What is it about?

Euro KickOff lets you download all or individually selected fixtures into your favourite calendar application, whether it is Microsoft Outlook or iCal. You visit the Fixtures page and select whether you would like to follow your favourite team, get all the games of a specific group or stage of the tournament, or even from a particular venue or on a particular date. All that is left for you to do is hit the download button and import the generated file into your calendar application or it might even do it automatically (depending on which application/system you use). You will then have the fixtures in your calendar which will remind you when it is time to meet your friends and watch some football.

Backstage

For the techies amongst my readers, this is for you. The header of the site uses the Paralax effect demonstrated on Clearleft‘s Silverback App page. Just adjust the width of your browser window and you will see what I mean by that. A nice effect which also incorporates the flair of the hosting countries.

We are using hackable URLs, so you are able to access particular fixtures using, for example:

• http://www.eurokickoff.com/en/fixtures/ (for all fixtures)
• http://www.eurokickoff.com/en/fixtures/austria (for a particular team)
• http://www.eurokickoff.com/en/fixtures/vienna (for a specific venue)

The awesome design was put together by Gareth Brown, whereas the script behind the generation of the calendar files is courtesy of Brian Suda. Just before the weekend we are planning to put in translations for German and hopefully some more languages before the actual start of the tournament on June 7.

After all, it has been great fun working on this project and I am glad and happy how it turned out in the end. Even if you are not a huge football fan, I encourage you to try it out and provide feedback. Thanks!

With conferences like this, with so many interesting topics, it is always hard to decide between two interesting sessions. After all you need to pick one, and the other one will be recorded anyhow and the slides will be put online. So, in fact, you are not missing out that much. So here is a quick summary of the sessions.

Wednesday

Opening Keynote: Return of the King of Web Standards (Jeffrey Zeldman)

I have never seen Jeffrey Zeldman speak, so I figured that this is going to be interesting. Jeffrey gave a quick summary what kind of developments in the past led us to where we are today in terms of Web Standards.

Real World Accessibility for Real World People (Derek Featherstone)

Derek more or less gave the same talk that I have already seen in November at @media Ajax in London (with the same jokes…kind of). But no big deal. It was good hearing again how he tackled the problem that Google Maps is not accessible at all and how he and his team fixed it. And, I believe, it is always good to get a shot or two of accessibility guidelines once in a while cause they tend to be forgotten about in daily business life.

Five Essential Composition Tools for Web Typography (Kimberly Elam)

That talked turned out to be something I was not really expecting. Kimberly is coming from a very print focused background and is Chair of the Graphic & Interactive Communication Department at the Ringling College of Art + Design, Sarasota, Florida. In her talk she explained how she teaches her students what makes typography good typography. I felt that many of these things are highly applicable when it comes to print, but sometimes are kind a hard to translate into the web world (especially with variables like increasing or decreasing font-size, different screen resolutions etc.). But I found her slides very good and I wished we would have had those back at uni.

“Plays Well With Others” (Brian Oberkirch)

In his talk, Brian talked about ways to overcome the huge amount of different social sites and user credentials we need to remember and always have to go through the hassle of setting up a profile, inviting your friends etc. Solutions to that could be OpenID and OAuth.

What makes a design seem intuitive? (Jared Spool)

Jared is just great. Even if you have no clue what Web Usability means, you can just turn up for his talks and leave with an entertained mood. It is just the funny and compelling way that he presents. What he covered was how can a great design be intuitive to the user? It always depends on the target user audience and by knowing about the “knowledge gap” between current knowledge and target knowledge. So bridging what the user currently knows and what he needs to know in order to complete his task.

Better Gmail (Gina Trapani)

Gina, who works for Lifehacker.com, described how she discovered how it is possible for developers to make their favorite web applications better using Greasemonkey and fix issues that the original developers maybe have not thought about. Finally, Google released the Greasemonkey API for Gmail which makes it more easier for developers to add additional functionality on top of Gmail (e.g. keyboard shortcuts for most executed user actions, like ‘delete’, ‘move to inbox’).

