Penn State Web Conference 2007

Here are links to my slides from my presentations, as well as the joint session with Doug Stanfield and Wendy Estep:

Penn State Home Pages Conversion to CSS

Web Development Workflow

Web File Version Control with Subversion

It seems as if these "Web 2.0" ideas have carried into the How-to-Run-a-Conference space. Specifically I mean the community of peers who drive the content vs a traditional producer-consumer relationship.

No, not that these are new. A point Al had during the lightning talks was that the "lighting talks" and "birds of a feather (BoF)" sessions have been around for quite a while. To see them take hold in our Web conference is a positive step.

Some of these ideas are new because of the technology behind them being new, ergo blogging and podcasting. I think the conference blog is a great addition (I must, I keep adding to it!). Then again, I am an extrovert. Judging by the number of people I saw blogged vs count of conference attendees, it seems we are a bit in the minority.

I didn't see the podcasting-at-the-conference feature take off as much, but I wonder if that could be improved. I think having a mic in the hall seems a bit too removed from the discussions it could be recording and appears too "inconvenient" as I walk by on the way to the next session. Did we have many takers? Apparently, one other attendee's comment seemed interested in podcasting-at-the-conference-sessions. Maybe a podcast of the lightening talks and/or BoF may also be of value? Let the mic be your talking stick. Sure, baby steps are fine, this is just pie-in-the-sky discussion.

I wonder how well this can/should be carried into our "home" blogs (e.g. if you participate in the blogs.psu.edu pilot), and if this blog would loose participation after the conference? Perhaps it could be partially incorporated with year-round Penn State Web professional events, such as the Web lunch talks, WEBTALK@lists.psu.edu mailing list or http://webstyleguide.psu.edu/forum/ forum? Just some food for thought.

--
Jeff

Thanks to all who attended this session!

Examples of the ORP's use of Progressive Download in Flash are available for viewing here:
http://www.research.psu.edu/orp/education/offerings/archive.asp

The Flash examples are the last two on the page, listed under "April 8, 2005" and "December 3, 2004". The rest of the page are scheduled to be converted to Flash video.

I will be making my raw .fla files available for download soon.

Using multiple CSS files and manipulating text attributes such as line-height, Jerry and Christian offered an important look at "Publishing Scholarly Articles on the Web."

It was nice to see such a focus on typography and readability, amidst all these new mashups and other things that do little to enhance the viewing of complex articles on the Web. With more and more Web pages packing as much content into a browser window as possible, we can't forget how necessary it is to be able to turn all that junk off and get to the heart of what we are looking for...

If they should offer this (or a similar) session at a future conference, I recommend attending. As more and more lengthy articles, poems, and other mediums move primarily to the Web, we will have to treat them with care...

A big "thank you!" to those who came to my presentation. For those who missed it, it's now available in the WebLion SVN here. Presenter notes are available in the print view.

For the benefit of those who didn't come to the session, and for those who left before some questions were asked at the end, here's a review. Don't worry, the names of the innocent have been changed to protect the guilty.

• Is Penn State WebAccess available for sites hosted on php.scripts.psu.edu? - Yes, they are! Read php.scripts.psu.edu for how you can email us to add a (symbolic) link to your site from the WebAccess protected site under php.scripts. We can link to your top level folder, or to a sub folder to allow you to have separate public and protected content. You can identify who the user is who accessed your site via the $_SERVER['REMOTE_USER'] PHP variable. You can use that variable to restrict access in your code logic, or use the conventional .htaccess based access control.
• Can Friends of Penn State (FPS) accounts login to Penn State WebAccess? - Yes, they can! By default, all Penn State Access Accounts and FPS accounts are granted access via the same webaccess.psu.edu form to all WebAccess protected sites. A site designer would need to perform an authorization (authZ) step to restrict access to specific accounts. For example, one writing code on php.scripts.psu.edu can check the $_SERVER['REMOTE_REALM'] php variable to see if it is set to "dce.psu.edu" (for Access Accounts) or "fops.psu.edu" (for FPS).
• With DCE going away, what should we do to keep using groups with IIS in Active Directory? - Nothing will change for you. The Kerberos authentication service provided by the fido, sparky & scooby servers for the realm "dce.psu.edu" will still continue to work after we shut down the DCE service, which also uses the "dce.psu.edu" realm name. If your kerberos configuration uses the tr21g20, tr22g20, tr22g19 or yoda (or for some strange reason, the decommissioned servers f04s05, f04s06, vader), then you should really be planning on switching over. No one using Active Directory with Penn State Access Accounts should be.
• Will the feeds to the Penn State Directory (LDAP) service such as IBIS and ISIS be more immediate? - (answer paraphrased from Jimmy) This is something in which we are trying to do a better job. We receive several feeds during the day, Monday through Friday, so during the week, it will be updated at least daily if not better. For any changes submitted directly by the users, which include User Managed Groups & personal directory information submitted via https://www.work.psu.edu/, their changes are immediate.

