Bellingham is not too distant from Seattle. In fact, it’s less than a two-hour drive for most of my friends (who may or may not be driving like maniacs. I’m not sure how long of a drive it is for people obeying traffic laws.) So when I learned that An Event Apart would be in Seattle this year, I wept openly (but in a manly fashion, like an action star weeping over the death of his partner in an explosion-filled cop movie.)

Why? Because I knew I wouldn’t be going, mostly due to finances. The budget allotted to conferences already had been committed to Web Directions North. Now, WDN was worth it in every way, and a great experience. But as it lacked the notable Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman, it left me craving.

As AEA: Seattle drew nearer, I concocted a plan. I would not be going to AEA, but if I arranged a road trip with some Mindfly co-workers, I could attend one of the fabulous evening parties, perhaps, rubbing elbows with important web folk and picking up some new CSS tricks by osmosis. I discussed this in a post last week (having contemplated abducting speakers in this comic) and managed to round up a full squad of Mindfliers to roll south with.

Then, on fateful Monday, things started to go wrong. Like the Fellowship of the Ring, things seemed peachy at first, but then like Gandalf toppling into a pit the first person canceled. After a brief pause people started jumping ship left and right, with Boromir stepping in front a few arrows and Samwise and Frodo ditching on the group. I felt like Aragorn, stuck with an elf and a dwarf, and instead of Seattle decided to head to Isengard… er… home.

The Twitter stream of AEA attendees that night was like a punch to the gut. However, it’s presence illustrated the next best thing to attending: cyber-stalking.

Thankfully due to the presence of web-geeks at a web standards conference (surprise surprise) a great deal of the material and experiences of An Event Apart Seattle are present for downloading and consuming. You can’t taste the lunches or feel the giddiness of standing in a crowd of people as far down the rabbit hole as you are, but you can learn quite a bit about what was said and how it went.

Here’s a skimming of offerings from the hearty soup of the Internet:

Zeldman’s AEA:Seattle After-Report

Warren Parson’s Massive Photostream of An Event Apart: Seattle

Think Brownstone’s AEA Sketches

Twitter Stream of AEA (With All the Numerous Hashtags Used)

Dan Cederholm’s Presentation Slides

Dan Rubin’s Presentation Slides

Aaron Walter’s Slides

Tara Hunt’s Presentation Slides

There’s probably many more sources out there. If you know of ones I missed, feel free to link them in the comments, please. As for you, AEA, maybe next year!

Apparently blogs are over and done with. At least, Wired thinks so. Wait… what?

Jeffrey Zeldman would strongly disagree, and he just wrote a scathing critique of Wired’s editorial pronouncing blogs dead, and although his tone is definitely set to ‘acidic’, his points are right on.

I just want to quote the editorial’s misguided author, Paul Boutin:

@WiredReader: Kill yr blog. 2004 over. Google won’t find you. Too much cruft from HuffPo, NYT. Commenters are tards. C u on Facebook?

That’s what he’s proposing that we replace blog culture with. Seriously?

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Perhaps it was unwise for me to create the newest comic, as I hope to attend An Event Apart eventually, and poking fun at the event’s creators/hosts/organizers (Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman) isn’t exactly the best way to go about doing that. However, I will admit, the first time I saw Zeldman in person, at Web Directions North ’08, I couldn’t help but think “Gee, give him an axe and some chain mail and he’d fit right in in Khazad-dûm.” Mind you, I’m referencing the place when it was home to the dwarves, not its later days as Moria, home to a bunch of jerk orcs.

I’m not sure if that distinction is helping my case.

I did not, in fact, attend AEA: Boston. I greatly wish I had, but such was not meant to be.

Thanks to the very nature of the conference’s attendees (aka web people), though, I do get the opportunity to experience a great deal of information about what it was like to attend! There are flickr feeds, detailed blog posts about attendees‘ impressions of the event, summaries of each session’s relevant info (quite a few good ones by Luke Wroblewski), and slides being shared by the presenters. This is in addition to the various conglomeration of tweets that occurred during the conference itself, forming a real-time record of what was happening, while it was happening.

I’m still getting around to sitting down and trying to digest this cornucopia of second-hand information. With the speed at which technology changes, I can’t help but feel that there’s no such thing as taking a month off learning more about the industry I’m in. It’s a never-ending process. That’s why I think conferences like AEA are so important, as it provides a continually-refreshing wellspring of new, relevant views and information about what we do.

One piece of data that I have had the chance to digest, however, is the frequently repeated opinion that Jared Spool is an amazing speaker. I can agree, as I had the pleasure of listening to him at WDN08. I don’t know how someone can have that much energy when talking about user interfaces, but I’m glad he does, because it keeps the rest of us interested about the topic, which is admittedly pretty important.

(this is reprinted from my workplace blog here where it was originally posted.)

Like the kid that just won’t start poking the wasp’s nest, A List Apart has decided to push the angry topic button of the web development community by posting not one, but TWO new articles this week about the already infamous decision by Microsoft to incorporate a version targeting meta tag in Internet Explorer 8.

I’ve already poked my toe into the swimming pool of controversy in my post Loud Noises!, where I tentatively agree with the whole idea. After all, Netscape did essentially the same thing when they introduced the DOCTYPE tag as a way to control standards mode, and nobody got together a group of vassal warriors, went to their hall and burned it while standing at the door with swords. But Microsoft, being the two ton gorilla it is with a standards compliance history that is spotty to say the least, apparently hasn’t earned the right to try to follow suit and keep the Internet from breaking on their newest browser when it is released.

In his article They Shoot Browsers, Don’t They?, Jeremy Keith essentially says “Hey, we shouldn’t add a single meta tag just because one browser needs it.” Well, I hate to break Mr. Keith’s bubble of fantasy, but the fact is that for now, the vast majority of people on the Internet are using Internet Explorer. Heck, IE6, which is eons old and about as standards compliant as a clown on a unicycle (no, I don’t know what that metaphor means either), has a larger market share than FireFox and Safari combined. Add in IE7, and their share is so large it hurts.

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