Speaking’s out for Summer

Well, that wraps up my last speaking gig for a while. The wedding is next month and there’s still much to be done. I want to thank everyone who made it out to the AIGA Baltimore New Technology Event last night. After my Developing an Extensible Web App workshop had been cancelled (twice) it was nice to be able to end on a high note (two of ‘em if you count IceWeb).

As promised here are the two decks (includes some code samples and an OPML of general web design and development links) used in last night’s Streamline Site Production and Design with CSS plus Responsible Interaction Design with Ajax. I’ve exported them to Quicktime movies to preserve some of the multiple step slides (like Any Order Columns); a lot of information was lost in the PDF version. Open those suckers up in Quicktime and use the left and right arrow keys to switch between slides.

While these decks do use more screenshots and code samples than previous ones, the meat of the presentation was still in the spoken portion so if you weren’t there I’m afraid you might find it hard to follow along. To help combat that and to keep my word to attendees who asked for more information, here are some of the resources I used while preparing for the presentation:

• The Guardian redesign
• The CSS Zen Garden
• Microformats
• Standards Within Standards
• Reset CSS
• Undo HTML
• Internet Explorer Blog
• Conditional Comments
• IE Mac Band Pass Filter
• Sizing Text with Ems
• Sane CSS Sizes
• Any Order Columns
• Validator
• CSS Problem-Solving
• Firefox
• Web Developer Extension
• Console 2
• Explorer Exposed
• hasLayout
• Google Suggest
• Remember the Milk Signup
• Yellow Fade

If books are more your thing:

• Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm
• CSS Mastery by Andy Budd et al
• DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith
• Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference by Danny Goodman (It’s like having the internet on your bookshelf!)

Why the indefinite speaking hiatus?

I’m a designer and developer. My medium is pixels and code. I’d much rather be doing than talking about doing. Also, I don’t feel like speaking is the best way to communicate much of the information people hope to gain from these events. The two biggest comments I receive every time I speak are “there was too much code!” and “there wasn’t enough code!”

Talking about code is a tricky thing. Go to fast or make one too many assumptions and some people wind up hopelessly lost. Go too slow or assume the audience knows nothing and other people fall asleep or worse, talk through your presentation.

So with all that behind me I expect posting on this site to return to a more regular frequency.