Well, the creme de la creme Web Design and Development Conference in Austin, Texas certainly lived up to its formidable reputation.

And it’s hard to put into one blog post an event that encompasses so many aspects of the web, real time social networking, some marketing, and a lot of partying with new friends.

One interesting statistic was that it was thought 20% of America’s iPhone users were at SxSw. There were a lot of iPhones, and Apple products everywhere you looked. It felt like being part of a community just by having similar gadgets with these folks.

I really loved the openness of the event, it’s true – you can sit next to a Vice president of Yahoo! on one side and an A list web celebrity on the other.

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A great resource of web 2.0 trends, emerging technologies, web code, web services and what you should be checking out are on podcasts.

Great if your job involves travelling, have a short break, on have a long flight on the way back from a conference!
It’s a great way to keep in touch with whats happening on and around the web. And a different way of learning compared to getting the lowdown from friends and followers on Twitter.

For those on a limited budget for training or self learning this is an excellent way of listening to leading industry experts share their knowledge and information for free!
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Today is Blue Beanie day! If you haven’t got involved do it now!
It’s the day thousands of Standardistas (people who support web standards) will wear a Blue Beanie to show their support for accessible, semantic web content.
It’s easy to show your support for web design done right. Put on a Blue Beanie and snap a photo. Then on November 26, switch your profile picture in Facebook or other social Network and post your photo to the Blue Beanie Day group at Flickr (here).

Event details on Facebook

Photos on Flickr

Below is a screenshot of Twitter this morning, showing colleagues supporting Blue Beanie day, including King Zeldman himself.

Erin Caton has designed a pocket cheat sheet / pocket guide for commonly used microformats.

http://microformats.org/wiki/pocketcheatsheet

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Having del.icio.us‘d this, I thought it would be good to highlight the number of tools to make your management of CSS easier.

A selection of tools to help you clean up your CSS and optimize it by reducing the number of empty lines in the code. However, bear in mind, this may make it very hard to follow when doing future updates to your CSS files.

One that I found useful is the CSS Redundancy Checker for checking larger CSS files and large web sites, it looks at any redundant code and repetitive code you may have. Especially if dealing with a large site that has code from previous layouts and styles. Again cleaning up the files, making leaner and cleaner.
Check them all out at: http://mashable.com/2007/09/25/css-toolbox/

I’ve found some time and only gone and added extra functionality to Jayonline.

1/ AJAX functionality – to show the blog feed on the homepage which is in HTML format.

Partly due to Jeremy Keith writing ‘Bulletproof AJAX‘, a book which I have read recently. He has some examples of the code online, which is a great place to start playing around and seeing how the functionality can work for you.

The beauty of progressive enhancement. (more…)

Whilst I was at the Highland Fling conference yesterday (report and notes to come after Easter Break), this site had dropped the CSS and proudly showed off its naked code, part of CSS naked day.

Of course this can be done anytime, by disabling the stylesheets and images in modern browsers, or using the firefox web developer toolbar, but delegates at the conference were reminded by Brothercake that people in Australia can only get phone line that give maximum of 14.4bps connection, resulting in browsing the web with a text only browser.

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