BarCampDC2 – October 18, 2008 – 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM

As you may have heard the registration for the for the BarCampDC2 event will open this evening (September 22, 2008) at around 8:00PM.

Here is some of the important information before registering you will need to know.

When

Saturday, October 18th, 2008, 8:00 AM6:00 PM

Where

Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University
1055 Thomas Jefferson Street NW
Washington, DC 20007

Please make sure to only register if you know for sure that you can make it, since space is limited to the first 180 – 190 people. Also at time of registration you must choose your t-shirt size. The shirts should be American Apparel as I have been told and we will have women’s and men’s shirt sizes. For us larger guys, like myself we are planning on having sizes up to 3XL.

The ONLY place to register for the BarCampDC2 event is at the EventBrite website. Putting your name on the BarCamp wiki will NOT get you a seat at this event. Currently we have panel suggestions and will be adding more stuff there as time gets closer.

We are planning to have the panels be 45 minutes long and then have 15 minutes between sessions to get to the next room or mix and mingle with other BarCamp participants. Some more information to keep in mind.

  • Registration at 8:00 AM – 8:45 AM (submit panel talks at this time to help move things along)
  • Welcome BarCampers at 8:45 AM – 9:30 AM
  • Panels – 10:00 AM -6:00 PM
  • Lunch – around 12:30 PM
  • Event Ends at 6:00 PM
  • Clean up 6:00 PM -7:00 PM
  • Bar hopping afterwards 7:30 PM

We are looking for a few people to help set up Friday night (Oct 17) from 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM (?). Along with others to help out with registration, handing out t-shirts, helping with food, people to monitor rooms that others are not bring in food or drinks into the rooms, lunch, clean up after, etc.

So if you want to help please e-mail me at jfciii [at] jfciii [dot] com or on direct message me on twitter – @jfc3.

If we have not contacted you about sponsoring part of the event (max $250) and you would like to please contact me. For your sponsorship you will get your name on the back to the t-shirt (if payment in t-shirts are sent to printing), plus like two minutes in front of one of the panels about you or your company.

Hope you all will enjoy the event that a bunch of us have been working really hard to pull off.

How to Set Up and Use Access Keys

Access keys allow people to use the keyboard instead of the mouse to perform certain functions. Mostly to move from page to page or a different section of the current pages content. By using web standards you can improve peoples use of your website.

Example HTML Code

The code involved to adding access keys to your website is very simple, you just have to add one extra piece of code to the links as shown below.

<li id=”about”><a href=”about.html” ACCESSKEY=”1″ tabindex=”300″>About</li>

Internet Explorer(IE), Firefox, Opera, and Safari each have their own way of using access keys. In most web browsers, the user uses the access key by pressing “ALT“ (on PC) or “CTRL“ (on MAC) simultaneously with the appropriate character on the keyboard.

The following are the different ways to use the access key function combinations broken by PC or MAC and then browser type.

PC

  • IE – press the “ALT“ key + access key and then press the “ENTER“ key to active the action.
  • Firefox 2.0“ALT“ + “SHIFT“ and access key.
  • Firefox 3.0“ALT“ + “SHIFT“ + access key and the“ENTER” key are required. I finally personally tested Firefox 3.o on Vista Basic and sometimes you need to hit “ENTER“ and other times you don’t. (UPDATED)
  • Opera – the user presses “SHIFT“ + “ESC“ followed by the access key (without “ALT“). Doing this will display the list of access keys over the current web page.

MAC

  • Firefox 2.0 -“CTRL“ + access key.
  • Firefox 3.0 – this has been changed so that the key combination only focuses on the link, “CTRL“ + access key and an “ENTER” is required after the access key combo. I have not personally tested Firefox 3.o as of yet.
  • Opera -“SHIFT“ + “ESC“ followed by the access key (without “ALT“). Doing this will display the list of access keys over the current web page.
  • Safari – “CNTL“ + access key.

Example Key Combinations

Here is an example of three access key combinations you can use for IE:

Text sizing buttons with Small (S), Medium (M), and Large (L) options.

  • ALT“ + “S“ to change to small text
  • ALT“ + “M“ to change to medium text
  • ALT“ + “L“ to change to large text
  • Finally you must click or press the “Enter “ button.

These key combinations are for IE on the PC and are used to set the text sizes that you want. You can make the text larger or smaller based on your preferences. This is what we have set up on my work website.

From some of the reading I have done I noticed that people that are creating mobile websites and applications, when doing so they are using just the numbers to make it easier for their users to navigate the website and application.

Please give these a try on your websites. I have access keys set up on my website, so please try using them with different browsers. If you have any issues please leave a comment.

Key Points Learned at PodCampDC 2008

This blog post about PodCampDC (April 20, 2008) is way over do. I noticed it in my work in progress post list. I had started the post a long time ago and decided I would still post the few items I had listed. That I after making them into full thought and not just a short scribble of a few words.

Below are the main points I took away from the day.

When creating a podcast you should have consistent branding and highlight the program or product not the people in podcast. That way if you ever have to get new people for the show it will be less likely to die.

Justin Thorp said “You should make stuff sharable across communities”. Meaning that if you have content you need to let others be able to get at it no matter the way or where they are.

It is very important to make sure to use the same name across communities (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, blog, Mixx, Digg, etc.) so people can easily find you. When new applications/websites start up make sure to get your use name and any other user names that you are know for so other can not grab them and then start bad mouthing you or your products.

I noticed during Aaron Brazell (Technosailor.com) and Geoff Livingston’s live podcast District of Corruption some people where getting hung up on names of websites and the like. Sometimes a website may start out as one thing and then morphed into what it is today. The real important piece is the content not the name.

