I’m recovering from the WebVisions Conference that just wrapped up in Portland, OR yesterday. The conference was pretty low key but the temperature wasn’t. It hit 105 degrees yesterday, a record and I don’t have air conditioning in my car. Rush hour traffic was brutal. The rest of the trip from Portland, home, was one traffic tie-up after another. Instead of taking just under four hours it took about six. In the heat. Did I mention that I don’t have air conditioning?

Enough bitching. The conference itself was good. I only attended one session that didn’t offer something useful. The poor president of Ektron gave a session on content management systems and people were getting up at a regular rate and leaving. He wasn’t a bad speaker but he pretty badly misjudged his audience. He wasted the first fifteen minutes in a history of the internet. I would imagine that 90% of the audience, given his slides, could have stood up and presented the talk in his place. Yawn. His CMS did look interesting, though.

The one session that I was looking forward to on Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm was what I expected. Dan is an excellent presenter, organized, and logical, who throws in enough humor to keep the crowd chuckling. I’m glad I attended, if only to see one of the people I’ve followed over the years. But there was nothing new, but it never hurts to be reminded of best practices.

It was the sessions by people I hadn’t heard of that turned out to be the pleasant surprises. I started the first afternoon with a session on Rapid DOM/AJAX Development with Jonathan Snook. If that’s not a name you recognize, he is the project engineer for the Yahoo! User Interface Library. He made me a believer in JavaScript again. I learned JavaScript in the late 90s but dropped it because it was brittle, clunky and used mostly for gimmicks. It’s definitely time to get back on the boat. AJAX libraries make JavaScript the real thing this time.

There’s more. I took notes and will write about a couple more sessions in the next day or so. This isn’t Macworld with anxiously awaited product announcements and nothing is urgent. If you’re interested in some photos, there are some up on Flickr, keyword webvisions. My original intent was to blog directly from the conference but it’s so much more interesting to spend the time with the other participants. I can blog any time. How often do I get to talk web with over 550 other enthusiasts?

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