This is a summary of day two of the "An Event Apart" conference in Chicago.  To see day one go here.

Be Pure. Be Vigilant. Behave. Session

Jeremy Keith gave this session and he was the first person at the conference to actually show any code (and he showed client side javascript).  He raised a point that I have made in the past when I have talked about the use of AJAX on a web site:  Your site should still work even if the client does not use javascript.  The easiest way to accomplish this is to build the site first as a Web 1.0 style site (with postbacks), then you should add the AJAX functionality.  There is a real balance to this, because the presence or absence of AJAX would normally effect your design.

Best Practices For Form Design Session

Luke Wroblewski is a principle at Yahoo! and he showed a very visual presentation on design patterns for web forms.  Sounds really boring, but may have been one of the most useful presentation of the conference.  He gave some great "rules of thumb" for laying out your web forms.  Because the presentation was so visually oriented, it is tough to summarize this session.  Luke will have a book out next year, or you can read some of his blog entries about forms here.

Accessibility: Lost In Translation Session

Derek Featherstone gave us a wonderful insight into accessibility on web sites.  I have always thought that I had a good grasp of accessibility on web sites, but some of the issues that Derek showed during his presentation really humbled me.  AJAX and other cleaver DOM scripting techniques have really thrown a wrench into the accessibility of web sites to a level that I was not even aware of.

The State of CSS In an IE7 World Session

Eric Meyer gave this presentation on IE7.  As a guy who works for Microsoft I was "braced" for the worst, because if you search for Internet Explorer CSS Issues you get close to 1/4 of a million search results and most are not flattering (Internet Explorer 6 has a very checkered past).    Eric gave a fair and balanced view of IE7, and was complimentary of the work that the IE Team has done to fix the problems of the past and to comply to standards.

Eric made one point that was interesting:  He was very critical of sites that claim to know how what the percentages of people are using which browser (like 25% of all people are using Internet Explorer 7).  His point was that these sites aggregate data and the only thing they are telling you is what the aggregation is.  He said you should focus on what browsers you are seeing visiting your web site by looking at your logs (he used a funny example of http://netscape4plugins.com probably does not probably see a lot of traffic from IE).  He has a great point for existing web sites, but for new web sites I still think there is value in looking at aggregations.

Silicon Prairie Social is the latest in a line of events that have a simple purpose:  Getting technology folks together to have a free drink (and you don't have to be a technology folk to attend).  The inaugural social will be held at Mullen's Bar and Grill in Lisle, IL (which is in suburban Chicago).  The organizers are planning a great event with free food and free cocktails, but there is one catch you have to RSVP for the event.

Microsoft is a sponsor of the event and several of us will be there including Dave Bost and Angela Binkowski.  As a sponsor we have a table that attendees can come by and chat with us.  We are thinking of showing some kind of demo of some cool technologies like Silverlight or Photosynth.  But then again, we might just plug in an XBOX and play some Guitar Hero II.  If you attend the event, be sure to stop by and say hello.

Can these events actually be fun?

I went to the Madison, WI version of this event, the High Tech Happy Hour this last Thursday and it was a blast.  They had it in a fabulous venue, the Orpheum Theatre and Lobby, which is a classic theatre that has to date back to the 1920's.  It was really neat to talk to so many people in a casual setting.  I even met a professional hypnotist at the event.

I got to attend the An Event Apart conference in Chicago this week.  An Event Apart is the in person version of the popular web magazine A List Apart, which bills itself as "explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices."

This is a different style of conference than what I am used to, and the change was refreshing in some ways.  Normally I am used to a conference where they have somewhere between one and three keynotes over the course of the conference in a massive room.  All other sessions take place in between 3 and 50 simultaneous breakout sessions.  At An Event Apart  there were no keynotes or breakouts.  All of the sessions took place in the same room and all of the attendees saw the same session.  It was great in that you did not have any angst to go through in picking out which session to attend (always stressful because you have the fear of picking the "wrong session").  The other benefit is that during breaks everyone is talking about the same topics, because you just saw the exact same session.  Here is a quick overview and some thoughts from today's sessions.

Secrets of the CSS Jedi Session

Eric Meyer is a CSS guru, it is hard to have a conversation about CSS with his name popping up as part of the conversation.  He gave the opening presentation called "CSS Jedi", in which he built around his demo of how to take an HTML Table of sales data and strictly using CSS was able to turn it into a bar graph.  You can see the before and after on his web site here.   

