So I’m catching up with what’s happening in the industry. You know, one of these days when you zeroed-out your mailbox and entered the “save for later” folder in your favorite e-mail app.

You probably wonder about how do you clean your Inbox? Since you are asking, we intensively worked on the relaunch of Croportal last week, and as a reward, the team had a couple of days off.

At this very moment I’m writing the post in one of the 40+ tabs in Safari. And I still haven’t option-spaced NetNewsWire. There’s recent unpacked shipment from Amazon on a shelf across the table. If only days would last longer.

There was a time when web standards pioneers had all the important stuff only in the Bookmarks, because there was simply just a few resources. It was quite handy and convenient having them all in the Bookmarks bar. I sometimes miss that comfort.

Where there was just a dozen of on-topic resources to follow, now is the hundreds. Where there was 2 or three events a year, now is the ten or 20 at least.

I was introduced by 80/20 rule back in 2004. Fast-forward four years later and I wonder which ones are considered today’s 20% must-read authors? Even if I knew, one would still need considerable amount of time for all the latest stuff.

The above question applies to events, too — are there 20% events that cover 80% of the current topics?

The schedule can be occasionally a serious threat, time and budget-wise. Especially if you have to travel across the continent and have tons of work that just don’t allow frequent travel breaks.

We’ve been practicing various media diet programs. Should we also consider event diet?

How to judge which one to choose and which one to discard from the list? With media, you test it for some period and then decide is it good enough to enter reader’s A-list, but for obvious reasons, you can’t apply the same method with events.

Barcamp Zagreb session slots are almost all filled. I reserved mines in the very last moment (thanks Mislav) risking the clash with other presenters which sessions I planned to attend. Everything went well at the end, and BTW I finished up with the two topics:

• Superfast web sites in 20 minutes beginning at 19:20 and ending at 19:40 in Gray room and
• Typography for web, 10 dirty tricks from 20:00 to 20:20 in White ‘the Geekier’ room

Just a few more seats are available, so hurry up and grab yours for an intensive Wednesday afternoon.

YEY! The first BarCamp in Zagreb, Croatia will take place on Wednesday, December 5th, at the Grey and White meeting rooms at FER, Zagreb.

The event is organized by Initium, the guys behind the successful web.start conference, held earlier this year.

At the time of this writing, I already got a booking confirmation from EventWax and if you are coming (and I hope you are), keep an eye on the official web site.

BarCamp rules for attendees are pretty simple: all of the crowd should participate actively in some way. I’m still not quite sure about the topic which would be the most appropriate for me to join with, but I have a few dirty ones — if I am lucky enough so the others would find those interesting:

• Typography for the web
• DIY high-performance web sites
• Usability testing on a shoestring
• Bit-literacy on the web

Now, I whipped this list in hope that I will at least make myself publish an article or two in the near future about the mentioned matters.

Earlier this week, I already wrote about FOWA Expo, but here are more informal bits — moments and quotes written down, remembered or experienced.

Networking

Prior the conference every attendee was asked to sign-up to FOWA Crowdwine and choose her interests, so the organizers can help us meet more people. Those who did, received unique badges at reception with their tags, matches and opposites.

My tags were naturally: user experience, web standards, typography… and my matches were Robin Christoperson, Andrew Pendrick, Sarah Ward and George Zafirovski. I actually met George, who moved from Macedonia to London some 10 years ago, so we easily switched to Croatian (Macedonia and Croatia are both former Yugoslaw republics).

There was a couple of considerable job offers on the conference and if one was available, she could walk away with a brand new position.

Randoms bits

• Erika Hall said Users don’t complain about wording as long as you don’t change colors. (Copy is Interface)
• Matt Biddulph said Internet is small pieces loosely joined. (Coding on the Shoulders of Giants)
• If you need reliable standalone “DOMContentLoaded” JavaScript function, take a look at the shortloaded by famous Stuart Langridge.
• Identity Matcher, extracted from dopplr.com codebase, enables you to pull in social network information from sites such as GMail, Twitter, Flickr or Facebook.
• This one’s my favorite; Daniel Burka said You simply have to say ‘No’ to more features. Look at the Firefox and Mozilla Suite. Firefox would never be so popular if they didn’t decide to keep it simple.

