It was an absolutely phenomenal experience! Everything from the workshops and presentations to the people, and the after parties were just fantastic!

Accessibility 2.0 Workshop

On Wednesday, 2006-09-27, I went to Derek Featherstone’s workshop on accessibility. It was very informative and interesting to see many of the issues demonstrated. Throughout the day, he demonstrated the use of various assistive technologies, including a screen reader and voice recognition, showing just how badly common mistakes can affect the usability and accessibility of a site. Although I had previously read about several of the issues discussed, some were new to me and it was great to see the practical demonstrations.

Conference Day 1

Thursday, 2006-09-28, was day 1 of the conference. The most enjoyable presentations for me were Jeremy Keith’s Explaining Ajax (featuring a sexy, and rather hairy, topless photo of Cameron Adams) and John Allsopp’s Microformats. Derek also presented on accessibility, which was also good, but it was almost a subset of the topics addressed in his workshop, with only a few new points.

Conference Day 2

Friday, 2006-09-29, was the second and final day of the conference. At the beginning of the day, John Allsopp awarded prizes for cool and/or funny photos posted to flickr and blog posts about the conference. I was lucky enough to receive some prizes for my photo of Ben Buchanan in is Web 2.0MFG shirt. I won a SitePoint shirt that reads “Eat, Sleep, Code” and two books: The CSS Anthology and Deliver First Class Websites.

Andy Clarke’s presentation, Creating Inspired Design, was extremely interesting. As I’m a coder, not a designer, it was good to learn about web design from a designer’s perspective. Without showing any code at all, he illustrated ways to think about design and how to look for inspiration in the real world. He showed how, with just a little creativity, we can start to break out of the common 2 or 3 column layouts and into more interesting concepts.

However, the highlight of the day was Cameron Adams getting his revenge with a topless photo of Jeremy. But, according to Jeremy, that photo was actually photoshopped.

The People

Despite all the great presentations and workshops, the most exciting part of the conference was getting to meet so many wonderful people. It was an absolute pleasure to meet the likes of Molly Holzschlag, Derek Featherstone, Jeremy Keith and James Edwards (Brother Cake), as well as catching up with people I’d met before like Russ Weakley, Cameron Adams, John Allsopp and many others.

I got plenty of great photos over the 3 days I was there. In particular, the Lachlan³ photo featuring myself, Lachlan Hardy and Lachlan Donald, and myself with a bunch of fairly hot chicks.

Finally, the t-shirt slogan competition to come up with a Web 2.0 slogan is yet to be announced, but I’m hoping to win for my “Wake Me for Web 3.14” shirt. Of all the shirts I saw at the conference and those on Flickr, I’m predicting the major prize of a Sony MYLO will be awarded to either myself or Anson Parker for “Wallet Inspectr Nigerian Division”. John told me it would be announced on the Web Directions blog some time this week.