The inaugural PodCampSLC 2008 took place on Saturday, March 15th, 2008. The turnout was pretty good. There were a few glitches with building entry and wifi, but all-in-all it was a fairly smooth unconference I suspect. I had great fun meeting people and listening to interesting conversation and one very well done, very educational speech on audio engineering by Mike Wiseland. I also was pleased to meet Jake Spurlock, who works on skiutah.com blog as part of a school project. Very cool stuff. While browsing the blog, I saw this truly gorgeous ski photograph by Grant Gunderson.

Some really cool things I learned at PodCampSLC were:

• The Zoom H4 is a dynamic and superb little podcasting tool.
• The Sure SM58 is a common mic you can get for ~$100.
• The AT4050 is a great mic (three mics in one: cardiod, omni & figure 8) that retails for $999, but you can probably get it for around $550.
• The biggest problem with lower end video cameras is hum from the tape.
• Vegas is a really great professional podcast editor that also does video.
• VisualHub is great video editing software.
• I really like startcooking.com (mentioned by Doug from Podango).
• 50,000 downloads/month is not enough reach to attract sponsorships, 50k might be enough for niche advertisers.
• If it takes 1 hour to create a 13MB audio podcast, it probably will take 10 hours to create a 50MB video podcast.
• Blogging is a great search engine tool. (I knew that one!)
• The best mic situation for a group setting (i.e. users group meeting) is a Zoom H4 type device to record the speaker plus two table top mics for questions from the audience.

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Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO by Jaimie Sirovich, Cristian Darie
Publisher: Wrox (April 16, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0470100923
ISBN-13: 978-0470100929

From url canonicalization to link bait, Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP hits all the SEO basics a php programmer could need. Billed as a book written for the php developer or tech-savvy marketer, this book attempts to debunk a few myths and protect you from the black arts of black hat seo while offering up a healthy dose of code examples and tool suggestions. (more…)

Presentation: Page Source Order and Accessibility
Speakers: Roger Hudson and Russ Weakley
Event: OZeWAI 2005 & WSG
Links: Study, Podcast, Presentation slides
Date: Friday, December 9, 2005

Restructuring page source order has become a recent phenomenon due to CSS layouts that allow developers to create visual presentation using stylesheets that break out of rigid inline, structurally ordered html. Separating presentation from content leads to this question: is placing content first more accessible?

Roger Hudson and Russ Weakley set out to answer three questions in their presentation, “Page Source Order and Accessibility”:

• Is source order important for screen reader users?
• Are skip links a waste of time?
• What are structural labels and do they help?

The study offers up user expectations and observed behavior of screen reader users and text browser users. The conclusions (or recommendations) that result are interesting and not necessarily what the average web developer might expect.

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Presentation: Scaling for Your First 100k Users
Speaker: Matt Mullenweg
Event: Webvisions 2006
Date: Friday, July 21, 2006

I was impressed and intrigued by the best practices Matt Mullenweg presented despite the hardware-heavy titled presentation, “Scaling for Your First 100k Users.” As the founding developer of blog software WordPress, the Jazz musician turned blogging software developer has garnered world-wide recognition and a following of blogging elite. The Q&A after the session was equally as interesting and tech-filled with lots of questions from the audience about infrastructure and hardware. If you would like to start a blog, you should sign up at WordPress.com. (more…)