A Web Design and Development Blog
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007
At today’s conference about Libraries, Teenagers and Web 2.0-yeah (slides at slideshare), I showed a quick example of how you can take an idea and rapidly produce it on the web. Sadly I was running out of time, so skipped over it a bit; I’m posting it here for a more thorough explanation.
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Monday, October 1st, 2007
Part of my job is working for Evidence Base, who do research and information gathering for libraries and the public sector. Mostly it involves building online surveys and an exicting new community of practice site.
However, next week they’re running a conference on Web 2.0, Libraries and Teenagers called Inspiring the iGeneration. I’ll be speaking about the perils and possibilities of modern web applications, which’ll be a bit about my own experiences with online communities and a bit about web best practices. Ideally it’ll show that you can’t just slap a gradient on something, call it a blog or wiki and expect people to engage, or at least that’s the plan. I’ll let you know when I finish the slides… Hopefully it won’t involve too much buzzword bingo.
So anyway, as I plan my slides, it occured to me to ask you folks out in blog land what you consider to be the archetypal perils and pitfalls in the modern web world? Not so much in a development way, but in a process and social dynamics way. I have my own ideas from a few years of supporting staff in e-learning and how we encourage freshers to use that system, but I’d be interested to hear other tales.
So, if you were going to give people a map of web 2.0, which areas would you mark with “Danger!”
Wednesday, June 13th, 2007
I’ll probably write some more coherant thoughts later, but suffice to say I think this year’s @media was pretty good. I enjoy it as a chance to meet like minds and discuss ideas, this year I found myself really grooving on the presentations too. Possibly it’s ideally pitched at my eclectic skillset.
On the design side, I really enjoyed Jon Hick’s Creative Sponge talk, which was a great summary of pulling together diverse inspirational elements and a nice insight on his creative process. Jason Santa Maria’s Devilish Details talk was a great look at core design principles. Mark Boulton’s Typography presentation was a look at type through a martial arts lense.
Over in the development world Dan Webb’s Javascript talk included a few nice details (including one very tasty testing and debugging tool) and Nate Koechley did a sterling job on high performance sites.
I got to catch up with a few folks. Special shoutout to Simon Mackie, one of my old colleagues from glasshaus who was over here representing Sitepoint (and who provided me with an elegant orange T-Shirt).
© 2008 Matt Machell