Thursday

What was really nice of the organizers was that they rewarded people who put blogposts on their web site, uploaded photos to Flickr etc. to spread the word about WDN. And the first site John put up on the projector (in the main audience hall with about 300 people), on Thursday morning before the second day started, was mine. I was flattered and felt very happy (although it also reminded me that a redesign might be a good idea). Anyway, so the reward consisted of a very nice WDN 2008 T-shirt and 3 books. Awesome – thanks again for that.

Innovation is Overrated (Indi Young)

In this first session of the day, Indi talked about how innovation does not really happen “overnight”, but rather is a process of years sometimes. She talked about mental models and really emphasized how important it is to think about the problems that people have and – most of all – listen to them. She is also the author of a book called Mental Models:Aligning design strategy with human behavior.

The 3 Stages of Dynamic Systems (Boris Mann)

Boris mainly took his stand point on how the web changed from static to dynamic content – well, in fact there are still a huge load of web sites out there, which are put together using static content. He made a lot of references to Brian Oberkirchs talk yesterday and made a few major points, e.g. don’t reinvent the wheel: rather than develop another CMS, take some of the solutions that are out there. To extend them, use plugins/modules. Much kind of in the spirit of Don’t Repeat Yourself.

Ajax Security (Douglas Crockford)

Douglas – also not inimitable – made some really strong points about how the whole browser model today is broken, with lots of security flaws especially. What developers can do is make their as strong and secure and clean as possible, but in the end, the web still remains broken. He took some extreme points of view but that is just Douglas, and you need to respect and give him credit for that. Like with Joe Clark, it sometimes takes extreme standpoints and opinions to push something and make sure it gets done right the next time.

Where’s your web at? (John Allsopp & Dave Shea)

Dave and John talked about new challenges that await us developers now and in the near future when it comes to how users will visit our sites. Not on a desktop computer in their office, but on any device that is out there which has internet capabilities. They mentioned mobile devices like regular cellphones or the iPhone, but also things like the Wii and Televisions which allow you to browse the web. Dave focussed on the design aspects, whereas John talked about interaction related challenges such as not having a regular keyboard or a mouse at hand to interact with a page.

Very interesting, especially from my perspective, cause the diploma thesis I did about one and a half years ago dealt with those things (amongst others). As John said, they could have continued to talk about this for hours, cause there are just so many aspects to it that are worth researching and thinking about.

The Why and How: UI Case Studies (Daniel Burka)

Daniel is the creative director at Digg, a founder of Pownce, and a founder of the Canadian web firm silverorange. Daniel showed his experiences from (re-)designing certain parts of Digg and his approach when he designed Pownce. He gave insights as to how digg users reacted and gave feedback based on his changes and what it feels like to get emails from angry people who liked the old design better.

The presentation had many interesting topics in it, although unfortunately many of them got kinda lost because of the bad quality of the projector.

Closing Keynote: Movement (Matt Webb)

I had met Matt (try to repeat that quickly, 5 times in a row) briefly after lunch and found out that he also came to Vancouver from London. Very nice chap and I was looking forward to his keynote. What surprised me, but in a positive way, was that he did not give a kind of “hands on” presentation, but rather talked about stuff that makes you think, rather than opening your laptop and start coding.

Honestly, many of the stuff he talked about I had a hard time to figure out how this ties into the internet that we know today, but I believe that what he was trying to convey was that with things like RSS, APIs etc. at hand, we should be able to further enrich the user experience and the applications that we are building today for our user audience. To continue the maturing process of the web,that, as Matt said, started in 2007.

Wrap up

So that’s it. Four days of Web Directions North went by, just like that. And I have to say that it has been better than last year. Some of the talks were not as thrilling as I hoped them to be, but overall I got a lot of input, things to learn and food for my brain to think about and apply in the near future. “Broaden the horizon” is a good term I would say. Also because of the many people I had a chance to meet and talk to. Thanks to Maxine, Dave, Derek and John for doing this again, it has been a pleasure to be here.