Key Takeaway
You can't completely divorce the content from the presentation.  We get really hung up on the "separate your content from the presentation" mantra when we talk about the value of CSS.  I think everyone would agree that using CSS is the right thing to do, but his point was that you have to have some presentation built into your content, or you can't do any styling.  His example, which was very insightful, was that you can't apply CSS formatting to a text file, because there is no structure to anchor to.

Writing the User Interface Session

Jeffrey Zeldman gave this talk on the importance of copy in the design process.  "Design helps people read less" and "Copy is the easiest and cheapest part of you site to fix" where two of the key messages.  It re-enforced the Copywriting is Interface Design section of Getting Real by 37 Signals.

Designing Your Way out of a Paper Bag Session

Jason Santa Maria is the creative director for Happy Cog Studios and this session was insights into his personal design process.  Jason showed us a lot of the projects that he had worked on in the past (some of the stuff that he has done includes the current version of A List Apart, the new WordPress logo and the redesign of dictionary.com).  The most remarkable part of his session was that he would show you the evolution of the design process.  He would show you "before" images of sites, sketches he made in his sketchbook, early prototypes he called "Grey Blocks", later drafts and finally the finished product.  It was really neat to see evolution of the design process.

Search Analytics for Fun and Profit Session

Lou Rosenfeld is the co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites (an awesome book) and his talk was focused about how to look at search logs and gain insights into what your customers are looking for.  He gave a great explanation of "the long tail" with real data from a search engine log.

Interesting points

• Many search results are seasonal (searches for the word "football" are at a peak in September and October)
• The #10 search result on a typical search results page (1-10) is actually clicked more often than the number 6,7,8 and 9 results on the same page
• Don't underestimate the value of a manually configured "Best Best" on a search result for common searches
• Most search results fall into the Zipf distribution (where the name "the long tail" come from), but you should not ignore the queries that people do in the second half of the distribution.  You can find some really interesting results.

The Seven Lies of Information Architecture

Liz Danzico is an information architect with Happy Cog Studios.  Her presentation focused on the 7 rules that you can break, including: Navigation must always be consistent, There is a magic number sever (plus or minus two), and Users must get to all parts of the site all the time.  One of the neatest things about her presentation was that to prove some of her points she would show a portion of a screen shot and ask you what it is.  We (as human) develop a natural pattern recognition.  Do you recognize what this is despite the small snip?:

   
Interface Design Jugging

Dan Cederholm walked us through a lot of interesting graphic and design issues.  He did this via a guided tour of his sample site "Toupee Pal".  He then shifted gears and started talking about Microformats.  I mentioned Microformats last week in Madison, WI during my presentation on Mashups.  Check them out, they have now achieved sufficient mass to pay attention to them.

Attendee Party

I am not going to blog at the attendee party.  I am going to hit "publish" and head over to Fadó Irish Pub.  Look for another update tomorrow.

The guys over at Clarity Consulting (Kevin Marshall in particular) had such a fun time putting on the recent Facebook Developer Garage that they have decided to hold another event, this time specifically around Silverlight.  This is going to be an unconference

style event modeled after a barcamp (with the exception that it is going to be focused on one technology).  The SilverlightDevCamp Wiki is even being hosted on the Barcamp.org site.  As an unconference event, they are looking for people in the community to step up and help out with the event, you can contact the organizers to volunteer or you can go add to the Wiki.   They have also setup a Twitter account to use as part of the event. 

Can't wait?

There is another SilverlightDevCamp in San Francisco 2 weeks ahead of the one in Chicago.

Microsoft released an experimental interface for search on Tuesday called Tafiti.  You can see a on10 video about it here.  I thought I would share it with you because there are some neat things about it:

• I love the name: Tafiti means "Do Research" in Swahili.  This is yet another confirmation of my theory that all the good names are trademarked - we are now having to use words from other languages.
• The interface is built with Microsoft Silverlight 1.0.  It demonstrates some of the cool things that you can do with the first version of the Silverlight platform (you don't have to wait for the .NET enabled version).
• It is built on the Live Search Engine APIs.  I know it is not seeing the traffic volumes of the Google home page or even the Live home page, but the performance seems acceptable given that the client is seeing a lot of the traffic.
• It is an attempt to address one of the key issues I see with search as we know it today.  It is not just about searching for the data, but about finding it and organizing it.  You can "file" the results on one machine and access it on another.  Even if one of them is a Mac. 

As you check it out, remember that this is an experimental interface.  It will doubtless see some tweaks as they get feedback on it and one day it might just disappear.

Beer and Code
Originally uploaded by jodieandlarry.

