Did you know I bake cakes? No? Neither did I… However, despite your entirely justified skepticism – I’m proud to announce that at the time of this writing everyone who tasted my cherry cake is feeling perfectly normal. Hooray!!

Web.Start is the first conference in Southeastern Europe focused exclusively on Web applications and Web startups. The conference takes place on May 17-18th, 2007, in Zagreb, Croatia.

The conference is catering to the authors of Web projects, aiming to help them realize or improve their projects and helping them reach the knowledge and contacts that will help hem position themselves on the market, fund their projects and achieve success.

The conference will introduce a couple of celebrities, Joel Spolsky and Alexander Kjerulf to name a few, and a dozen of local experts in the fields of web development and business.

If this all sounds good to you, then browse to Web.Start official site, register and meet me there.

It’s been a while since we’ve been at FOWA London. The personal highlight of the event was Geek Dinner in “Bear”, the pub placed somewhere in the London down-town. The pub’s name was a curiosity for the Croatian team — here in Zagreb we also have a chain of popular pubs all under the same name “Medvjed” which literally means Bear…

Even though not the opening presentation at the conference, the things became pretty interesting after Tara Hunt from Citizen Agency talked about Building Online Communities (4,3 MB PDF). Tara covered all the general aspects of building social networking web sites, but the most significant point for me was — “it has to be fun”. Social networking sites have to be fun. Fun to use, fun to read… I encourage you to download the presentation for the examples.

Later on, at the dinner, we all had good time talking about the various industry topics. At some point we discussed about how to convince clients to provide cool, useful, fun and most of all encouraging copy on otherwise boring, but absolutely necessary error pages — 404s and/or 403s. Special care should be taken with social networking applications, where the user-generated content is very dynamic and the pages are lost more often, then anywhere else. Tara advised and I’m sharing (beware! the following is not the exact quote, it’s more what I managed to recall the morning after):

Create a portfolio of cool 404s from sites of the successful companies (Flickr, Threadless, Last.fm, Twitter and such) and also a portfolio of plain 404s of a few companies nobody ever heard of. When you do, use it as an argument when talking to the client.

Every business wants to be compared to a famous company…

Once you convince your client, go on and make the web more enjoyable place! BTW, see what Flickr says about 404s.

If someone would told me a year ago, that webmasters are going to return big style, I’d say – that’s crazy. But now, with a portal or two under my belt, the idea doesn’t seems so funny anymore. I wrote about new Nacional.hr and how bringing the right person for the job lifted the site from the ground.

Every serious web portal – sooner or later – suffers from the limitations caused by predefined cover designs. Those initial designs usually work well in the beginning of the site’s life-time, but eventually as the content grows, the editorial stuff is crying for more freedom.

What to do in such situation? There are certainly a few noteworthy paths. At web.burza, we even developed a fancy drag ‘n’ drop cover management module. It gives chief editors freedom never seen before, works like a charm in your browser, the learning curve is easy and fast, it even delivers 100% valid markup, … but it has it’s drawbacks, too.

Such semi-automated systems don’t cover all the possible scenarios. The development is rather expensive for such a product. And at the end of the day, for any layout setup that’s not covered, you’ll have to contact the agency.

Most of the time agencies have an expert who can full-fill an editor’s vision, but the procedure is rather slowish. For a breaking news scenario, a response time of an hour or two can make a difference between the winner and the last one in the race.

At portals which are taken care of by a full-time employed webmaster, such inconvenience can be minimized, if not avoided altogether. Webmaster who is a jack-of-all-trades and a problem solver, could replace all the custom cover management systems, no doubt. However, employing such a savvy guy raises the general costs of the web site.

The question remains – is the ability to create custom covers fast worth enough having another employee on a payroll every month?