March 30th, 2008 |
Published in
Announcements, Mobile, Portland, Web Development
If you are interested in attending Web Visions, I encourage you to register now as the early bird rate ends tomorrow.
If you haven’t been to Web Visions before, you’re missing out. It is a top-caliber event. It takes place in Portland, and is reasonably priced. You’d be hard pressed to find a better deal.
At my previous job, I took my entire team to Web Visions every year. For the same price I would spend to send a single person to a more expensive conference in another city, I could send my whole team.
This year’s speaker line up is exceptional and includes a keynote by Jeffrey Veen whose last keynote at Web Visions was worth the price of admission alone. His presentation remains my favorite and is something that I’ve used to inform my thinking many times.
So if you do anything web related, I can’t recommend this conference enough. Plus, you may recognize a familiar name on the speaker list. :-)
March 24th, 2008 |
Published in
Announcements, Mobile, Portland
A quick reminder that Mobile Portland is tonight at 6 pm at eROI. Tonight’s hot topic is the iPhone SDK. More details and RSVP information.
March 19th, 2008 |
Published in
Announcements, Mobile, Portland
In case you missed it, the first meeting of Mobile Portland is scheduled for next Monday. See more details and RSVP.
February 20th, 2008 |
Published in
Announcements, Mobile, Portland
After a process that took far too long, I’ve finally managed to publish my slides from last week’s mobile presentation.
The big news out of the event was the announcement of Mobile Portland, a new user group focused on mobile development. We’re currently planning our first meeting for March. Sign up now receive details on our first meeting.
February 19th, 2008 |
Published in
Mobile, Portland
At last week’s talk at Portland Web Innovators, I promised to post the slides on Cloud Four’s blog. It seemed like a simple promise at the time, but boy has it turned out to be an ordeal.
- My slides don’t make sense without my narrative — My slides are typically photographs or illustrations that augment the story that I’m telling instead of bullet points that I’m reading aloud. This makes for more dynamic presentations and fits my belief that my job is to tell a compelling story by adding a visual and hopefully an emotional component to the narrative.
Unfortunately, a slide that has a picture of a wall covered in post-it notes and a title that says, “And she married me anyways” doesn’t make a lot of sense to those who weren’t at the presentation.
- To add context to the slides, you need to add presenter’s notes or audio — Unless you created presenter’s notes from the beginning that can be digested by other people, at the very least you will need to go back to the slides and edit them all to add presenter notes. If you choose to record audio, you have to find the software to do this and learn how to record and compress the audio correctly.
- Some slides have to be edited to simplify their transitions — I also found that I had to edit some slides that had automatic or timed transitions to no longer have those transitions because I would no longer control the timing of the slides.
- No good solution for posting presenter’s notes online — My first choice was to add presenter notes. In fact, I added presenter notes to every slide before I realized that the services for uploading slides and embedding them in other sites didn’t support presenter notes very well. There appears to be no way to see the presenter notes if you embed a viewer like Slideshare into your site.
I ended up copying all of my presenter notes (including the onerous task of converting non-ascii quotes which Slideshare wasn’t escaping correctly) into comments on each slide. I then added a large note on the first slide instructing viewers on how to view the slides.
Ultimately, I was disappointed in this solution because if I embed the slides into Cloud Four’s blog, the presenter notes won’t show up.
- Recording audio isn’t fun — Actually, I’m sure it is for people who do it more often than I do, but I had several aborted attempts including one complete run that didn’t have enough volume.
The lessons here are that Garage Band is much easier to use than Audacity, that I can’t listen to my own voice for any length of time so I didn’t try to edit the audio at all, and that 3/4 quarters of the way through the audio I realized that I had said that things were going to “radically change” far too many times (yet another reason why I *will not* be listening to the audio again).
- Slideshare has been processing my audio for almost 24 hours now — The final hold up on posting the slides appears to be problem with Slideshare that is preventing me from uploading the audio file successfully. I’ve submitted a few support tickets, but have no idea when it will be resolved.
Throughout this process, I’ve found myself thinking, “This shouldn’t be this hard.” But the reality is that the type of presentation that is compelling live is very different than one that can be comprehended by someone reading online. Any way you slice it, it takes a lot of work to repurpose your slides for online posting.
