An Event Apart San Francisco 2009 on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

An Event Apart San Francisco 2009 on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

An Event Apart was amazing – this is between speakers – the conference was sold out. I was inspired and challenged, and humbled to be in the presence of so many great web designers.

Update on my project site

I’ve been working like a madwoman on the website I was going to use for my content management class project – the only thing is, I realized I needed to do way more work on it before converting it to WordPress. It was a legacy site, that lots of wonderful volunteer webmasters worked very hard on with what skills they had at the time – and boy have I been there. I should say, I’ve been THEM. I have left a few legacy sites in my wake as I’ve moved up from volunteer to free-lance semi-volunteer, and from learning by dabbling to actually taking classes, reading books and blogs and going to conferences. I know so much more now that I did when I was that volunteer webmaster muddling through, yet I realize now how VERY little I still know. I’m still dabbling, though much more effectively, at least.

Anyway, back to my “project” site – I’ve been going through all these old FrontPage generated pages and cleaning them up, separating content and style and behavior by adding stylesheets and javascript and php includes, making them all validate strict xhtml – it’s quite satisfying, actually. I’m also learning a ton by doing this. Like the joys of the .htaccess redirects – ha.

There is still much to be done, and as I’m doing it, I’m learning more about the site, the organization, and what the needs may be. It’s all good, but it wasn’t yet ripe for WordPress – or maybe I wasn’t. That, or another cms, Drupal? Joomla? Maybe even one I create, is definitely in the site’s future, but for now, I’m continuing to fiddle with it.

I just added an xml sitemap for Google and created a user sitemap. I really should work on the navigation – I’ve been working on the site’s architecture “under the hood” and now the menu needs to reflect that – it will be easy now that I have the navigation in a php include – only one page to edit!

The actual site is working pretty well now – the design is still pretty primitive, but I’ll work on prettying it up later

Here it is – comments, feedback, ideas appreciated:
http://bristleconecnps.org/

Third Annual Blue Beanie Day

Sheesh – I can’ believe I missed International Blue Beanie Day yet again! By only ONE DAY this time! I have my blue-beanied avatar all ready to go, and I keep missing it. Well. Every day is blue beanie day for those of us who try to design to web standards. Styling that bibliography page using an ordered list and cite tags really made me happy, and actually using a definition list for a glossary page – omg. It’s the little things, you know?

Here I am, in blue beanied glory, a day late, but not short on love for the standards:

Happy Belated Blue Beanie Day, Standardistas!

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year…

Yep – it’s time again for 24 ways, “the advent calendar for web geeks!”

That and AN EVENT APART IN SAN FRANCISCO!!!!!! Can I have a w00t from the congregation?

I can’t believe I get to meet Zeldman, “Beep” (aka Ethan Marcotte), Dave Shea, Andy Budd, Jared Spool, Eric Meyer, Jonathan Snook, Luke Wroblewski, and Jeff Veen, among others, IN PERSON! I either have books by the aforementioned web design gods, or follow them on Twitter, or regularly read their blogs, or all of the above! So exciting. And the topics look great, too!

I’ll report on An Event Apart here – it’s gonna be great. Wish you were coming, too!