Last Saturday I got to attend the Facebook Developer Garage in downtown Chicago that was hosted by Clarity Consulting.  I am a relatively new user to Facebook, so I had a lot to learn about Facebook as a web site and as a developer platform.  I am glad that I went to the event because I learned a lot about both of these things.  Overall the event was pretty good, but it was not without its hiccups.  The biggest hiccup was that Facebook was supposed to send someone to give the keynote address, but at the last minute they had to pull out of the event (probably got a great idea about a new feature that they just had to implement).  There was some delay while trying to set up a video conference with them that never got started.  In the end, Jia Shen from Rock You!  (a company that builds applications for social networks like MySpace and Facebook) stepped in a gave a great keynote presentation.  He did a great job of explaining the basics of the platform and then showed us newbies how to build a "hello world" style application on the platform. 

I spent a lot of time talking with the various attendees and I got to see what some of the startup companies where doing with Facebook, like Swap Simple who have integrated the facebook login with their site.  I added several new friends to my Facebook account and even ran into Jeremy and Kevin from Web414 at the event.  I then spent some time building Mashups of Facebook photos with popfly. I took some pictures of the event, you can see them on Facebook or on Flickr.

Thoughts on Facebook as a platform

I like Facebook as a web application, but I am still trying to figure out how much of a developer platform that it is.  They have done some impressive stuff with opening up their web site to people who want to build Facebook "applications".  However, the standard Facebook application runs on the Facebook website.  I don't see a lot of openness to exposing the data outside of Facebook (there was some information that you could tap into from popfly, but it was limited).  I look at other platforms like Flickr and Twitter where there is a rich eco-system of complimentary applications that have been built on the APIs from those sites and I don't see that yet in Facebook.  I hope that over time they start to open up more Internet based APIs so it will grow into a true platform.  Maybe they were working on that last weekend. 

Thanks again to Clarity for hosting such a cool event.  They paid for coffee and doughnuts in the morning and pizza and beer in the afternoon.  Way to step up guys.

My friend and colleague Josh Holmes attended the Flex/AIR Jam this week.  While at the event, he built a Twitter Badge built in Silverlight (I have to talk to Josh about how he pulled this off, I can't seem to even check my e-mail effectively when at a conference and he runs off and builds an application that works!).  The Badge is a work in progress, as he wants to update the graphics, but it is live on his site.  The concept is that you page through his Tweets and the clock reflects the time that it was posted.  It looks kind of cool how the clock goes back and forth as you are paging.  I am sure that Josh would want me to make sure that I mentioned the idea for the Twitter Clock Badge came from James Ward, an Evangelist for Adobe.

Glavin in the Bullpen
Originally uploaded by jodieandlarry.

As you may know from reading this weblog, I am a big baseball fan.  I catch as many games as I can in person, both at home and on the road and I also watch a lot of it on TV.  So I was very excited to see that MLB.com has started to roll out a new media player based on the Silverlight 1.0 platform.  They have only rolled it out in a couple of parts of their site for right now and this is not the full blown media player that we saw some glimpses of earlier this year at MIX (hopefully that is coming soon!).  There are a couple of interesting things to note:

• This is a Silverlight 1.0 implementation, so it is based on the javascript implementation not the .NET runtime
• This is the Release Candidate version, which included a "go live" license on it
• The Silverlight is being served up from a JSP page

Check out his video http://mlb.mlb.com/media/video.jsp?video=200708062132724, which is highlights from Tom Glavin's 300th career win on Sunday night to check out the full installation and viewing experience.  It is bitter sweet that I have to watch the highlights of the win, because I almost got to see Glavin get number 300 last Tuesday night against the Brewers (I took the picture of Glavin in the bullpen just before the game).

Note: This article was updated after it was published to fix a typo in the title. 

Clarity Consulting is hosting a neat event coming up in Chicago in a couple of weeks - The "Facebook Developers Garage".  It is going to be a neat event where you can talk with some of the people from Facebook and also hear from some people who have built Facebook applications themselves.  You can sign up to give a presentation yourself (Barcamp style), or you can hook up with a few people and build the next great Facebook application.  I will be there for the event, but you might not see me for a couple hours as I sneak out to see the Thunderbirds perform at the Chicago Air and Water Show.

Some Details
Upcoming event - http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/226685
Wiki - http://facebookdevelopergarage.pbwiki.com/
Facebook Event - http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=2642140688

Note:  I created a Facebook profile to register for this event.  I think I was the last person on Earth not to have one.