There were a few things that I thought could have been better and they were? Not needing two locations, meaning that I saw no point in having to get to the Spectrum Theatre an hour early just to go over to the final location after about ten minutes of announcements. The other issue had to do with having multiple five plus rooms on three different floors and having to take the stairs to get to them.

Hope these points are useful even though they are like two months over do.

Finally My Notes from An Event Apart Chicago 2007

Finally got around to finishing up my post about the actual two days at the An Event Apart conference in Chicago on August 27 – 28, 2007. I had  a great time both at the conference and at the different gatherings each evening. I learned as much if not more at the evening events as I did during the day at the conference.

Please download all my notes, below is just an overview of some of the things I learned. The following is a summary of what happened by day ad speaker.

DAY – 1

The first speaker of the conference was Eric Meyer and his topic of discussion was “Secrets of a CSS Jedi“. He showed that you could use tables and CSS to create pages that end up displaying graphs. I had seen his earlier article about this and had worked on creating forms to allow you to enter the amounts and then put out the graphs. It is now time to work on this again, since Eric has changed the graphs from being pixel based to now be EMs based.

The next presenter was Jeffrey Zeldman and he talk3d about “Writing the User Interface“. His three big points were:

  1. Content is King.
  2. Design helps people read less.
  3. When people read less every word counts.

Next to speak was Jason Santa Maria on the topic of “Designing Your Way Out of a Paper Bag“. His main topics were:

  1. Branding.
  2. Layout.
  3. Hierarchy and focal Point.

Jason also recommended three different books during his talk.

  1. Thinking with Type” Ellen Lupton
  2. “Grid Systems (Raster Systeme)”
  3. Making and Breaking Grids“ – Timothy Samara

After Jason finished talking we had like an hour and a half  lunch break. The food was great and I ate way to much.

This made the first afternoon talk by Lou Rosenfeld (“Search Analytics for Fun and Profit“) a bit uncomfortable because I ate a great deal. Lou talked a lot about making sure you review your website search information to see what people are looking for and where they go once they have searched. You might be able to make a few changes to your website that will greatly improve peoples ability to find certain information. Here are a list of his points:

Querying you Queries and Getting Started

  1. Most frequent unique queries.
  2. Frequent queries retrieving quality results.
  3. Click through rates.
  4. Most frequently clicked results/query.
  5. Frequent queries with zero results.
  6. What are referrer pages for frequent queries.

You should look for what type of meta data people are looking for in their searches.

By typing “site:jfciii.com” into Google’s search box will give you search results from the website you put after the”site:“.

Next, Liz Danzico talked about “The Seven Lies of Information Architecture

  1. Navigation should be consistent between pages on a website give or take a little bit.
  2. Allow users may need to get to any part of the website at any given time or place.
  3. User experience must be seamless.
  4. Shorter is better.

Dan Cederholm – “Interface Design Juggling

He suggests starting with colors and use two colors or less. Meaning stay in the same color range just use different tones and hues. He sometimes just goes to Photoshop and starts dumping paint using the paint can.

Two add texture use noise filter.

Make sure you read “Web Design is 95% Typography“.

Get on mailing lists for type foundries.

  1. Hoefler & Frere-Jones
  2. myfonts.com
  3. veer.com

Dan was the final speaker for day 1.

DAY – 2

Jermey Keith – Adactio.com and ClearLeft.com

Presentation slides

Be Pure with how you write your code and do your work.

You need

  1. content
  2. structure
  3. presentation
  4. behavior
  5. HTML
  6. CSS

Be Vigilant and try not to put in extra stuff to your code or content.

To build an AJAX website first build a plain website and once working correctly then add in the AJAX.

Show where things were changed or updated when using AJAX. Look at 37 signals “Yellow Fade“.

Test early and test often.

Luke Wroblewski – “Best Practices for Form Design” – Yahoo

Why Forms Matter?

  1. They make money.
  2. Give access to communities.

Label Alignment depends on what you are doing.

  1. Top alignment is better for familiar data.
  2. Right alignment is better for more difficult data. It makes you think before answering the questions.
  3. Left alignment is better for unfamilar information.

Matteo Pemzo has a great article on “Eye Tracking Data“.

Group data on forms of like kinds together using fieldsets.

Take data user gives you and format it yourself. Only give error if completly incorrect.

Derek Featherstone – “Accessibility Lost in Translation” – Box of Chocolates and FutureAhead

Presentation slides

Create an accessible user experience.

Remember to use keyboard and mouse interaction.

Require fewer page refreshes.

Screen readers need “alt text”if there is none, it reads source attribute which can be very weird.

Size forms and everything in EMs to make it scale for even borders, padding, etc. this makes it better and does not break pages easily.

Submit button should be last in code order.

Eric Meyer – “The State of CSS in an IE7 World”

He talked about IE7 adding the followig items.

  • min-width, max-width, min-height, and max-height
  • Attribute selections
  • Child selector
  • :first child
  • Alpha channelin PNG images
  • they fixed FIXED Â

and  a whole lot of other things.

Jeffrey Zeldman- “Selling Design”

Jeffrey mentioned that you should have a process. Be calm and methodical.

Remind client each time you see them of what you talked about at the last meeting, phone call, or last week.

Learn to translate what they said into something you and they understand.

Sell design not pixels.

Last but not least was

Jim Coudal – “Dealing With the Both of You” – coudal.com

He talked about

  • You need a cool flash of insperation for your projects or websites.
  • Learn quickly and be curious.
  • Value taste over everything else.
  • Work with others and have adult conversations.

He also showed three movies that he and his cmpany made.

  1. Copy Goes Here
  2. Regrets I Have a Few – Hobbies
  3. Subway – Ad Agency video

Please download all my notes, below is just an overview of some of the things I learned. Hopefully they are helpful to you and anyone else yu pass them on to.