Dan's Shorts

New product delivery methods

I just put together a new nifty little mini-app for the DWfaq Store. Customers can now choose to email the products to themselves instead of downloading. If you're like me, I keep my email around for ages, so it would be nice to have my downloaded products categorized in there like everything else :). My email inbox is more organized than my house. Kinda scary.

DEVCON Cancellation

Unfortunately I've had to cancel my scheduled appearances at DEVCON due to some work conflicts. Hopefully I didn't put MM into too much of a bind and they'll see fit to have me for the next one :). Not sure who's going to be taking over my presentations (XHTML and XML) but I'll post here once I find out.

Some impressions of <a href="http://www.todcon.org" title="The only conference you need to attend.">TODCON</a>

I must say, that TODCON has got to be the best conference I've ever attended. And no, I'm not saying that because Ray told me to. The attitude is so completely different than any other group.

First, it's mostly Dreamweaver Newsgroup users (or other newsgroups, such as PVII) attending so most people already know each other. This makes for an interesting phenomenon when everyone gets to the conference. You have a group of people you deal with on a daily basis, who you've probably never even spoken to on the phone, much less met and shook their hand. This makes for fast and lasting friendships. It also makes for late nights and hoarse voices, as you finally get some immediate feedback from friends you've only talked to in spastic emails or instant messages. I wouldn't have known on the streent Jay if he'd ran over me in his fire truck, but meeting him in person made all his MSN harassment worthwhile, and I nowhave a face and voice to go with the text on MSN Messenger. It's those types of meetings that make the conference such a wonderful experience.

Second... content. Wow. Considering this is only the second year for this conference, there were so many big names and book authors there it was amazing. At the risk of leaving people out, I won't mention all the names, but many of the people that helped me when I first got into web design were there, and it was great to shake hands and personally thank someone for helping me make a success of myself. Ray has a knack for getting the best and brightest to show up anywhere in the country, even if it means flying from Switzerland (Massimo) or a hellish trip from the UK (Steve Grosvenor from Phireworx. I honestly don't know how he does it. As far as what I enjoyed the most, Bob Boiko's presentations (he's from Metatorial) were real eye openers as far as how I should be managing my information, and I might even be signing up for some classes from the Information School. And Peter Ladka was an immense help when it came to ASP.NET. Some of my mental blocks have now been knocked down, not to mention I got his ASP.NET for Web Designers for free from New Riders :).

Being the second time I've presented at TODCON, I felt much more in my element, and I think this made my presentations all that more successful. It felt fantastic to have Paul come up to me after the presentations and tell me that I'd helped push him in a direction he was leary of taking. It was fantastic to see the "ah-ha" factor on faces as I went through the Simple CMS presentation. And seeing some of the fear of XHTML and CSS wash away after mine and Angela's presentations was awesome. Makes me feel good to know I'm now able to do for people what others did for me when I first decided to dive into web design and development (that doesn't sound too sappy does it?).

I find it utterly amazing that it's only been a few years since I started this whole endeavor, and already I'm in a position to give so much more back to the community. Makes me grin (even if I am still wiped out from 4 hours of sleep a night... a bunch of geeks in one room is a dangerous endeavor).

I hope I'm able to help Ray make next year's just as successful. It'll be nice to have it on the west coast as well, even if I can't convince him to hit Portland. There's still time to convince him though ;-)