One evening in 2006 during a group iChat, Dave Shea, Maxine Sherrin, John Allsopp and I threw caution to the wind and decided that we were all on board. We were going to bring the stand-out web conference from Australia—Web Directions—across the Pacific Ocean to Vancouver.

Here we are close to a year and a half later, and we’re excited to announce that we’re doing it again. Following on the success of Web Directions North from February 2007, we’ve just launched:

We’re really happy with the line up of speakers and the entire week’s schedule – it is going to be an amazing conference and we hope you’re as excited as we are.

What are you waiting for? Go ahead over to the site, check out the WDN 08 schedule overview and the stellar lineup of speakers. We’d love to see you there!

Other locations are planned for 2007, so if you’d like to see it come to a city near you let us know in the comments or drop us a line.

Technorati Tags: ajax, javascript, accessibility, ajax accessibility, workshop

I’ve had a 15″ MacBook Pro for a month now, and I must say that I’m reasonably happy. Built-in iSight is great. Processing power is great. Having the ability to run Windows with Parallels has been amazing – I can now work on one machine instead of two. The Windows installation is even reasonable at running assistive technology.

I’m a little disappointed in one area though.
Continue reading MacBook Pro Plane Power

It’s official. I’ll be heading to Austin again in May as a guest instructor for Knowbility’s Accessibility University.

I’ll be teaching a course in Accessible JavaScript — though many have struggled to define accessible scripting techniques, to me it means thinking carefully about what we do when scripting – we can’t just implement JavaScript solutions without actually determining their impact, and planning it properly first. In order to do this, we need to look at a few concepts:
Continue reading Back to Austin

A few days ago, I posted a list of code related items I want to explore in 2005. Now, I’m taking a different path and looking at things that I want to do in 2005 – some are truly personal goals, some are more like notes to myself, and some are business objectives I’ve laid out for this year.

Continue reading My Other List for 2005

For each new project I work on, I always try to push my own personal envelope, taking on at least one component in the project that requires me to do more than I’ve done before – to learn something new, and implement it on a site or application. I consider it professional growth, and about the only way I can keep up. Besides, it expands the range of tools I can implement in the future, so even though I am learning something new, or experimenting a little, it is easy to justify spending the extra time.

Continue reading My Coding List for 2005

As the year comes to an end, I’m pretty pleased with how the year went personally and business-wise. One area I’m not happy with (actually quite disappointed, really) is the professional development side of things: I haven’t been to a conference since 2001. When you run your own business, it is sometimes difficult to attend some of the face to face events that are vital to your own professional growth — quite often it takes a back seat to pretty much everything else.

Having said that, there were a number of conferences that I “attended” this year from the comfort of my own home office. Here’s a rundown of the events that I was able to experience remotely.

Continue reading Web Conferences 2004

Only recently did I come across the video of Zeldman’s keynote address from Web Essentials ’04. In it I found a great line about web standards. It is simple in its elegance and reflects what a number of people have been saying for some time about web standards and the current state of the world of web design:

I believe web standards are just going to be what you do… If you know what you’re doing, it’s just going to be … just a tool. It’s just going to be a tool that you use… and I think the focus of web design will go back to things like content, design, usability

Continue reading Growing Up With Web Standards

Many years ago in my previous career as a teacher, I was introduced to concept mapping and card sorting. These were techniques that I could use to help me get a better understanding of how my students constructed knowledge and were able to make meaning about the things I was teaching them and how they related to things they had learned in the past.
Continue reading Understanding How Users See Your Blog