We managed to sell out the first set of tickets in about 36 hours, by just using twitter, a few blog posts, and a lot of word of mouth with probably some e-mails sent to friends and co-workers that they should sign up soon.

The even more amazing thing is we have have like 30 local individuals, big companies, and even a few start-ups willing to sponsor the event. They all chipped in a little bit here and some more over there so that you all could come to the event and not have to pay for anything. There are even a few people that are sponsors and will be out of town the day of the event, that’s how much they care about the DC geek community. Here is the list of sponsors we have now, I will update the list as we add more sponsors.

• 1Piazza
• Americans United for Separation of Church and State
• Ask500People
• AwayFind
• BlackMesh
• CaseySoftware, LLC
• Collective Detective
• Contribune
• Design Reinvented
• FriendCompare
• Intridea
• IntroIn
• iStrategyLabs
• Iterative Designs
• Jess3
• Jobmatchbox.com
• John F Croston III
• Jounce
• Leslie Bradshaw
• Matt Bowen
• Network Solutions
• OpenHost
• PotomacTechWire
• ShareMeme
• Siteworx
• Viget Labs
• We Love DC
• Wondermill Webworks
• Yut Media, Inc.
• Zmanda
• Zvi Band

By them making donations you will get to have a continental style breakfast, lunch, snacks and drinks during the day, and a free t-shirt to commemorate the event.

Who knows we might have some extra money left for drink or food after. Not making any promises I have nothing to do with the money except making my contribution.

I would like to thank the following people for their great help so far, Justin Thorp, Shaun Farrell, Peter Corbett, Keith Casey, and others that have here and there.

The final great big thanks you has to go to CDIA Boston University and Bill Chenaille and the schools staff for lending us this great space to have the event in.

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

When

Saturday, October 18th, 2008, 8:00 AM – 6:00 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 Appreal as I have been told and we will have womens and mens 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.

When creating a FORM you should not make all fields required. By doing that nothing stands out to the person filling in your very important FORM. If most fields are required you should state at the top of the FORM or in the directions the fields that are NOT required.

Instead of just placing an asterisks after either the LABEL or the INPUT field in a FORM for a required field as most people do. You can actually place the word “Required” within the LABEL. Of course your using LABELs for your FORMS, along with FIELDSETs and LEGENDs.

Here is how to accomplish this for a web FORM and it can be easily accomplished by using a little CSS to hide the text that a field is “Required” to be filled in. The way to do this, that I use is to make it part your input fields LABEL. Here is an example of a few lines of code on how the code might look.

<label for=“username”><em>Required<em>User Name</label>

To hide the word “Required“ you will be able to use the same CSS used for hiding “SKIP NAVIGATION” by adding a new class or stating that LABELs with an “EM“ in them will be displayed.hidden off the page.

Reminder please do not use “DISPLAY: NONE” in your CSS, since screen readers will not see it. Below is the CSS to visually hide the word “Required” from browsers.

.skip a, .skip a:hover, .skip a:visited, label em {
position: absolute;
left: 0px;
top: -500px;
width: 1px;
height: 1px;
overflow: hidden;
}

As you can see the CSS positions the link absolutely with a position of “LEFT” zero pixels and a “TOP” position of negative 500 pixels. This will allow screen readers, Blackberries, Treos, etc. to see it but not browsers. That is as long as their CSS in turned on.

You can also place extra notes or instructions for a field inside the INPUT field with lighter text that is that will not go away once you start typing in the field. This can be done by using more CSS. Below is the XHTML code to accomplish this.

<label for=“username”><em>Required<em>User Name<strong>must not contain spaces<strong></label>

<input type=“text” name=“username” id=“username” size=“25” maxlength=“50” value=”” />

The CSS to do this is fairly simple and follows below.

label strong {
color: #aaa;
font-size: .85em;
font-style: normal;
position: absolute;
top: 0;
right: -275px;}

Here is what the CSS is doing for the extra notes and instructions. It is first taking any STRONG elements within the LABEL and making it light gray color, the FONT-SIZE smaller and normal weight. After that it is absolutely positioned at the top left of the INPUT FORM field, as long as the LABEL is left or right justified to it and finally placing the information negative 275 pixels from the right of the beginning of the INPUT field.

dont’ forget to listen to your FORMs by using the Firefox extension Fire Vox. Here is an example how placing extra notes or instructions would look in a FORM, along with some “Required” field examples.

