Yesterday evening I was very happy indeed to go to the National Maritime Museum in London to talk to representatives of several Museums about data distribution, YQL and open tables.

The whole thing was initiated by Jim O’Donnell who had spent quite some time with YQL and NMM’s data.

In my talk Reaching those web folk [PDF, 6.2mb] I covered the switch from a web sites as end points to open data as an opportunity to reach many more users and turn any of your visitors from a receiver to a relay broadcasting your information to their friends, contacts and distribution channels you are not even aware of.

You can download the audio recording of the talk, too: Reaching those web folk [MP3, 76.6mb]

Also thanks to Mia Ridge for taking notes in case you want someone else’s view.

Some days ago (I lost track with all the travelling and time differences) I gave the first talk at Yahoo7’s Open Sessions in their ludicrously beautiful offices in Sydney, Australia.

• You can also download the slides PDF if you don’t want to sign up for SlideShare

In order of appearance I talked about:

• The Yahoo Design Patterns
• The design pattern stencils
• Graded Browser support
• The Yahoo User Interface library
• The YUI CSS grids builder
• YUI widgets
• Information how to skin YUI widgets
• How to extend YUI widgets by subscribing to custom events
• Progressive Enhancement with Autocomplete
• Progressive Enhancement with Data Table
• Yahoo’s exceptional performance information
• YSlow
• Yahoo BOSS and examples I built with it like Keywordfinder and Unsafe Search
• Yahoo! Pipes
• YQL and how to use it to retrieve creative commons licensed photos of Sydney.
• YQL open data tables and how to use them

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Getting upgraded to business class on my flight back from Hong Kong as BA didn’t have a vegetarian meal for me! Flatbed win with 8 hours straight sleep.
• Celebrating my birthday with my friends and getting a giant duck:
• PPK’s slides on JavaScript Events from his presentation at Yahoo
• Splendid Cappucino Latte Art
• Meeting colleagues from long long ago randomly in Australia and them blogging about your talk
• A great presentation by filament group on Access oriented web design
• Vimeo doing a very nice custom Flash effect for the Let it Shine ad.
• Sand/Stone is an interesting idea, “a 6,000km-long wall of artificially solidified sandstone architecture that would span the Sahara Desert, east to west, offering a combination of refugee housing and a “green wall” against the future spread of the desert”
• The Full Frontal conference is now live, come to Brighton in November to get your JavaScript fix.
• A good comparison of Game Developers and Porn Stars

Yesterday I gave a presentation at the Open Source Developer Conference in Taipei, Taiwan about a different view of accessibility called Open and Accessible:

[slideshare id=1309350&doc=1309350]

• download ‘Open and Accessible’ from S3

As part of my Taiwan trip I had an interview with Ray Wang of IThome about accessibility and he was pretty impressed with me telling him that accessibility shouldn’t be about trying to comply with a law but is an opportunity to build massively successful and better usable products for everybody.

In this talk I am covering the same topic for an Open Source audience. I do believe that free and easily available and usable assistive technology is the future of accessibility as with commercial products we are running in circles. Screen readers are expensive pieces of information and far too hard to install and upgrade. The accessibility world’s technical set-ups are stuck in a woefully outdated state that developers despise having to support and the only way out is to make easier, upgrading and self-maintaining products built on systems like Mozilla’s Firefox.

I hope I managed to entice some people of the Open Source community to give accessibilty a go and maybe organize an Asia Pacific Scripting Enabled.

The talk was filmed, so there will be a recording soon.

I just came back from giving my first talk in Taiwan and I have to say it seemed to have worked out well. The room was packed and people asked very good questions afterwards.

[slideshare id=1297512&doc=1297512]

• Download the slides The road to professional web development – PDF 11MB

In the slides I covered the history of web development, what we did wrong and what we should avoid in the future. I also covered the YUI and how it embodies some of the priniciples great web development is based on.

Update: Liang-Bin Hsueh posted an audio recording of the talk missing only the first five minutes.