Category Archives: Personal

Personal information.

Fund Raising

Personal

If I’m going to seriously consider attending WD06 in September, I really need to start saving up significantly. Unlike many others, because I’m a freelance contractor and I’m not lucky enough to have my employer cover it for me, I have to cover the whole cost by myself.

As a way to help save up for the conference, I’m going to see what this site can do for me. Although I refuse to ever place advertisements on this site, I’m going to try accepting donations through Pay Pal. So if you would like to see me at WD06 and would like to help me make it there, please feel free to contribute a few dollars.

The Pay Pal button will be in the side bar of this site at least until the end of September, and all donations received from now until then will go towards my ticket. In the unlikely event that there’s some left over, I’ll probably donate it to a charity.

Web Directions 2006

Personal, Standards

If you haven’t already heard, the Web Essentials conference held in Sydney for the past 2 years has been replaced with Web Directions. As I unfortunately missed out previously, I’m looking forward to going to WD06 this year. My one concern is the $750 price tag (the early bird discount) just for the conference and $395 for each workshop (when purchased with conference registration).

Prior to the conference, there will be 2 days of workshops on September 26 and 27, with two full-day workshops per day. According to the information I stumbled across, the workshops will be run by Jeremy Keith (DOM Scripting), Derek Featherstone (Accessibility), Kelly Goto, and Molly Holzschlag and Andy Clarke (Markup and CSS). If I can afford to go, I’ll try and attend Jeremy Keith’s and Derek Featherstone’s workshops.

At the conference, the speakers will also include Thomas Vander Wal, Cameron Adams, John Allsopp, Ben Barren, Ben Buchanan, Dave Greiner, Cheryl Lead, Donna Maurer, Laurel Papworth, Ben Richardson, Gian Sampson-Wild and Kevin Yank.

Hope to see you there!

CSS and JavaScript Workshop 2006

Personal, Script, Style

This past Monday and Tuesday, I went to the CSS and JavaScript Workshop 2006, which was just fantastic. Although I was one or the more knowledgeable attendees, I still found it a valuable experience. I even picked up a few techniques I hadn’t seen or used before, which I’ve already started putting into practice.

I got to meet both Russ Weakly and Cameron Adams, two wonderful people that were very easy to talk to, and I’m looking forward to meeting up with them again at the next WSG meeting in a few months. Russ even put a photo of me on Flickr. I also met a few other people, some of whom knew of me online but had never met me face-to-face. I even managed to get a few contacts for potential contract work in the future.

The most beneficial part of the workshop for me was the discussion of XMLHttpRequest(), which I had some understanding of but have never really put into much practice, and the form styling and validation techniques were rather interesting as well.