I hope this post is useful and further explains how to hide visual the word “Required” from my Accessibility presentation “Is your Website Accessible?”, please look for the most current presentation closer to the top of the list.

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.shtml” 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:

• “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.

Right now we are still looking for a venue and sponsors. We are trying to schedule it for either September and October.

I will keep you posted when we have more information and have a firm date.

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.

Today is going to be spent with a few one of my brothers, his wife, and three boys (Denver, CO), along with one of my sisters, her husband, and three boys (Columbus, OH). Relaxing and getting ready for the big party on Saturday, which includes my other sister, her husband, and two girls (Buffalo, NY), along with my other brother (Buffalo, NY), two aunts and uncles (Rochester, NY) and a bunch of their kids and grand kids (Rochester, NY and Centreville, VA).

Today should be filled with a seeing how much all my nieces and nephews have grown over the last year, since I have seen most of them. Mostly time will be spent playing hockey in the driveway, swimming in the pool, and a whole lot of cards. We are more of a gin and euchre type of crowd. Even my almost 13 year old (in less than two weeks) and his 10 (?) brother have been playing for a few years and are fairly good last time we played.

The big crowd of 34 people does not get to my parents until Saturday around 1:00 PM. At that time there will 20 adults, if you count me and a few of the others that act like kids most days and then 14 children that are 13 and under. Mos are in the 4 to 8 year old range. It should be a nice quite affair at my parents.

Hope you all have a a great 4th of July and drive safely if traveling.

Please leave a message of your plans or what you end up doing for the holiday.

First it was work being busy trying to get a bunch of stuff done and into production, then it was preparing slides for the 2008 DC PHP Conference. After that it was helping get ready for my friends 28th annual pig roast in Cabin John the same week that I was speaking at the DC PHP conference.

I worked Saturday (May 31) doing yard work for pig roast, then Sunday was getting a few things done around the house before meeting about a dozen DC PHP conference goers out for drinks and food Sunday night. Monday, Tuesday (day of my talk), and Wednesday I was at the conference and then the after conference gatherings. You would think not being in the office would be less tiring.

While at the DC PHP conference I talked about tips, tricks, and practical ways to make your website more accessible. I met a bunch of really cool people such as Tony Bibbs, Mike Tutty, Eli White, Ben Ramsey, and many others.

Thursday was my one day back at the office to catch up on e-mail and anything that needed being done. Friday I was off doing more work for the pig roast.Saturday was the big day at pig roast and it felt like a million degrees that day. That was probably do to the fact that even though I was at the party, a few of us including myself still had to work by picking up trash bag etc. during the day.

One of the hardest parts of pig roast is getting myself and others back to friends early Sunday morning (to beat heat and get it over with) to do all clean-up and putting away of all the stuff needed to put on a party for 500 -600 (only 300 - 400 this year because of the extreme heat).

It took a few days to recover from the heat and work related to the pig roast. Now it’s time to get back on track and work on finishing up my couple of web applications in ASP (current language I know to prototype in), start learning PHP so I can convert them into something my web host allows.

It’s off to do house cleaning, laundry, sorting and dumping (Goodwill and trash) and then yard work once it gets cooler, sometime around dinner time. This might take a few days to get done, but it needs to be completed.

Hope to do more blogging, since I have about a dozen different posts started, in need of just a bit of editing, or just titles listed for subjects I want to talk about.

Is it just me or are others blogging less, since using twitter? I feel by using twitter I can get my points across on some subjects but others require a full post to explain all the technical stuff required.

