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I know, I know, I haven’t posted anything in the aftermath of AEA-NYC. Things have been a little busy on the homefront (new roof, kitchen remodelling and the firing of a lazy, lying contractor) and since moving into the new office, I haven’t really felt much like bringing my laptop up to blog in the evening (instead choosing to enjoy spending my time with Kelly). Sorry.

To create a nice triumvirate of excuses, I’ll toss in this one too: I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time off-line, working on a chapter for an as-yet unannounced web standards book (more on that soon) in addition to plying my technical editing skills to the latest edition (3rd, I believe) of Jen’s Learning Web Design (note: the link still goes to the 2nd edition) and Andy’s Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design.

Anyway, so, An Event Apart…
I had such a great time at this conference. Not only was it a pleasure to speak at, but I met some awesome folks and got to spend more time with Jeffrey, Eric, Jason, Khoi, Tantek, and Rob. It was also great to spend more time with (Dr.) Kat and Carolyn (Eric’s family) and to finally meet Carrie and Ava (Jeffrey’s family) and Liz (Jason’s bride). I also got to hang out a bit more with Dan & Jon (both formerly of Pixelworthy). They are two truly fantastic gents and they played their roles as the AEA go-fers/whipping boys with gusto. Seriously, these guys rock. From purely a social aspect, AEA was fantastic; like an intimate SXSW.

As for the sessions, I thought they were incredible. I thoroughly enjoyed all of Jeffrey’s talks. He is such a great speaker, capable of moving an audience with even the simplest turn of phrase. It was nice to finally see Eric giving a CSS talk too. I’ve only seen him talk microformats (at SXSWi 2005) and general web standards stuff relating to search (on one of my panels at SXSWi 2006). I was delighted to find that he and I tackle layout problems very much the same way… making my methods not seem quite so mad. “Stan” was also a fantastic solo act (I’ve only seen him on panels) and he walked us through how the ALA redesign came to be. Being that I came on board just after the relaunch, it was nice to get some of the backstory.

The guest speakers were also a lot of fun to listen to. ze frank had me in tears I was laughing so hard and I had no idea just how much work Khoi puts into blogging and other non-NYT-related activities. It’s amazing he gets any sleep at all. Tantek’s microformats talk was also good because it helped amalgamate a lot of the disperate (and not always clear) information available on microformats into something usable, allowing me to take it beyond the simple hcard and hcal stuff I’ve been using for the last couple months.

I also thought the design and code critiques were excellent. The design one could have been a little more hmm, how to put this… aggressive? But design is such a subjective area, it’s hard to critique without some semblance of a creative brief or at least an understanding of the audience. Eric, Tantek and I were a little less forgiving in the code critique, but I think we brought up some really important points and kept it educational for everyone. Tantek’s got a nice write-up of the proceedings over at his site.

In all, I had a great time at An Event Apart. You may be thinking sure, but you were a speaker, but I am positive I would have enjoyed it equally as much as an attendee. There were great people, great talks and the food was fantastic.

If you feel so inclined, you can check out my photostream from the event as well as the AEA-NYC group photos over at Flickr.

Sorry for the sparseness of posts lately, but there’s been a lot going on for me, personally and professionally. All will be revealed in due time. Before any rumors fester into fact: no, I’m not going to Google and Kelly is not pregnant.

Anyway, if you want to catch up with me it looks like I’ll be speding a good amount of time in “the city” (New York, natch) this summer. Here are a few places you can find me:

July 4th - Belle and Sebastian @ Battery Park

What a way to spend the 4th, if I can get tickets of course.

July 6th - Jeremy Keith on DOM Scripting and AJAX @ Digital Sandbox

Mr. Keith is making the trek across the pond to school us Yanks on how to work some DOM magic. This has all the makings of a great workshop… I’m really looking forward to it.

July 10-11 - An Event Apart @ Scandinavia House

An Event Apart had to expand to two days to accomodate all the talent: Zeldman, Meyer, Santa Maria, Vihn, Çelik, and now zefrank. If I wasn’t also on the bill, I’d still be going.

July 28 - Editors @ Irving Plaza

I missed the presale tix on this one, but I’m gonna keep an eye on eBay.

August 10 - RJD2 & Lyrics Born @ Pier 54

Two of my favorite hip-hop artists on one stage… and it’s free!

SXSW has released their “Honor Roll” for 2006 and “How to Bluff Your Way in DOM Scripting” managed to make it pretty darn close to the top. I had no idea there was such a thing, but apparently audience feedback is tallied and the sessions are graded and then ranked. I’m pretty proud of our 4.69 “GPA” too — it put us solidly in the Top 10. The two other sessions I participated in (“Web Standards & Search Engines” and “Web Standards & SEO”) also garnered some respectable scores (4.01 and 4.06 respectively) and made the list.

My co-presenters/panelists all did an incredible job (Andy, Ed, Eric, Jeremy, Molly, Peter, and Tim: my hat is off to you), but my greatest thanks goes out to everyone who took the time not only to to come to our sessions, but to provide us with feedback on them as well.

The feedback provided by an audience is invaluable. I know it’s sometimes annoying to fill out those comment cards (especially when you’re racing to get a seat at the next session), but it is those very comment card that help us hone our skills as speakers/presenters/teachers. Your feedback is what makes us better the next time around. Seriously, it means a lot — evenespecially criticism.

When developing a session, you write the description to capture the essence of the talk and (hopefully) set expectations for the depth and breadth of coverage, but you’re never sure just how that will be interpreted by attendees. The only way you can know how successful you were at planning, describing and giving the presentation is by receiving audience feedback. That’s why it is so crucial.

To me, a session is a success when the majority of the feedback tells me

1. I didn’t lose anybody, and
2. people learned something.

But it’s hard to strike that balance too. You never really know the audience’s comfort level, especially on the more technical or programming-related topics. That said, you do know you’ve hit the mark (at least for most people) when you receive feedback like this:

Great breakdown of concepts…

…interesting to even an experienced DOM coder

Broke down things to a real level…

…well organized and not so deep that beginners would get lost

Great/useable content that we can take back to the office.

I’ve learned something useful today!

Thank you very much for all of your feedback and please keep on commenting.

I just got the best comment spam ever:

I’m very, very impressed that this sort of work is being done; Web Design is getting stagnant with people using just styled block-level elements to produce artwork. The incorporation of SVG into sites excites me a lot.

How long do you expect it will take for this sort of technology to be widespread?

Obviously you can only speak about WebKit realistically, but if it’s going to take ten years for IE Win to gain (full) support, we can’t design with it.

I’m amused by the “Becoming more important” line in the first paragraph. This has been a HUGE problem for years - ever since HTML-2.0 was introduced to be more of a layout language and less of a markup language. For an example, you just have to look at this site sex partners [link removed -ed.]. Why is all the text crammed over on the left side of the page with a big blank space on the right side?

Why is the default font tiny and unreadable? Fortunately most browsers now let you override the latter problem.

It is a little disjointed, but the fact that it mentions “block-level elements,” SVG, WebKit and (of course) “sex partners” is hysterical. Someone’s been paying attention in my training sessions.

That’s right, I’m coming to NYC to join Jeffrey, Eric, “Stan”, Khoi & Adam to deliver An Event Apart in its new 2-day format. It’s gonna be a blast and I’m incredibly honored that I was invited to join in the fun. I’ll be dropping a few teasers between now and July on what I’ll be talking about, but it’s gonna rock your socks off… At least I hope so.

Anyway, you can read the official teaser over at the AEA site.