia folks while in San Francisco and was impressed anew by their interest in doing the right thing when it comes to standards.  These are folks who think about not just today’s Web, but the Web to come, and how they can best help authors get from here to there.  That’s a highly commendable perspective in a tool vendor.

• Released was published on Friday, September 12th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Speaking, and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

I wrapped up the three-day speaking and training session at Los Alamos National Laboratory yesterday, and it seemed to go really well.  This having been my first multi-day training session, I was a little bit nervous that I might have problems with pacing, but everything seemed to come together just fine.  The attendees certainly were positive about the material, and how much they learned.

Now I’m off to Albuquerque to catch a flight to San Francisco (by way of Houston) for Seybold.  I’ve been four days from home, and have another five before I return.  Kat and I talk at least twice a day, and it seems like every conversation begins and ends with, “I miss you.”

• …the Weird Get Going was published on Saturday, September 6th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Speaking, and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.

Today is my last day at AOL Time Warner.  In the end, my interests weren’t compatible with the positions available in the post-Netscape environment, so I decided to leave.  I won’t have any free time, though:  I’m proud to announce that I’m firing up my own consulting business!  I’ll be concentrating on the following:

• Advising clients on best practices in standards-oriented design
• Guidance through standards conversion projects
• CSS and HTML optimization for improved site performance
• Hands-on training in CSS and design techniques for groups of any size
• Help resolving design compatibility problems

As you can probably tell from the above points, I’ll be taking my passion for intelligently using Web standards and applying that passion to my work with clients.  More detailed information should be on the way soon, but the work I’m already doing has me too busy to set up the consulting site.  Here’s a sample of what’s on my plate:

• I’m working with a major and highly respected name in the industry on optimizing their site’s CSS and providing guidance for their future plans.
• I’ll be doing three days of CSS training at a major research facility in early September.
• Also in September, I’ll be chairing a conference track at Seybold San Francisco, one of the largest and oldest technical conferences in the United States.  In addition to the chair duties, I’ll also be delivering two presentations and sitting on two panels.
• This November, I’ll be in Las Vegas co-presenting a developer-centric CSS class at COMDEX.  The other presenter for this session will be Molly Holzschlag.

I have some other projects simmering as well, but that will do for a quick glimpse into this new venture.  Hopefully I’ll find some time in the next week to get the consulting site up and running.  In the meantime, if you’re interested in my services, please feel free to get in touch with me via my meyerweb e-mail address.  (And please, make the subject line really painfully obvious so I don’t accidentally throw your message away with all the spam I get!)

I may not be working for Netscape any more, but I’m still incredibly proud of the work done in my two-plus years there.  It was an honor and a joy to be a part of our team.  I wish the people still at AOLTW continued success in their fight to promote standards both inside and outside the company, and I truly hope we’ll have a chance to work together again in the future.

• Close One Door, Open Another was published on Thursday, July 31st, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Consulting, Personal, and Speaking categories.
• There have been no replies.

I wish I were in Seattle right now, hanging out with all the cool folks speaking at Web Design World.  Oh well, I guess one can’t be at every conference.  I also wish the WDW site didn’t use points to size their fonts, since that makes the text painfully tiny in some browsers, including one I use fairly often.  Oh well, I guess you can’t expect good Web design from every Web design conference’s Web site.

Hey, wait a minute.

Although I may not be in Seattle this year, I will be in Cambridge, MA this October for User Interface 8, and have added a note to that effect to my Speaking page.  On the latter page, you’ll find a registration code you can use to get a nice discount at UI8, and incidentally add a small bonus to my bank account.  We both come out ahead—what’s not to like?

I’ll also be at Seybold in early September, but I don’t have the details ready just yet.  Check back in a few days if you’re interested.

• Distant Speeches was published on Monday, July 28th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been no replies.