Sunday - (2008/03/09)

Managed to get up and make to see Rob Weychert and Jason Santa Maria do their talk on “Everyone is a Design Critic“. They had a few main point to be made. the first is that a critique should be broken up into three parts. The parts are before, during, and after the presentation of your ideas.

The other main point was the “Top 5 Client Requests”:

1. My unqualified friend has a different idea.
2. Purple is my favorite color, why don’t you use it?
3. We need more stuff above the fold. (People do scroll now.)
4. There’s so much empty space, can’t you fit it in?
5. Cant’ you make the logo bigger?

One of the most interesting points was when Rob realized that they were being displayed on the two big screens. So while Stan was talking he just started dancing around behind him.

One of the best presentations that I saw was the next one by Derek Featherstone. His talk was titled “Everything I learned about Accessibility I learned from Star Wars“.

Before Derek started his presentation he came on stage wearing all black with a brown hooded cape. While setting up he turned “Mac Saber” on his laptop, which now made it sound like a Star Wars light saber. By using the MacBooks built in gyroscope yo can pick it up and make it sound as if you had a really light saber in your hands. Ok, now on to his talk.

A few keep points are:

• “You think you know everything and others know more”.
• “Storm Troopers are all the same”. Real life things are different.
• “No, matter what you can see on the surface does not matter to what is underneath”. I think what pretty stuff your page has does not matter as long as your code under the pretty is accessible.
• “Living people is what matters not validators or screen readers”.
• “Pass on what we learn to others to channel the FORCE”.
• “You have to believe it can be done”.
• “Do or Do Not there is No try”. - Yoda
• “I don’t believe it, that is why you fail”. - Yoda

The other amazing part of his presentation were the digital Star Wars drawings by Aton Peck.

Went to an internationalization talk by Stephanie Troeth and Stephanie Booth. This was one of those core talks that they added this year. It was interesting and I learned a few things about how to internationalize websites. It was more a discussion between them and the audience of about 25 around one table.

The final big event of Sunday was the “Geeks Love Bowling” event put on by the nclud guys and real hard work of Cindy Li. Cindy and the nclud crew were able to in a few short weeks get enough sponsors to be able to rent out all 52 lanes at the bowling alley and get buses to transport all the people and a bunch of peole that just wanted to watch. On top of all that they had prizes for all the top bowlers for each team and the top three winning teams. The prizes were free copies of the new 2008 Mac Office suite.

The Refresh DC team I was on did not do to badly. I believe we finished in like 14th place we needed only 4 more pins to come in 12th place. Maybe next year we will do better, not that it matters, since we out to have lot of fun and meet new people. We shared a lane with an all woman team from England. I believe most of them had never bowled before. Fun was had by all.

After bowling a lot of people went out and I decided with a few other the Brits and others to go back to the Hapmton Inn and sit in the second floor lounge and talk. it was great time to be able to relax with Cindy, the Matt Harris, John Hicks, Richard Rutter, Anton Peck, and others.

Monday - (2008/03/10)

I attended a few different panels that I normally might not go to see. The first was “Scalability Boot Camp“, were they talked about make sure to monitor your system early and often. That is everything from Disk I/O, memory, and bandwidth.

Another one was the”Design Eye by South By” where they went over how they would re-design the SXSW website to make it better and more usable. What they talked about and showed was really nice, but the build up was to much for what they showed.

Attended the Annual public WASP meeting. Very interesting to see what they are up to and planning on doing in the future.

It was out for the “Great British Booze Off” and the “NXSW” party. I like the Brits party a great deal and had a wonderful time meeting a lot of new people and meeting up with others I had met last year or earlier this year.

Tuesday - (2008/03/11)

I went to a bunch of panels I normally would not have. I first went to the “How to RAWK SXSW and Stay Inspired“. A few key points from this panel was to:

• Go through businees cards on plan.
• No, idea is to silly.
• Read “Cluetrain Manifesto” - cluetrain.com
• Look for other ideas, etc. at aftersxsw.pbwiki.com - Password - POPRAWKS

The “Secrets of JavaScript Libararies” panel was cool, since it seemed to have all the people that started the different big JavaScript libraries.