Yesterday, there was the closing party, sponsored by (mt) Media Temple, which was fun, and Friday and Saturday some folks are going up to Whistler to have a blast skiing there. Not me this time, but I believe I will find some other interesting stuff to do in Vancouver .

More stuff about the conference

• WDN Cafepress Store
• Meetweaver
• WDN Facebook Group
• WDN08 Flickr Group

Monday: Transcending CSS (workshop), Andy Clarke

Andy, in his inimitable way, talked us through the topics he also covers in his recent book, Transcending CSS. Even though I heard him speak last year, there were, again, some eye-opening things he mentioned during the workshop. One example would be the way he approaches designing a web site. He does not actually use Photoshop that much, but rather does most of the design in the browser itself. And one thing, that he showed, which should go without saying these days, is, to start with the content. Starting with the pure markup, without thinking about the visual presentation at all. Considering his marvellous design skills, he is then able to magically make some magnificent designs “happen” before you even realize what is going on.

He also used some advanced CSS techniques (including some CSS3 stuff), which is nice, but would require to get the “this page does not have to look the same in every browser” attitude into the mindsets of every person involved in a web project, especially the stakeholders.

Overall, I enjoyed it very much and got a lot of things out of it that I could use for future projects.

Tuesday: Designing Really Usable Websites (workshop), Jared Spool

If you have ever seen Jared Spool speak, you might not want to miss another opportunity to attend a workshop on Web Usability with him. There was so much interesting stuff but one of the key things was that you should consider your content page (the page the information is located the user is looking for) the most important page (in terms of development and design time). Other things were that the 7±2 rule does not apply to web design when it comes to putting together the navigation items and that if users need to scroll, it does not really mean that the site is less usable.

In general, it was enlightening in my ways. On his User Interface Engineering site, Jared and his guys put even more useful stuff online about really usable sites.

Canucks vs. Stars

I am not exactly what you can call a lucky charm when it comes to me going to a Vancouver Canucks game. Last year they lost against the Chicago Blackhawks, this time the game ended with a 3-4 loss against the Dallas Stars. Too bad, but I did enjoy the experience. I don’t get to see an NHL game that often

Update (January 28th, 2008): Just by pure concidence, I just found an article on the BBC website that quotes a survey where Vancouver is voted as “the best place to live” out of 127 cities. I can totally see why.

The flight

I had chosen a direct flight with Air Canada from London Heathrow to Vancouver International Airport on Saturday. And it turned out, it was a good choice. The aircraft which was used was – I would say – a more or less brand new Boeing 767, with awesome luxury seats in first class, but also decent seating in economy class. Lots of legroom and even power plugs. So I managed to work on some stuff for this blog, talking to my neighbor and the 10 hours flight time went by pretty quickly.

Back in nice Vancouer

I took a cab to the Hyatt Regency, where the conference will be held as well. After finding out that, although the view from the room on the 24th floor is amazing, having a connecting door to the room next door is not so much. Especially when you can hear the neighbor watching TV. So I switched to a different room on the 7th floor. The view is less good, but it is much more quiet. I like it. The price for one day of Internet connection (wireless) is $ 14.95 (plus VAT), which is, again, a rip-off, but I hope the guys from WDN can get the WiFi right this time .

Meeting a friend

After unpacking, I met a friend of mine from my time back at uni. It was really nice catching up with her, haven’t seen her for about a year. We went to Steamworks for a beer and then to some other bar. At ten, the jet lag started to kick in and I made my way back to the hotel.

Sunday

Considering the time difference of 8 hours, I did not sleep that bad. I got up around 7am, got some breakfast and wanted to pay a visit to the Vancouver Art Gallery. Unfortunately, 3 of the 4 exhibitions are not open until Saturday. So I cancelled that, or rather moved that to Sunday. Instead, considering the sky turned blue and the sun was up, I decided to go for my run around Stanley Park.

