Blog Standard Stuff

I’ve written an article which is published on Think Vitamin about the thorny subject of accesskeys. Love ‘em or loathe ‘em, they can be useful to some people, but not necessarily when they are forced on people. In the article I demonstrate how JavaScript and the DOM can be used to set and recall chosen accesskeys, but all done unobtrusively and with an evil factor of zero.

Read Setting & Retrieving Accesskeys with JavaScript and DOM on Think Vitamin, and please do add a comment if you have some suggestions for improvements on this idea

Technorati Tags: javascript, DOM, accessibility, accesskeys, tutorial, vitamin, think vitamin

While I realise that there are already many other write-ups about people’s experiences of South By Southwest Interactive 2007, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to add one more voice to the mix and in it reflect a little on how things have changed over the years.

Like the title says, SXSW 2007 was my fifth time in Austin. In 2003 I went along courtesy of the company I work for, arriving on a Friday night and leaving halfway through the day on the Tuesday (a somewhat compressed visit). I had no idea what to expect other than a great conference. Even then, it had a buzz about it. I had read about it on Zeldman.com and others who were luminaries back in the day (and still are, lest that be misunderstood!).

In 2003, I was - as far as I could tell - ‘The Lone Brit’. Still somewhat wet behind the ears, I found myself being taken under the wing of Min Jung Kim who introduced me to lots of people, brought me along to the Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood, TX and generally helped me to feel part of the gang. Most were amazed that a Brit would come to the event, and for the event alone rather than adding it on to a bit of sight-seeing. I came away from that first SXSW buzzing with enthusiasm and with a feeling I’d made a lot of new friends.

In 2004 I found myself on the other side of the world - in Sydney, Australia - as I was a quarter way through a year-long trip around the world. Despite the distance away, and despite the fact that I was not working my way around during the year out (I remortgaged to pay my way for the year), I still felt compelled to make a massive diversion from Sydney (via San Francisco and Denver) to Austin. That’s how high an opinion I had of the conference. I remember at this point that there were a couple of other Brits at the conference, but still I was in the minority.

In 2005, the Brit invasion started to take hold. The boys from Brighton, Malarkey and a handful of others came over flying the Brit flag. The numbers at the conference were on the up, but still manageable but by 2006, the numbers were getting a bit too high. The number of open bars sponsored by the likes of Yahoo!, Google and co were crazy, and getting a seat at a table of a lunchtime was starting to get difficult. So, how would it be in 2007?

I was never all that sure that I’d make it to SXSW this year (having been married the previous year, I wasn’t sure if I would be a dad, or waiting to be a dad. Turns out I’m neither and SXSW still had a green light). I didn’t have massive expectations this year in terms of learning much from panels and presentations because that’s the way it’s been heading year after year. There are only so many CSS tricks you can learn several years down the line. And this probably explains the distinct lack of CSS-themed panels and more open topics regarding design and user experience. That said, I found that the panels I picked were all a bit vague and airy, like you were eaves-dropping on a pub conversation, only without the beer and, often, the ability to hear people all that clearly. For the first year I can’t truly say that I came away with any firm learning, but part of that was simple bad luck in not picking the right panels; it really is a lucky dip. I regret missing the Web Typography Sucks panel (blame the Great British Booze Up and subsequent open bars for that!), though, based on what others have said about it. Sorry Mark and Richard - I’ll re-live it via the slides and podcast!

A whole new part of the conference centre was revealed to me this year. I’m told that it used to be used years ago for Interactive but now the event is so huge that they’ve opened up many more rooms to cater for the number of events and delegates. Often this would mean walking long distances between the various panels (doubly annoying when a room is swapped because of high demand and you have to walk all the way back again!). It anything, I’ve come away thinking ‘less is more’. The ‘power sessions’ that lasted 25 minutes always felt too rushed, but I can understand that if they didn’t open up the venue and have more events in general, the increased number of delgates would have nowhere to go. So if the number of events needs to decrease, as some have suggested, then so will the number of delegates. Could numbers be capped at SXSW 2008? That may well happen as it can’t scale much more than this, surely?

