Reporting (mostly) live from An Event Apart Atlanta... 8:45 a.m. - An overcast, nasty day here at Turner Field in Atlanta. I arrived a little over an hour ago and got out of my car just as the sky decided to open up and dump a 5-minute deluge on my head (and the rest of me). My umbrella was absolutely useless. I got completely drenched, and my socks, shoes, and pants are still soaked. I'm drinking coffee just to warm up; I never drink coffee.
Earlier I did a short interview with Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Jason Santa Maria. It will be available for download in a few weeks via my forthcoming podcast site (link to come).
WiFi has been promised for later, but isn't working at the moment. Apparently the storm messed with the setup here. So this won't be exactly liveblogging.
10:00 a.m. - Eric Meyer just finished talking about what to expect in IE 7. He confirmed what had been my inkling all along: there's no need for developers to bellyache about IE 7 not supporting hacks such as
* html. Since they've fixed rendering bugs and parsing bugs, IE 7 will ignore the hacks just
like Firefox and other standards compliant browsers do, and display the correct styles. 10:16 a.m. - There are no clients in the room.
10:34 a.m. - Zeldman's computer started talking to him in a Darth Vader voice... it was really disconcerting.
11:24 a.m. - Jeffrey Zeldman gave an informative and amusing presentation about forging good relationships with clients, creating designs that effectively capture the "spirit" of the client's business, and so on. It simultaneously made me want to get back into freelancing, and reminded me why I stopped looking for freelance work two years ago.
The sun is starting to come out and shine in through the windows of the 755 Club, but my shoes and socks are still wet.
11:32 a.m. - Jason Santa Maria is talking about the redesign of A List Apart. "I know people who don't really ever throw out books." Yeah, that would be me. Being surrounded by books is really cool, until I have to move.
11:50 a.m. - Really impressed with the ALA redesign presentation. Words of wisdom from Jason Santa Maria:
- Design is about problem solving, not innovation.
- Design is about communication.
12:40 p.m. - Somebody's phone is playing "Y.M.C.A." Eric is dancing.
1:41 p.m. - Just finished lunch; wish they'd had more meatless options. Also, I met a fan. No, seriously! Some dude came up to my table and said he reads my blog and had been looking forward to meeting me today. I was really surprised; it was cool, and also a little creepy. But mostly cool.
1:53 p.m. - OMG, WiFi appears to be working! (Very sporadically, though.) I'm going to try to post this...
2:00 p.m. - Okay, maybe not. The WiFi is such a tease.
2:27 p.m. - Zeldman is talking about branding, specifically (at the moment) guide copy. Blogger has good guide copy; pretty much everyone has seen the orange arrow that says "Start your blog now." Flickr has great guide copy and branding, and succeeds in being a social networking tool in disguise.
Here's an example of bad guide copy:
Understanding the new Medicare drug benefits2:45 p.m. - Labels should reinforce the brand, and should speak to humans. Example: don't call a page "the downloads page" if it's where users can download 4 PDFs of case studies. A better name? "How we help customers." Ya see? The focus is on people.
You must have Flash installed and Javascript enabled. If you find the text too small, you can use your own style sheet by keying it to the body id.
3:12 p.m. - Atlanta web developer Todd Dominey has taken the so-called stage. Apparently we're neighbors. All the cool people live in Decatur.
3:38 p.m. - Todd Dominey's advice for creating your own product or starting your own business:
- Avoid "cool;" think useful. It needs to be something people find value in.
- Take your time and make sure it's done right. Don't just rush it out the door half-baked.
- Don't get hung up on needing a marketing or business plan. If your product has value, it will market itself. Your users will make you successful.
- Speak in the first person; the "royal we" is lame. People want to interact with a real person.
- Free / open source software is great, but it won't pay your mortgage.
- Remember to keep track of receipts, accounting, etc. You get to do your own taxes, hurray!
4:40 p.m. - Eric is discussing the One True Layout. Guess what? It works back to IE 5.0. No one thought of this for a long, long time after it was actually possible.
Cooler even than the One True Layout any-order columns thing is the equal height columns. I've said it before - it's like the holy grail. Eric explained it much more simply than the original OTL article. Of course, the original article needed to have more detail, but now I actually feel comfortable with attempting to implement this on my own blog.
Caveat: named anchors screws this up. But honestly, who uses named anchors anymore?
5:09 p.m. - And just like that... it's time to go home!
1. The fellow with an accent and long hair back here at the table in the back corner has set up an SSH tunnel proxy that seems to be getting us online. Liveblog away!
Posted at 2:55PM on Apr 3rd 2006 by will