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 The accessibility world’s technical set-ups are stuck in a woefully outdated state that developers despise having to support and the only way out is to make easier, upgrading and self-maintaining products built on systems like Mozilla’s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.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Currently being in Taiwan after a long flight from London via Hongkong (Slumdog Millionaire – win, Memento – win, Marley and me – surprising win, Bolt – looks like put together from recycled other animated movies) and scoring a room on the 35th floor with view of Taipei and 101: The hotel also is the first one not to have a complimentary bible but a nice novel to read on the bedside table. Today and I will be interviewing with the media. What I was very positively surprised about was that the media wants to chat predominantly about accessibility ! This afternoon and tomorrow and then speaking at two universities about best practices in web development. Check out the cool icons for people attending at the bottom of the page. Saturday there’ll be an open developer evening together with Rasmus Lerdorf.
• Started reading Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe on the plane which reminds me of The Starfish and the Spider
• Getting ready to go to Australia for the Web Directions Roadshow and speaking next Wednesday in our office in Sydney at the first Yahoo7 Open Session about YQL and other open things full of awesome.

Things found on the intertubes:

• Pulp browsers re-enacts the iconic pulp fiction scene with Safari, Firefox and IE6. Yes, IE6 dies.
• Brothercake gives us 10 cool things we can do once IE6 is dead
• An amazing singer on Britain’s got talent (a rare occasion in itself) shows us that you should never judge a book by its cover.
• Apparently all squeaking doors in old horror movies were really a Chihuahua
• I am not sure if we really needed a chair that sends twitter updates when the person it it farts but the hardware behind it is cool.
• Scott Schiller shows his take on the Digg bar – his numerous manifestiations of a fetish for rubber chicken lately worry me though.

Distributing your information all over the web has become a common practice over the last few years and it makes a lot of sense. By covering lots of distribution channels you can reach various audiences and get comments and feedback from them.

You also make yourself independent of a single online resource – if your server is unavailable your data is still around. I could go on with the benefits of distribution (after all I’ve written a book on the subject) but let’s take a look on the flipside: by spreading your data all over the web you also spread yourself thin and you want a single resource to act as your main URL.

People have been telling me for a while that they don’t have time to find all the things I leave across the web and that they are wondering if there’s a single entry point. One Solution is FriendFeed but you want to be able to style your “online profile” more than that.

This is where YQL comes into the equation. Using YQL, a YUI CSS grid, a few dozen lines of PHP and a bit of CSS I managed to pull together My online portfolio http://icant.co.uk and you can do this as easily. The following screencast shows you how it is done:

You can also download a readable version of the screencast for ipods.

Since I put together the screencast (which was a bit hurried as I needed to catch a flight) I’ve updated the idea with yet another script that scrapes the resulting HTML document to create an RSS feed of all my data on the web.

• Check out the source of index.php
• Check out the source of feed.php

Using YQL has a few more benefits than reading all the different sources yourself and mixing them up: the results are cached for you, YQL’s connection to the web is very much likely to be faster than yours which makes the fetching process easier and you have full control over what’s happening as YQL output gives you diagnostics information.

I’ll talk more about in YQL in various talks in the nearer future, and there are even more interesting changes to the system itself around the corner. Stay alert for awesome updates.