Umamiblog

There are Apple’s EVERYWHERE!

Apparently geeks like these a lot, too!

Web standards, and why you should care.

Not a very good presenter, didn’t really offer any real reasons as to why we should care. The guy introducing her did a better job in 30 seconds… The only real reason offered was that your site will rank higher in search engines.

Maybe its just symptomatic of how far we’ve advanced that argument in Wellington. We’ve already dealt with these questions and issues with GWAGs – it’s old news. We’re looking for how we can take it that step further whereas Dori was still telling us to close all our <p> tags.

This session saw 8 speakers with 5 mins each, the highlights:

Philip from Shift: Rapidly prototype with Flash. Its easier, and more agile than in HTML.

Rachel from Heliocell: .NET *can* be used successfully for standards based apps. Communication is key.

Michael from Ruby on Rails core team: Full stack, convention over configuration. Happier developers

Robin from Acease: all of the info for all of the people all of the time.

Mark from Searchbots.net: Cool idea, check it out.

Steve from Abstract Engineerng: Centruflow – visualisation of team structure.

Theresa from Focus (Melbourne): Excellent speaker. Good design is elegant problem solving.

Sideshow Bob from Provoke: The times on the web are a changin;

Darren is a blind user from Australia, gave an excellent presentation showing the audience what is it like to navigate and use websites with a screenreader. An example website, one that he needed to use for his work had 70 down arrow keys just to get to the content of the website.

“No such thing as skim listening…”

“So what I normally do is leave”

“The day that the Sydney Morning Herald went online it enabled me to read the newspaper independently for the first time ever.”

One of the interesting points that was brought up was that we shouldn’t really need text-only versions of websites if the main site has been designed/developed well. It is just a duplicate.

There are also unseen benefits of making things accessible. Sydney Buses, we’re forced to be made accessible. Side benefit is that now all people are able to get on and off the buses even quicker – and that benefits everyone. I guess it’s emergence.

Joel Spolsky from Fogcreek Software, an excellent presenter who engaged the entire audience with humour . Talked about blue chip vs the off brand, iPod vs Creative, Angelina Jolie vs Sandra Bollock.

The key is to make people happy. Often the computer is deciding what you do, not the other way around. How does that impact on our emotions and feelings if we are not in control of the experience? Compare the checkout process on Abercrombie vs Amazon. Abercrombie where you must go through their process in a specific order and way. Amazon, where you can change things when you want, where you want in the checkout process.

Think about emotions!
Why do people feel safer in a SUV rather than a Camry even though they are twice as likely to die in a SUV?

Obsess over aesthetics! Style over comfort.
Why can Apple charge about 70% more for a product with less features. You can’t even change the battery.

Lipstick vs guts.
“The world is monumentally superficial”

Focus on happy comfortable people, not Java vs .NET.

JD doing a stellar job.

There are Threadless tshirts EVERYWHERE.

Apparently geeks like them, alot.

Doug Bowman of Stop Design talked to us on Common Structure. There is very little reuse on the web, we are constantly reinventing the wheel. Over and over again. Yet there are some common patterns. That might be with websites (blog, wiki, etc) or what they are used for (support, document list) of page patterns (contact, archive) or module patterns (header, footer, blogroll) etc.

We need to ask, seek, and document. There has been research into these patterns and whether they actually exist. 90% of sites use the id ‘footer’. Everything else is repeated, but no where near the same level.

You can approach patterns from the top down (page patterns and modules), or the bottom up (XHTML, microformats, etc) but there is still a gap where the two meet. Two types of grouping is proposed, to identify and to classify. We need to start simple, identify those common patterns, and reuse popular taconomy (footer, etc) and enable participation on a global level.

There is a hidden deep web that is HUGE. But missing out of the benefits that could be attained here.

Allowing users more (yes more!) control. Scary… but the “web is the web”. Nice.

Mike Brown from Web Standards NZ opened the conference stating that the web is at a crossroads now and we have the opportunity to exact real and positive change. That the key of this conference is to come away inspired.

Tim Berners-Lee has been asked to attend but couldn’t make it. Instead he sent a video message. Nice.

Registration went smoothly, heaps of goodies including tshirt, bag, and even chit-chats…

It appears that the organisers wanted to start at 8:30 but didn’t ask people to register before then. So we are running a little behind already.

The Clean’s Anything Could Happen is blaring in the background. Hopefully that means we’re about to get started.

Mmmmm, the porridge was good – so was the coffee. A little early for most of the team but the fuel will be needed for the day ahead.

This Thursday and Friday Wellington sees the inaugural Webstock Web Conference. The workshops are running over the Tuesday and Wednesday before the conference and include some big names of the web world. The stated aim of the conference is: “to improve how websites are built through inspiration, education, insightful analysis and practical application.” Personally I think I’m looking forward to Kathy Sierra and Doug Bowman the most.

It has been interesting listening to comments friends and contacts have made about the conference. I’ve felt that Wellington is very lucky to be the first city in NZ to host a major web conference. I pushed work early to support the conference and was really happy to see that happen. A programmer I used to work with in Dunedin was very excited about the conference and was sharing half the costs with his employer just to make it up. That contrasts with another person I know whose employer decided it was just too expensive to send anyone along. That’s definitely their decision to make but I can’t help but feel that its somewhat short-sighted. The real cost is probably in time lost (well, time that could’ve been spent on billable work :D) rather than the cash cost of the conference (which can be expensed anyway…).

Work is sending me along as well as almost all of my team. Nice. Be sure to check out our stall at the conference in the Ilott Theatre foyer. We’re going to be running a little competition that includes these cool little remote controlled fork lifts, you’ll have to maneuver it through a course with the fastest 2 times picking up a rugby ball signed by the NZ Rugby 7′s team. We were one of the first companies to jump on board and sponsor Webstock and we’re helping bring out Joel Spolsky for breakfast (really!).

I’m using the conference as a chance to experiment with semi-live publishing. Wifi access at the town hall is being kindly provided by Signify so my plan is to bring the laptop and camera along and see what I can accomplish or post in that time. Mind you, home is only about 300 metres away from the conference center so it’s not really an issue if the place has internet access or not.

I do have to question the choice of slogan; “Code for freedom”. Really? I guess they’re webbies rather than marketers but it doesn’t scream lovemark to me. Registrations are still open if anyone still wants to come along. That does say to me that they haven’t been able to get near selling-out but I hope it’s close. This year is definitely the test case, if it is successful then this should become a permanent fixture. Knowing the fickle nature of New Zealand and the support of new ideas and events, we won’t know until just after the conference starts as to whether or not it will fly or sink.

There is a blog and a flickr feed for the conference.