The lovely chaps from Northcast have edited and uploaded the video of my talk at GeekUp Leeds about JavaScript and the YUI.

I especially like that they went through the whole story, right from me arriving handing over the schwag and being hugged by mysterious flatcapped Northern beauties, including the whole talk and the full Q&A session. The second part of the Q&A session is a bit on the rough side from a sound perspective but I guess the free beer consumed till then is to blame.

I hope this is useful to some, it was interesting for me to see what I talked about as the whole presentation was finished on the train and completely ad-libbed as it is.

Thanks again to GeekUp and the NorthCast people, good job and I am looking forward to more of this sort.

Last Thursday I went to the Google offices in London Victoria to attend a bi-monthly unconference called Open Source Jam. I was running a bit on autopilot as I was in Leeds the day before talking about the YUI at the Geekup meeting and originally wanted to skip the session as I was pretty knackered. It was great though that I didn’t follow my instinct, but instead have a nice unconference with Pizza, Beer and lots of 5 minute+5 minute Q&A sessions revolving around creating interfaces for humans.

In comparison to other barcamps the Open Source Jam was a lot more technical and speakers were more coders than web developers. I’ve learnt about a chess program for the iPhone, how to write APIs to make them more accessible to humans, UXON - a User Interface Object Notation (more on this coming soon), Behaviour Driven Development, holes in the Flickr API and a lot of other things.

My initial idea of staying for an hour and then leaving for a speaker’s dinner of a company-internal conference was foiled and I took the last tube back from Victoria.

My own talk was a preview of a session I will give at the Abilitynet Accessibility conference in April, talking about how accessibility is not an extra task but – if taken into consideration from the beginning – an opportunity to build better products for everybody.

I want to thank the organizers and will very likely be there for the next jam.

Photo by Adewale Oshineye

Here is a talk I just gave at an internal SEO conference about the overlap of SEO and Accessibility. The main consensus is that if you look at it closely, the two are really trying to solve the same problem, most of the time our approach is what makes it tricky.

[tags]seo,accessibility,talk,presentation[/tags]

I am right now sitting on the National Express train back from Leeds, UK heading for home and just finished a talk at GeekUp about the YUI and JavaScript. The slides are available on slideshare:

The GeekUp people also filmed the presentation and the long Q&A session, and I will try to get my hands on these recordings to see what I actually said as the 3 hour stint with 2.5 hour train rides was confusing.

Nevertheless I had a great time, got rid of the Schwag I didn’t want to carry back home and had some really good questions in the Q&A session. If you live in the north of the UK, make sure to check out GeekUp

Also make sure to check out the new 2.5 release of the YUI and the official blog post about it.

[tags]geekup,javascript,yui,leeds,uk[/tags]

There is a lot of software out there that allow you to create screencasts by recording what is happening on the screen. Some programs even allow you to annotate each step and tell people what needs to be done. The issue with most of this software is that the outcome are large video files and that users cannot interact with the system while the explanations are given.

Step by Step is a JavaScript solution based on the YUI that allows you to script an annotated walk-trough of your web applications that happens directly on the application and does not require any video editing skills or large downloads.

What do you think?