Feel free to add a comment to this blog entry if you didn't get a chance to ask your question, or send me email at jcd at psu dot edu (ya, you'll need to convert that "at" to an @, etc).

Slides: http://www.personal.psu.edu/jcd/useful/webcon/2007/.

--
Jeff

The Auto-align feature in Photoshop Extended just completely blew my mind!

Based on Robert McDaniels' demonstrations of CS3, Adobe has done an excellent job integrating their suite of apps...They are making repetitive tasks easier and much more efficient for cross application work-flow.

Awesome Job, Adobe!

$500 for the site license Master Collection of CS3.

***THE FOLLOWING IS AN UPDATE***

I had to update that Dreamweaver just crashed during McDaniels' presentation. It made everyone chuckle, and I heard one dude say - "better quit while you're ahead"...

So maybe $500 is a bit too much for the Master Collection, or maybe we should all await the updates before we purchase...

:)

I posted about our session over at my PSU Updates blog (powered by the Blogs at Penn State toolset). If you are interested in the slides, head on over and get them as a PDF. We had a blast pulling this together and talking. I hope everyone enjoyed it -- we tried to keep it easy and loose. Hope we hit the mark. Thanks to those who attended!

I found Jared's explanation of what is Web 2.0 quite interesting.

Four components of Web 2.0 -

- AJAX is NOT a Web 2.0 component - it's an embedded, supporting technology, Jared says. Flash, DHTML, PDF, Quicktime, etc. Important stuff, but not necessarily Web 2.0

- User generated content is NOT Web 2.0 per se - reviews on Amazone, posts on eBay, Community forums. These have been around since the beginning of the Web.

- Concrete examples of Web 2.0 - Flickr is the poster child for Web 2.0. Various applications are created by individuals to track things on flickr like where photos are shot, who is shooting them, etc. Notice some folks are doing this with other Web 2.0 sites, such as twittervision.

- Feeds are also part of flickr. Anything can be picked up on flickr via feeds.

- You can attach flickr photos to your blog.

- Tagging, folksonomies, are part of flickr as well. Allows one to see all their photos in particular categories, as well as others.

- You can also gather contacts and communicate with others.

- APIs....these include mash-ups. Guy made an application that put Craig's List postings on a map. I think this is an interesting example - took data streams and allowed users to find real estate listings on a map.

- He's now talking about twittervision. I agree, twittervision is hypnotic. He just moved onto a site that post snippets of conversations. I just love that stuff, I have to go there myself. I hear enough fun stuff on campus from people talking into their cellphones, and apparently thinking cellphones are similar to tincan phones, therefore you have to yell into them. But I digress.

- APIs are important in that other developers can build upon data and functionality and create some really cool stuff.

- Feeds.....Feeds can be powerful - but it can be complicated. Feeds are complex, you have to explain them. Feeds do not act predictably and chronological data is not the best way to organize articles. To find something, you have to know when it was written.

- Tagging.....del.icio.us is one of the first to make full use of these. Tag clouds, etc. You can create a hierarchy of most popular search items. Tagging is a great way to not only find things, but also people with a similar interest. The challenges include keeping things "clean" and moderated. It's very complex, jared notes.

- Netflix allows you to add "friends" to talk about films, see what films these "friends" like. Not so sure about this, sees sort of overkill. I guess it is okay to find movies that you and your friends would like.

- Social networks.....people will misbehave. No kidding. I know this as a moderator on a bulletin board.

- Online reviews.....5,000 reviews for first Harry Potter book at Amazon. However, on Target.com, most reviews are negative. Amazon has more diverse reviews, because of more people going there. I think more of it is people are more likely to complain than praise.

