Session 1 Blog in a Box

I'll be honest. I am not quite feeling up to the task of blogging this session so I'll do the best I can, but keep an eye out for other posts on this topic because I am one tired /pre-occupied Blogher this morning.

I arrived late because one of our live-blogher had drop off the roster at the last minute and yours truly didn't tweak to the idea of covering the open sessions herself until 10:00am, chalk it up to slight managerial incompetence.

The room is very very large for a hands-on workshop. I am amazed by the numbers in the room and the good cheer of the presenters faced with such daunting odds.

The basic idea seems to be a run-through of the basic information neccessary to someone who wants to set-up a blog in two hours.

Webtools 1/2 a Session

We've moved into social booksmarks now, and building links lists and blogrolls using delicious or magnolia.

Prior to this segment we busted through adding a book/movies or albums wishlist through the Amazon site and adding a calendar using Upcoming.org

The speaker has just introduced a library of PHP scripts for adding RS feeds capability to your site, the conversation is getting a little technical now, and mark kantor i heckling by asking stupid questions so that the speaker will elaborate the point, but the basic idea is that the library (which is a bunch of code) will take the rss feeds from other sites and dump it onto your site in a pretty little html list. There are a bunch of ways to do this using hosted services but if you want to control the feeds you manage through your front page then something like Simple pie probably the way to do it.

However if your still discovering the meaning behind those nifty h1 h2 h3 tags you'd do better to stick with something like Rss-to-Javascript.

Now we've moved into discussion of the merit of Feedburner and difference between rs feed going out and RSSfeeds coming in.

Adding plugin and other add-ons to your blog -engine. This generally require that you have a blog you host yourself and are not using a web-based service like blogger.

Generally one of the major drawbacks of the free services hosted on some major datafarm probably just a few blocks from here is the fact that you can't customize the performance of your blog by adding things like sidebar builders or administrative tools like search optimizers.

Here comes Mark Kantor heckling again; "What's the difference between a widget and a module?" and the speaker replies "It's just semantics?" and then Mark says" Is that like the semantic web?" Which gets a few chuckles.

Accesability

It is now 10:30am and a huge bunch of people just stood up started tsretching and talking through the accessability dicussion, okay good, now they have at down. Or left.

The speaker i discussing accessabilty, web accessability being the way to design a website so taht peopel who have functional deficits be they visual , cognitive or phycically disabling can surf the web without experiencing extra difficulty compared to people without deficits. here is a breakdown of her examples;

Non-paragraphed text and non-cited links. The non-cited link example is something I hadn't considered, the idea being that if your link is around the word "here" then a person with impaired vision who uses a screen reader and pulls just the links off a page, may not get much from the link target title or it's text.

the Back button Opening pages in blank screens breaks the back button and for people with attentiveness defecits the lack of a age history can have a huge problem retracing their steps

Color schemes and link states Using link state color schemes that help poeple with colour blindness or cognitive deficits will make it clear which links have been visited and which not, similiarly colour schemes need to keep to colour pairs that are visible high contrast and bright enough so that visually impaired people and people who are color blind can clearly read the texts

Alt vs title on images Using alt is usually for the visually impaired there is a difference between title and Alt tags, and the schema for using them is fairly complex. make it clear in your alt tags the function that the image serves, if it serves a function within your post, a title i the title of your image. that's the difference your image syntax should reflect that.

Catchpas The visual catchpa is a set of images of letters that form a scrambled word. If you are in full command of your faculties it can still be difficult to figure out when a 1 is a one and an i is an i so imagine if you are a peron coping with dyslexia/visual impairment/ yeah - it ucks. Try to avoid catchpas or like blgger use and audio catchpa which isn't perfect but is better

Layout The lay-out standard of sidebar at right is not just standard it's kinda neccesary. when people using screen readers see blogs with left hand sidebars they have to scroll through every item on the left before you get to the body text. To deal with this in your templates if you are couragous you can siwtch the order of your template columns, if you aren't couragous find a new template with a yellow checkmark at the bottom, that has the column on the right.

Text-sizeDon't use fixed text-sizes in your lay-out. ( ouch ! ) take the time to learn ems and then use yoru em forumla for all typography.

FlashTry to avoid creating loops in Flash that trap a user who can't see the visual interface and forces them to re-start their browser.

The Final Rule If you don't know: Ask

We are now watching a photoshop tutoarial made in screencast. A method by which you make a movie on your computer by capturing screendata and recording your voice as you working on your computer. ( thisis reminidng me of the second book of the Cryptonomicon and if I weren't such a busy nerd I would look up the name of the process that sneakily does the same thing) I am going to find the links to the screencast at the end of this sesion so I am not going to bother explaining what's going on.

blogher_06