This year’s Webmaster Jam Session was a resounding success. Many thanks to J. Cornelius and the Coffee Cup staff for putting this conference together.

The WJS, if you don’t know, is a small conference held here in Dallas that attracts some of the top developers and designers in the business. Attendance is kept to 300 people, so the whole thing feels very intimate and focused, and while the conference is sponsored, the conference is devoid of booths and is, hence, free of the noise and distractions normally found at conferences. I can sum up the quality of the speakers by saying that in almost every case, I regretted not being able to be in two places at once.

Two things struck me at the conference that I wouldn’t have expected:

1) The majority of attendees were Mac people. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was among my peeps and didn’t feel like the outcast in the room for whipping out my shiny white Mac Book.

2) The general animosity towards Microsoft was palpable. Throughout the two day conference, jibes, hisses, and boos were thrown in Redmond’s general direction. What’s even more amazing was that Microsoft was one of the show’s sponsors, and they had representatives in attendance! What struck me most is how much this one company has made each and every web developer’s life a living hell. It’s one thing to read about this. It’s quite another to see 300 people in a room actually demonstrate this sentiment.

That aside, the point of the conference is to learn how to become a better web developer. Toward that end, the sessions were aimed a particular topics of interests to professionals doing work on the web. A small selection of the best sessions I attended:

The Dawning of the Age of Experience by Jared Spool
A look at how experience design is changing the Web
Jared is a highly entertaining speaker and gave this year’s keynote. The session focused on the radical notion of improving the user experience on your sites. If there was a common thread, it would be that simplicity rules.

Viewports and Byte-ranges and Bandwidth. Oh my! by James Craig
Standards-based, practical tips for developing for the next generation of mobile devices
James gave a very insightful talk about designing and developing for mobile devices. While he focused mainly on the iPod Touch and iPhone, he advocated the need to keep all mobile users in mind through standards compliance and previewing through emulators if you don’t have the means to test on actual hardware.

The Broken World by Molly Holzschlag
Solving the Browser Problem Once and For All
Molly is famous in the web world for her decades-long advocacy for web standards, and is one of the rare characters in our community. She’s a nut. And I mean that in the good way. Her session focused on why we are where we are with regard to standards support in the various browsers, and after hearing her speak, it’s amazing to me that we have a web at all. I definitely have a new appreciation for the difficult job the browser makers have, and the makers of Safari, Firefox, and Opera are to be commended even more.

Design is in the Details by Bryan Veloso and Dan Rubin
Sometimes the smallest things make the largest impact.
Brian and Dan from Sidebar Creative are two of the most talented designers I’ve come across in a while, and their camaraderie made for a great session. The take-away: pixels matter. As with many of the sessions, simplicity was the theme, here. Give your designs “breathing” room by bumping up fonts and increasing padding & margins. But most of all, take the time to check the alignment of your elements. They did a fantastic real-time fix up of the horrible Fox News web site. By aligning elements and giving the design some breathing room, they improved the site about 1000%. Great session.

All Systems Go by Stephanie Sullivan
Preparing your content for takeoff with CSS
Stephanie is the goddess of CSS and is, in fact, responsible for those fantastic new CSS templates that come in Dreamweaver CS3. She gave an engaging and informative talk on semantic markup and compliant CSS. Again, the drum beat here is simplicity rules (noticing a theme here?).

Real World Accessibility by Derek Featherstone
Get the scoop on creating accessible Websites from one of the world’s top experts.
The closing keynote was given by Derek, one of the world’s leading advocates and experts on developing accessible web sites. Developers need to do more than simply run down a QA checklist and make a site “compliant” (whatever that means). Rather, you should put yourself in the shoes of those who use your site in an unconventional way and pay attention to details. Just one great example: Google Maps. By failing to make their controls actual button elements which could have been styled to look exactly the same as the current controls, those using a screen reader were completely shut out from the app. Something so simple had such a massive impact on the user.

I could keep going since there were many excellent sessions. You can check out the rest of the session details here, and the WJS site promises to have podcasts available soon. In all, the WJS was a fantastic conference and an incredible value. If you get a chance to go next year, I highly recommend attending.

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LockBox is a tool I wrote for myself about a year ago. It quickly developed into something I use on a daily basis. With dozens of clients to keep straight, along with a seemingly endless stream of unique crypt keys and and serials to keep track of, LockBox has proven to be incredibly useful.

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