I think I can

Although it was sunny, it only had about +3° Celsius and it was a bit windy. But it was beautiful to go running, especially in such a nice environment. After about a third of the way, and due to the fact that my right knee sometimes starts to hurt a bit while running, I said to myself: “Do you really want to do this?” Cause normally I only run for about 40 minutes, when I go running around Regents Park in London.

But I did it, felt pretty exhausted afterwards, but very “refreshed” in a way. And this is the raw data that my Polar Heart Rate monitor recorded for me during my run:

I am quite happy with the result and feeling pretty good that I did what I planned to do. My muscles are a bit sore, but that’s part of the deal.

So tomorrow the conference is staring off for me with Andy Clarke‘s workshop, Transcending CSS. Really looking forward to it. If you want to get a visual impression of what is going on here, check my photostream from my stay in Vancouver.

After doing Web Directions South in Sydney for a couple of years, Maxine and John, with the help of Derek and Dave, took their idea to beautiful Vancouver last year and – from my perspective – it was a huge success and well received by the attendees. Web Directions North 2007 had almost everything one could ask for from a conference. Great speakers, a nice venue, decent catering and – last but not least – 2 days of skiing in Whistler. The only thing that did not really work was the WiFi (as it is almost the case with every conference I have been to).

It will be hard to top that, but having a look at the website and checking out this years ‘feature list’, there are a couple of things that makes me think that it will even get better and that I am looking forward to:

• Even nicer venue at the Hyatt Regency Hotel
• Even more impressive speaker list, including Jeffrey Zeldman, Douglas Crockford, Jared Spool and Matt Webb

In addition to that, there will be a closing party sponsored by (mt) Media Temple and – once again – 2 days of skiing at Whistler. What I am personally planning to do is putting on my trainers and run around Stanley Park, going to another Vancouver Canucks game and making a day trip to Victoria on Vancouver Island.

To sum it up: I am really looking forward to this trip and escaping busy and grey London for a couple of days.

Anyways, I brought these nice little presents from my accident home with me. Unfortunately, I also got sick during the long flight from Vancouver back home to Dornbirn (via Frankfurt and Vienna). There were some troubles with the air condition during the trans atlantic flight, which made it become pretty hot in the cabin.

So when I came home, it turned out to be a nice flu. But this is also much better now, thank God.

Still I had to see a doctor today, because since Saturday I felt some strange dizzyness when lying down in bed, which made me vomit a couple of times on Saturday. It did not get better on Sunday, so I called the hospital and one of the doctors there advised me to see an ENT specialist on the next day. So today I went to this specialist. He calmed me down by saying that this is nothing serious, though the reason for this might be the accident I had up on the slopes in Whistler. He showed me an exercise I should practice 3 times a day so that some crystals which are part of my inner ear get rearranged and do not affect my sense of balance.

I also feel much better after I saw the doctor and I think that I am on my way to “100% healthy” again…

I will still take it easy in the next couple of days and try not to overdo it. I am certainly not in the mood for a relapse. I will try to do as much as I feel I can do – which is: constantly looking for new job opportunities, as I will be of no work starting March 1st. So if you know of any interesting opportunities for a Front-End Web Developer, focusing on XHTML, CSS and JavaScript with some decent Back-End Skills (for details, see my resume), I’d be happy to hear from you…

First, on Thursday, there was the keynote of Kelly Goto, talking about “Designing for Lifestyle”. She basically pointed out that it is of crucial importance to know your audience when producing a product/offering a service and communicating a lifestyle, not functionality.

In “Web Apps 2″ Paul Hammond talked about how the bridge between Front-End and Back-End Developers can be bridged and George Oates shared her experiences when working for Flickr. The afternoon was reserved for Dave Shea and Veerle Pieters where they presented all different kinds of aspect of “The Design Process”. Very nice and lovely done.