Socially, SXSW 2007 was excellent. The evening events were all great, but I must say well done to the guys from @Media, Boagworld and Clearleft for putting on the Great British Booze-Up (even if it did mean I missed the typography panel the next day!). Aside from the organised evening events, though, I feel that the growth in numbers (I’ve read 6000+ delegates for interactive) did actually stifle conversation a little, to some extent. There were simply too many people going in too many different directions to be able to see everyone properly, and there were quite a few people I wanted to see but only saw fleeting glimpses of from a distance.

From a cost point of view, I still think SXSW offers exellent value for money. The value of knowing someone who works for x company and who can help cut through the proverbial red tape to get answers is difficult to put a price on, but it’s come in useful in the past, and no doubt will continue to do so. This is what I get out of SXSW, as a ’salary man’ - I’m not there to score business or land a contract. Just getting to know some good people and build up a network is what matters to me - I just wish that there were not quite as many people there ‘adding noise’, if that makes sense.

So it was another blast. I may not have gained as much learning from panels as in previous years, and socially it was more difficult to hook up with some people, but nonetheless it was an excellent networking event. I met a whole raft of people there for the first time who I hope to bump into again, either in person or by email.

Technorati Tags: SXSW, SXSW 2007, SXSWi, South By South West

Some time I ago, I seemed to be getting a lot of requests to add people as contacts at LinkedIn, for which I was already a signed up member. I could only put it down to a post-conference flurry of activity or something that happened after a blog post somewhere (I can remember Molly posting something similar a couple of years ago). Whatever, I obviously wasn’t getting it, but I intended to put all that right when I bumped into Steve Ganz at SXSW this year. Having spoken to him for some time, I’ve come away feeling encouraged and, basically, thinking that a service like LinkedIn is only as good as:

1. the effort you decide to put in to it when completing your profile
2. the quality of the contacts that you have, not the number

Of course, there’s more to it than that, and I’m actually having fun scrubbing my way through the various feature of LinkedIn, rather than viewing at as simply another social network to manage. It really is a different beast to the likes of Flickr, Twitter and whatever other social software I may have tried in the past.

What’s your experience of LinkedIn been? I’d be interested to learn how you’ve found it, and also keen to get any feedback about what I’ve done with my public profile.

Technorati Tags: linkedin, social networking, social software

Sometimes you don’t realise just how much you rely on something until someone takes it away from you. I’m not thinking legs, eyes, internal organs and such like, nothing that important, but nonetheless I really suffered when Bloglines stopped working for me at work (is that ironic -at work, not working?). I had put all my eggs in that one basket - making use of centralized services is all well and good until that service is made unavailable fro one reason or another, including:

1. The site/service makes its way on to a blacklist that is farmed out to firewall services
2. The site starts using external JavaScript files that are blocked by the firewall
3. The login is moved to a 128-bit encrypted page which is blocked by your place of work

These all happen to me frequently at work. I cannot log in to del.icio.us and add a favourite, I can’t check on Flickr any more (although I should be doing work, I’m sure some of you are saying!). But the biggest loss was Bloglines. I tried other web-based services immediately after but they usually fell foul of point 3 above, and even if they didn’t then point 2 would usually catch them out. So then I gave up.

Having just come back from SXSW 2007, I realise now how much I’ve missed out. I do have a news reader but Newsfire on the Mac does not suit so well, despite its brilliance, because I tend to read my feeds during the day and I cannot connect the Mac while at work, it’s a definite no-no. So today I decided that enough was enough and managed to find a decent web-based RSS reader called Feedshow. It seems to do everything I need it to and I’m really looking forward to removing my head from underneath that proverbial rock that it’s been under for the last few months.

Now, if only I could find a workaround for adding del.icio.us favourites, viewing my friends’ Twitter posts and logging in to Flickr, I’d be a very happy man. Not so sure that the boss would be though :-D

Technorati Tags: RSS, feeds, feedshow, bloglines, freedbacking