The FOWA Expo was more business oriented then the previous one (Expo extension is for sponsor’s stands on the entrance to the hall, where some interesting product/service demos were held). A vast majority of talks were about lessons learned and dos and don’ts when it comes to startups.

On to presentations… or better yet, speakers

Super-optimistic Chief Performance Yahoo! Steve Sounders, the author of YSlow for Firebug, confirmed what Nate Koechley first introduced at @media this Spring about speeding-up web pages.

You can’t fight the numbers and High Performance Web Sites surely whipped some shocking ones out. I already saw some of the graphs at YUI Blog earlier, but many attendees were left surprised.

Following the High Performance directions, any site can be 50% leaner within a few hours. Given the fact that the companies/organizations invest considerable amounts of money into hardware infrastructure and/or back-end development (for instance, a development of an advanced caching system), it is just silly to skip this first and the easiest step in optimizing site’s performance.

If you’re ready to start making faster web pages, but don’t know where to start, I encourage you to buy a book.

Robin Christopherson, a Web Consultant at AbilityNet, held pretty impressive demonstration about how visually challenged people use the internet. Listening to screen reader playing the endless strings of meaningful text was scary, but at the same time enlightening experience.

The curiosity of the session was — it takes approx. 20 minutes for screen reader to start reading the main content on Amazon.co.uk, because they simply didn’t provide skip to main content link.

Daniel Burka, a lead creative behind Digg and Pownce was a true refreshment. His presentation about community feedback was honest and authentic. He was surprisingly patient to rivers of attendees, without a blink of celebrity pretending. Thanks to his feet standing firmly on the ground, we’ve collected some pretty valuable tips & tricks during the informal discussions afterwards.

Erika Hall from Mule Design in her Copy is Interface gave a bunch of great examples of how careless choice of copy used on the site’s interface can make a site either miss-interpreted or completely blunt. She also pointed out that without knowing your users/audience, it’s difficult to come with the right choice.

The sweet desert of the second day was a survival/essential startup session by Feedburner co-founder Dick Costolo. He extended the presentation well over his minutes, but with a good reason and greatly approved by the crowd.

Launch Late to Iterate Often provided a great insight in common pitfalls in the first year or so of a projects life-span. Pointers like Ask for money when you have it, There’s no such thing as a Standard Deal and Flat Organization are just a few of 14 selected bullets I wrote down; and there was even more… What’s more important — he covered every thesis with a valid example.

All in all, many bits collected and a few randoms I will hopefully post in the next couple of days. In a mean-time, check out the available presentations at SlideShare.

Seats secured. Hope to see you there.

Two busy days of intensive schedule. A few very inspirational talks to fill your creative batteries and some encouraging sessions that simply confirm you’re on the right track. Rivers of nearly 700 people crawling inside the Business Design Centre in Islington, London — in for the presentations and out to breathe some fresh air, grab a bite or light a cigarette — that’s in short what to expect from the largest web conference in Europe.

Sessions

Sessions were held in two tracks, so unfortunately one couldn’t catch up on everything.

I went to see more of the design-oriented talks, while Tomaš, our lead developer, was more interested in technical topics. Vanja (web.burza CEO) and Daniel (our personal paparazzo) visited a little bit of both.

The most inspiring presentation was Jon Hicks’ How to be a creative sponge, after which I couldn’t resist to photographing every single street sign and shop display on the way back to our appartment.

All other sessions were quite interesting, although not revolutionary. We were happy to get the confirmation that we were already following advices given as “best practice”, with one little exception — the eye-opening session High Performance Web Pages by Nate Koechley. At the conference, Nate offered 12 rules for speeding up your pages, but added two missing rules later on in his slides, which can be downloaded from his site.

Special thanks goes to Malarkey for mentioning Croatian design a few times in his presentation Royale with Cheese (slides can be found at his pages, under the events, right-hand column).

People met

Quite oddish, we mostly mingled with Croatian people while we were in London!