So for those who are waiting for the slides to be posted, I apologize. They are truly on their way. And believe me, I want them posted as soon as possible. :-)
February 8th, 2008 |
Published in
Announcements, Marketing, Mobile, Portland
As promised, I’m kicking off a series of posts leading up to my presentation at PDX Web Innovators forum on Wednesday. The first of these articles has just been posted on Cloud Four blog. If you’re planning on attending the session, please remember to RSVP.
February 6th, 2008 |
Published in
Community, Portland
Dana and I had a blast at Ignite Portland last night. The presentations were wonderful, entertaining and thought-provoking.
If you missed the event, you can still watch the videos of the presentations courtesy of Linuxaid.
One of my favorite parts of the evening was meeting people. Some of the people I met I’ve been following on Twitter. Twitter has contributed to a sense of community in Portland’s tech and creative circles that I haven’t seen before. It’s a wonderful thing.
While all of the presentations were interesting, I had a few thoughts I wanted to share on a couple of them:
- Where Does Imagination Go? — This may have been my favorite of the funny presentations for the night. It was riddled with Lewis Carroll-like quotes such as “Where does imagination go? I don’t know. Imagination can only go where we imagine it to go. And imagination has never gone where I imagined it couldn’t.”
- That’s Entertainment: Politics as Theater in Campaign ‘08 — One of the slides showed how politicians have to be performers. Bill Clinton had to play the sax. Mike Huckabee on guitar. It reminded me of running for student government in high school all over again. Except it’s not high school.
- Time for Portland to Take Its Place — Great stuff in this presentation. The ideas of following our passions, swing for the fences and build great companies. Portland is the place this stuff can happen. We just need to shoot higher.
- Beauty in Abandonment — It was great to see Peat on stage and Lyza’s photo. I didn’t realize Peat was a photographer as well. More to talk about the next time we grab lunch.
- A History of the Stick Figure — This was a five-minute version of the Helvetica documentary. Great info and history that I didn’t know.
To sum up the evening, Dana turned to me and said, “You better invite me to the next one.” Consider it done.
January 31st, 2008 |
Published in
Announcements, Community, Mobile, Portland, Web Development
I’m going to be speaking at the PDX Web Innovators February meeting on Mobile Web and the upcoming mobile tsunami. I’m excited to have the opportunity to share my love for the mobile web and possibilities available for businesses and developers.
Here are the details:
Graciously Hosted by Nemo Design
1875 Se Belmont St
Portland, Oregon
February 13th, 7 pm
PDX Web Innovators
RSVP Here
In preparation for this event, I’m going to be starting a series of blog posts talking about the mobile market and how it mirrors the early days of the Internet. These posts are likely going to be posted on Cloud Four’s blog, but I’ll be sure to link to them from here.
September 20th, 2007 |
Published in
Announcements, Business, Community, Portland
Silicon Florist announced Jive Software’s award at the OEN Awards based on my tweet earlier tonight. So in the interest of getting it right, here is my wine-colored recollection of the winners:
As always, the Awards Ceremony was fun, the food good, and the videos of all the finalists were inspiring. Congratulations to all of the finalists and winners.
(And I hope I remembered the winners correctly. Did I mention that the wine was good?)
September 19th, 2007 |
Published in
AJAX, Business, CSS, Community, Design, Portland, Site Performance, Web Development
Speed Matters: Presentation and Resources
We had an exceptional audience tonight at DevGroup NW for my presenation on how to speed up web pages. There were a lot of good questions and an engaged audience. Thank you to everyone who showed up. Here is my presentation from tonight as well as some of the resources I mentioned.
The great irony is that I used so many images in my presentation that I can’t compress the pdf files to the degree that I would like. Sorry for the large file size. If it is any consolation, you’ll likely get to fully use your broadband connection unlike when you download web pages and are limited by current connections to a fraction of your connection speed. :-)
Books on Site Performance
Articles & Resources
Measuring Site Speed
Minimizers and Compressors
Statistics & Studies
Thanks to all of the Flickr users who posted their images with Creative Commons licenses. This presentation wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting without their photographs.