in case you haven’t found it here is a list of all the events going on after hours at SXSW.
My SXSW trip
SXSW is just around the corner and to get the most out of you need to be well organized. I was hoping to hoping to skill most of the big named presenters since I have read so much about past panels with them. In general it's funny that the panels that are most popular and have really made me want to go to SXSW are the ones I want to avoid. This is an expensive trip and I really want to get the most out of it instead of hear Tantek talk about micro formats again, which at this point I think I have a good grasp on.
After the 3 day AIGA conference I was exhausted. I can't wait to see how I'm going to go to a conference all day and then, hopefully make it to some events at night for 4 days in a row.
Saturday
10:00 am • Beyond Folksonomies: Knitting Tag Clouds for Grandma
11:30 am • How to Be A Web Design Superhero
2:00 pm • Jim Coudal / Jason Fried Opening Remarks
3:30 pm • How to Increase Creativity at Work
5:00 pm • Starting Small: Web Businesses for the Rest of Us
Sunday
10:00 am • Sink or Swim: The Five Most Important Startup Decisions
11:00 am • Meet Judy Jetson: How Technology is Transforming 21st Century Teens
2:00 pm • Keynote Conversation: Heather Armstrong / Jason Kottke
3:30 pm • Running Your New Media Business
5:00 pm • Holistic Web Design: Finding the Creative Balance in Multi-Disciplined Teams
--This one is rather star studded and I will need to make sure to get there early.
Monday
10:00 am • CSS Problem Solving
11:30 am • Standard Deviation: Hacks and Dirty Tricks for the Web
2:00 pm • Craig Newmark Keynote Interview
3:30 pm • Designing for Community with 'Zero-Advertising' Brands
3:30 pm • Creative Subplot: The Viral Edition
--clearly I'll have to pick one but I might wait till the last minute to really pick which it will be.
5:00 pm • Design Eye for the List Guy
--I might want a backup for this one as it's probably going to fill up fast.
Tuesday
10:00 am • Building a Start-Up Technology Company
11:30 am • How to Be a Virtual World Entrepreneur
2:00 pm • Burnie Burns Keynote
3:30 pm • Dogma Free Design
5:00 pm • Bruce Sterling Presentation: The State of the World
sxsw, conference
Google moving toward standards
Google has come out with a WYSIWYG editor to go along with there brand new web hosting service. In general the service is mediocre and on par with most other services. 100 mbs of storage with the ability to up load images. The editor is smooth though lacking in features. Clearly there is room for improvement and a straight forward path of features to add. This is a product aimed at people who don’t know what they are doing and so no web designer need to worry about losing their jobs yet.
What is interesting is the code it created. Google is know for writing bad code and discarding standards. The Google front page alone, in all it’s bleakness, has 66 errors. Making a quick page and running through a validator shows only 10 errors which is a large reduction.
Looking deeper in the the code you can see they have put some good effort in to making this a new age editor. About 95% of the design in done in CSS. Al the code is very readable though there are browser hacks abound and it will be interesting to see how that degrades with time.
I don’t know if they are storing the entire text file of HTML or generating the page on the fly. If it’s generated on the fly they can update the CSS as needed but if it’s all saved to a static file they might be saving hacks that will one day be a big problem to fix.
While no techy person is going to be overly impressed buy this release I think it’s mostly a good thing that will hopefully help people who don’t know what they are doing make better formed websites.
I hate Akismet
Akismet is really starting to piss me off. It’s a great spam filter for wordpress and has really stopped all spam.It has also stopped all commenting. This is a tiny tiny blog in the midst of a vast blogosphere and get few to no comments at all. Every comment I get is like a small flower that I want to tend and encourage to grow.
Akismet insists on placing comments in the moderation queue and then never telling me. It sends me no email and I don’t check often enough to see new comments. In general I would like actual comments to float right through to the page.
Akismet might be great at stopping spam but what’s the point if it just stops everything else as well? It would be one thing if I could turn on email notification, or change the level of security but there are no options to mess around with.
Previously I was using spam karma. I don’t know if that’s been upgraded to wordpress 2.0 but I’m missing it a lot these days.
Matthew Mullenweg could comment about all the great think Akismet could do and all the improvements he will make but who knows if I’d ever even notice the post to approve it.
Joss Whedon vs Warren Ellis in funny comment flame war
This is only internet history for the few. if you love Joss Whedon, Warren Ellis, FireFly, or just comics in general you have to read this comment war between Joss and Warren. It has to be one of the most exciting things I’ve seen unfold before me I have ever witnessed.
This week has been full of crazy websites that no one but me would find funny but me. I hope this isn’t one of them and others can get some enjoyment out of this as well.