We met Danijela Nađ, the head of design at Croatian T-Portal. T-Portal is one of the top five most visited web sites in Croatia, and despite the fact that it’s under the roof of the local T-Com branch (the site is made with frames!), it’s nice to see that the guys behind it care about the standards and are trying to make it better. Baby steps, I guess…

The social aspect of the conference (soundly named @media Europe) was a little bit disappointing. There was a number of “closed” groups (for instance, The Brit Pack) that we did not approach because interrupting “internal” conversations is considered rude back from where I come from. Funny or sad, we had to introduce ourselves to a certain group of individuals for the second time now, but I guess that’s the way it goes when someone is a celebrity and you’re not…

Back in Februray at FOWA, the conference host Ryan Carson and his team made an extra effort it this area, which resulted in boosting a number of everyone’s industry connections. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that the crew behind @media did everything to make the conference as successful as possible. After all — 700 attendees is not easy to handle. (Note to self: visit smaller conferences.)

Despite my ramblings not everything was so dark — we had a few nice little chats with Mr. Joe Clark (he is Canadian, so no wonder), whom we hopefully taught a few lessons about Croatian recent history, even though the man is a walking encyclopedia and you can hardly impress him… Joe briefly introduced me to Richard Ishida, the Internationalization Activity Lead at the W3C, who was quite a pleasant company, too.

The highlight of the trip was finally meeting Rade Brujić (a.k.a. Medo), a long time online friend who was born and lives in London. Medo works for Kingston University London as a web designer/developer in a small, but dedicated web team which is behind some of the great Kingston University subdomains, like the recent International Conference: Excellence in Concrete Construction - through Innovation…

Anyway, Medo was our guide most of the time and thanks to him we spent three nice days hanging out in London’s restaurants and pubs. Hope to see you soon in Zagreb, buddy!

Off conference activities

We had a chance to take a walk around the central London, do some stunts at Traffalgar square and to visit the (unmarked) Abercrombie & Fitch store (where we almost left our life savings). All the cutest chicks work there, so if you are a tourist from Croatia wondering about the lack of cute British ladies on the streets of UK’s capital — the answer is: cuties have to work, too!

Addenum

Podcasts and presenatations from @media 2007. are available for download.

The Tech day of Web.start conference went really well. Apart from being a pioneer conference in Croatia, once again I’ve witnessed the importance of the networking aspect of such an event.

Today, I met guys who I knew only over the internet, so I’ll have to update my XFN relations for the following people: Siniša Dukarić, Stjepan Zlodi, Nikola Plejić, Nikola Denić and Marko Bijelić.

All in all, presentations were quite interesting, especially Joel Spolsky’s The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code and Marko Bijelić’s Information Architecture — mostly because of the presenters’ entertaining style.

Hope to se more of such happenings in our corner of the world.

Update: Vanja and me are not visiting the second conference day. However, in Friday you can meet our fellow developers — Tomaš and Marijo.

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.

FOWA was excellent – I’ll summarize most of it – some interesting topics have to be discussed…

In the mean time here’s what I’ve found around the streets of London (that’s right – I’m a type addict). Excuse me for the low quality of the images, but the weather was far from perfect.

I was honored to be invited by Vuk Ćosić (the founder of Case Sensitive) to Net Konferenca 2007 in Slovenia on January 31.

The main topic of the conference was Social Networking and my fellow colleague Vanja Bertalan was invited along with Mrs. Tanja Gligorović (project supervisor from Podravka d.d.) to speak about Coolinarika.com, a web site developed for Podravka in 2006.

Vanja offers his PowerPoint presentation for download (3.6MB ZIP) at web.burza site (the presentation is in Croatian – nevertheless, numbers and graphs are quite impressive).

Even though it was sometimes difficult for me to understand speakers talking in Slovenian, all presenters were quite interesting and we both went back to Zagreb with quite a few new ideas.

Net Konferenca is a regional event I could visit next year, too. And if they would invite more world-class speakers (like excellent hats-off Daniel Heaf from BBC Radio 1) in the future, I envisage this could be the relevant conference in South-East Europe.

FOWA tickets bougth, hotel reservations made. The next target: same city, four months after… @media Europe 2007.

If you’re local designer/developer and you are interested in visiting the event, please contact me regarding the possible group discount arrangements.

A small Croatian/Slovenian expedition is preparing to experience three days of inspiration & insight at Future of Web Apps 07 summit, the biggest Web 2.0 conference in the UK. The event is held in London, 20-22 Feb 2007. in organisation of Carson Workshops.

Note: Parties from the region interested in joining the trip, may do so via contact form.