• John Resig - jQuery - (ejohn.org)
• Sam Stephenson - Prototype - (conio.net)
• Alex Russell - Dojo - (alex.dojotoolkit.org)
• Thomas Fuchs - script.aculo.us - (script.aculo.us/thomas/
• Andrew Dupont - Prototype - (andrewdupont.net)

The main thing that was said was before picking one of the main JavaScript libraries is to figure out hwat you need them for. Each different one has strengths and weaknesses.

At another panel a cool thing I saw on the person in the row in front of me was a photo application. After the panel I asked him what it was and he said it was PicLens (Firefox plug-in). The following is the description of PicLens from the plug-in page - instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen 3D experience for viewing images across the web.

There was a bunch more stuff that happened during these six great days in Austin, TX. I hope to get to the full set of notes I took in the next few weeks.

Any further explanations or questions please leave a comment.

The first two days follow with the other four days to follow in two more posts with two days in each. Finally, the notes from all the different talks will be posted once I get them typed up in about two weeks.

Thursday - (2008/03/06)

Arrived in Austin around 12:30 PM. got luggage and stopped at the information booth to find out where to pick up the fifty cent bus (Route 100). It stops at 6th Street and Brazos, which is one block back and then down like 4 or 5 blocks to the Hampton Inn.

I grabbed a chicken burrito at the Taco Shack on the way to the hotel. When I got to hotel I was able to check in and then grabbed my laptop and wnet downstairs to the second floor lounge, to eat and check e-mail and twitter. Sat around and visited with people as they got into the hotel.

Went to dinner with 20+ people to Moonshine. Had a very nice dinner of flat iron steak with mac and cheese. Left Moonshine to head over to Buffalo Billiards. On the way there we were all walking along and there were two people ahead of me walking along the curb. I was turned to my right talking with someone when the two people in front of me parted. When this happened Patrick Haney yell “Look out!” at which point I turned back to him first and then forward again at which point I walked straight into a parking meter. This made a great thud as my rib cage hit it. Everything was okay, just a little sore. It was nice that everyone checked to see if I was okay before letting a a bit a laugh. It was funny, at least from my point of view and I’m the one that hit the parking meter.

Spent a bunch of time at Buffalo Billiards talking with people I met last year and to new people I just met. I even watched and listened to some great karaoke upstairs.

Friday - (2008/03/07)

Slept into until like 8:00 AM and went downstairs for breakfast. It was nice seeing even more people that I had missed the day before. Later in the morning I headed over to the Austin Convention Center. It took about 25 to 30 minutes to walk over get my badge, grab the big bag of stuff, and then back to the hotel. Once I got back to the hotel I got rid of at least 85% to 90% of the stuff in the bag. I wanted to keep the bag so I could use it for grocery shopping back home.

After all that was done I started working on loading up Parallels on my 13″ White MacBook, since the weather was a bit cold and over cast and it was something I needed to do. I got it loaded pretty easily. Once that was done I worked on getting XP Pro installed. Once XP Pro was installed I spent a good half hour to forty-five minutes downloading and installing like 90 plus patches and fixes to the software.

Around 2 or 3 PM met up with a bunch of DC people and headed to convention center to go see “Respect!” with mostly people from the Happy Cog team. But first we ended up catching the second part of How to Rawk SXSW: The Basics presentation.

After the talk was over went back to hotel to drop off stuff and then headed over to the Iron Works for dinner. I got the mixed meat platter, which came with a smoked sausage, smoked beef brisket, smoked beef rib, and some pork BBQ. If that was not enough the platter had potato salad, beans, and a slice of plain white bread. Great dinner and the perfect satrt to getting back into BBQ after years of being a vegetarian.

After Iron Works I can;t remember what I did. I think I called it an early night and went back to hotel and checked  e-mail and twitter.

Tell me what you did on the first two days of SXSW 2008 or any of the days.