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.
I’m currently at home in Buffalo, NY at my parents to celebrate the 4th of July holiday with my family. After driving almost 9 hours Thursday to get here I spent time with a few friends, my god son, and my parents.
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. Most 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.
I can’t believe life has been so busy that I have not blogged in over a month and a half. Okay, some it was procrastinating on getting things done.
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.
Ok, we are now heading into the busy part of SXSW, that is if there is a slow part at all from the time you get there until you leave days later.
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”:
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:
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.
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.
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:
The “Secrets of JavaScript Libararies” panel was cool, since it seemed to have all the people that started the different big JavaScript libraries.
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.