Why are blogs posted in chronological order? Wouldn't it be cool if blogs had tags associated with them, which would allow users the powerful mechanism of finding blogs based on interest rather than having to remember a blog post date?

I have used Amazon Fishbowl, Mr. Spool. I've seen some pretty Awesome musicians on Amazon Fishbowl w/Bill Maher, Mr. Spool.

So when you clearly say that NOBODY uses Amazon Fishbowl, I think you are a bit confused.

Cool presentation - otherwise...

:)

I whipped up quick tutorial screencast about Yahoo Pipes to go along with my presentation about mashups tomorrow at 11am. In the tutorial I show how to use Yahoo Pipes to pull the Web 2007 blog and del.icio.us feed together, do a content analysis to determine keywords, and search the web for related content, all in around 5 minutes.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cxm470/movies/pipesexample-psuweb2007.mov

Results from this experiment:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=Iklka6cX3BGSBBIV1vC6Jw

Just wanting to see if sessions will be available as podcasts this year? Looks like there are some killer session that I won't be able to get to. Are you planning on capturing and releasing audio from the sessions? If not, as a presenter, am I able to record my session if I bring my own equipment?

Well, the Web Conference is catching up with Web 2.0. Following Jeffrey Veens keynote in 2006, Jared Spool is returning with his message Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hipe. And what lovely hipe it is. All that goodness being made available in easy-to-implement JavaScript frameworks; and OH!, the Google, blog and Facebook APIs. It's enough to make us forget about usability and - dare I even mention the word - accessibility.

I'm here to say that yes, Virginia, you can have it all, but we need to build our skill set. Which is why we have Web 200X to get us started on the path to Web 2.0 mastery.

It's a start. If you have the heart, the world is your oyster. Enjoy the conference!

P.S. Don't forget your laptop, camera, voice recorder, your head, ...

P.P.S. Tag your links and photos to del.icio.us, flickr and other favorite community sites with psuweb2007.

P.P.P.S It's crazy to try and compile a reading list of individual articles and books; it's way too subjective and domain-bound. Here's a Google search link that can get you started:

Google search: reading list web 2.0

... except that some of the classic stuff doesn't rate with Google any more - that's the limits of the Google search method. So, check out:

• The Cluetrain Manifesto
• More to come, and check out the psuweb2007 links at del.icio.us

Bravely jumping in with both feet.

This sums up my attitude towards the various developments that are finally being implemented around here. It also seems to be the attitude of others who have reached critical mass. Seeing the WebCon take on its new zope/plone face at the webconference.psu.edu domain, submitting a "podcast" which is a new part of process of being a presenter this year, and now I find myself blogging directly to the "companion site." It seems that just last year we were just talking about these various technologies or supporting others. Now there's a whole lot of community dog food being eaten and my reaction seems to be the same to each one. To the whole, it is a wow.

To each one, it brings new challenges along with new benefits. I myself wasn't directly attracted to the zope/plone camp, but find the activities others have been doing compelling. The promises of a better workflow by the ITS Knowledge Base have been realized so far for the simple group model, but there remain challenges to consider. My own group in ASET has been pushing towards our own plone based presence. While I remain cynical of the unfinished details, I still feel overall optimistic and very willing to lend whatever small amount of insight I can provide.

I feel compelled to contribute to the WebCon blog site, as well as the blogs.psu.edu pilot, in the interest of steering my own little part of the big ship and also just to see by doing where we are headed. I also believe this is a great way to extend the conversations outside of the conference and also allow others to join in who wouldn't be able to physically. My biggest complaint is that there are too many choices for break out sessions to turn down. I feel hopeful this will help extend the knowledge so more people can hear about more topics of interest.

Can't say the wiki is all that new to me. I've been using it for internal IT staff documentation for years. My advice for using them is to agree to the philosophy of less is more. Try to do too much with formatting and you'll spend far more effort that it is worth; at least with most wikis that is the case. That said, I keep wanting to "iterate to the truth" on just about every other new system that isn't a wiki.

Part of my giddiness towards all of these "new" things has been from anticipation of the sweeping change coming from my camp with the PASS Migration and its impact on our Web services. At this conference, my personal theme is devoted to riding the waves of change and staying on top of the curve. It takes a lot of energy to do, but can be very rewarding.

Hope to see most of you on Monday.

--
Jeff