created on Tue, 2006-07-25 08:26

Mike Davidson at Webvisions 2006 / Photo: Robert Scales

Webvisions was...
...inspiring, creative, fun, innovative, HOT, early mornings, late nights, full and fabulous days, well-organized, filled with friendly folk, reason to mark it on the calendar next year!

Thanks to all of the organizers and volunteers. Congratulations on having the best dang conference wifi EVER! This is something that is very much appreciated, goes a long way, is well-noted, and is something that other conferences could improve, so thank you. (More water on those 110 degrees Fahrenheit days would be pretty swell though!)

created on Fri, 2006-07-21 14:10 The lovely Matt Mullenweg, brilliant founding developer of Wordpress and Akismet led a session on getting those first 100,000 users.

A Few Tidbits:
• Wordpress.org gets 3 to 5 thousand hits a day.
• Wordpress.com is at 260,000 blogs
• Akismet has over 1 million spam blocks per day.
• Matt's only been programming for 3 years!?!

Mullenweg's 12 Rules:
1. You have to be the most passionate person involved.
2. Get off the computer - the act of writing things down on paper frees the mind, allows for the juices to really flow.
3. Obsess about the details, down to the space between two letters.
4. Do your own support. You have to be able to feel the pain of your users. Document everything. Make it as easy as possible for your users to contact you.
5. Blog every step of the way. Keep all of your users in the loop at all times - they will love you. Communicate with them and put them in the driver's seat.
6. Have a great tagline. If you can't describe what you are doing in less than 5 words, edit it, shave it down.
7. Frame everything you're talking about in a context for your users. What are you going to do for them?
8. Get out of version 1.0 as fast as possible. Most people make their successes on something different from where they started. Be flexible. User feedback is the most valuable asset. Don't let yourself be too led by your first users. Listen to the silent majority. Keep the majority in mind.
9. Track yourself.
10. Know what to do if you are successful.
11. Start strong, end strong. People don't often remember what was in the middle.
12. Be a pain killer, not a vitamin.


Tags:
• conference
• mattmullenweg
• portland
• raincity
• raincitystudios
• users
• webvisions
• webvisions06
• webvisions2006
• wordpress

created on Fri, 2006-07-21 10:37 Mark Wyner, Mark Wyner Design, gave a great and thorough talk on all the aspects to consider in building a better HTML email for you and your company.

• Your desktop is not a launch pad.
• Comic Sans is the devil.
• How do you deploy? Use an email-administration application. Create your own or use one of the many on the market. Mark uses Campaign Monitor and MailBuild.
• Techniques and best practices: The web-standards battle - standards-focused web designers use antiquated markup for design integrity
• Some benefits of web standards:
  1. Increased use of handheld/mobile devices, disparate support for presentation layer
  2. Accessibility
  3. Spam filters assess content-to-code ratios
• Embed your style sheets
• An email is a single document
• Account for all scenarios: build for progressive enhancement and create simple experience for lowest common denominator
• Image usage: display contextual images inline (products, people, etc) and display template images as CSS backgrounds
• Email clients offer image blocking
• Preserve format upon forwarding: forwarding-methods vary - as attachment, source code revealed, converted to plain text, converted to proprietary HTML
Tags:
• conference
• email
• html
• markwyner
• portland
• raincity
• raincitystudios
• Technology
• webvisions
• webvisions2006

created on Thu, 2006-07-20 13:42 Workshop on the process of creating and managing iterative projects and applications with speaker Kelly Goto.

"Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming, feedback is the treatment"
- Kent Beck, Extreme Programming

Thoughts:

This was a great overall approach at breaking the traditional cycle of workflow to a more iterative approach. This workshop helps to determine new ways of reorganizing the development process into manageable phases that optimize customer value, business value and technical feasibility. Interaction with others in the workshop through an example process, helped participants to discover new ways of scoping project.