But the real highlight was the closing keynote by Jared Spool who basically extended what Kelly Goto talked about in the morning. In his unique and humorous way of presenting, he unveiled the secrets of User Interface Engineering explained how important the user is and what could be done to get into his/her mind – to make better products and provide better services. Marvellous.

The offical Closing Party then took place at Library Square Public House and was sponsored by Media Temple. A great party where I had, again, the chance to talk to all the guys and everything went a little more loose than before. Maybe due to the alcohol, who knows. Nevertheless I went to bed at 00:30 to make sure to catch up enough sleep for the ski trip to Whistler, which took place the following day.

After a 2 hour bus ride, we arrived in Whistler at about 9am. Until about 4pm we were able to check out the I do not know how many slops on Whistler Mountain and Blackcomb and catch some food and drinks at the Garibaldi Lounge, where the guys from Microsoft were so kind to pay for everything. Unfortunately, on my first run down, I had a little “accident”, which means I fell, I hurt myself a bit – including smashing by digital camera. I was able to take some pictures before, but due to it is not working anymore, I not be able to download the from the media until I am back in Austria. So be patient

Nevertheless, it was a great trip up there, I really enjoyed it. When coming back to the Hotel at about 8pm I was so tired, I had to go to bed immediately. I was also booked for the 2nd trip up to Whistler today, Saturday, but due to my physical conditions, I figured that it would be better to stay in Vancouver and take it easy. So I spent some time walking in Stanley Park, went for Lunch on Dunmen Street and went the the Canucks store to look for some interesting fan gear. I also tried to get a ticket for tonights game vs. Atlanta, but it is sold out completely and I do not want to pay $200+ to some strange people selling tickets outside the stadium. So I will take it easy tonight, grab a bite at the hotel restaurant and go to bed. Tomorrow, I am going back to Austria.

After the break, I joined a couple of other folks at “Web Apps – Ajax Kung Fu Meets Accessibility Feng Shui”, done by Jeremy Keith and Derek Featherstone. Jeremy basically talked about what things needs to be considered when adding behaviour (i.e. Ajax) to your site. Derek then continued pointing out how important it is to ensure that your site still remains accessible, even with some fancy scripts in place.

I already knew a couple of things from reading Jeremy’s book. Concerning Derek’s speech, I totally agree with him and think that all the issues he mentioned are very valid. But on the other hand: who, in a real world client situation really has time to think about all the accessibility issues he mentioned? Most of the time, money and time is limited and in the end you are glad if all the markup and the css is in place, the client is more or less happy and you are done with the project. I am not saying that accessibility is not important, I only want to point out that in most projects, the client does not give you the time (and the money) to think about these things in great detail. Nevertheless, very eye-opening in many cases.

Then I had a tough decision to make concerning which session to attend after lunch. I chose “Microformats” with Tantek Çelik, John Allsopp and Dan Cederholm. Very interesting. I had a look into Microformats before, but not into detail. I really loved the presentation and what you are able to do with Microformats, I am looking forward to implement them on this site as soon as I have time. A very funny closing keynote from Joe Clark marked the end of day 2 – at least the official part.

At night, it was time for hockey. I got my tickets for Canucks vs. Blackhawks some time before the conference and was very excited to go there. I was really amazing, my first NHL game, but unfortunately, Vancouver lost 0-3. Do I have to tell you more?

The first day at WDN was really great. I already met a bunch of really nice guys and we’re planning to have dinner and some drinks later. There were 3 workshops going on today at the same time, all of them with very interesting topics. I have chosen “CSS + JavaScript = Magic” with experts Aaron Gustafson and Andy Clarke (see picture below).

Both of them took the audience on a journey through CSS and JavaScript, covering the current trends and best practices in terms of how the state-of-the-art web designer/developer can use both to mark-up their code in a semantic way, styling it with some nice and nifty CSS techniques and add some cool behaviour using JavaScript. In the end I was quite satisfied that I was able to follow them – although it might take some deeper look into the specific topics to implement some of the techniques myself.

Alltogether a very nice and useful start. Really looking forward to tomorrows sessions.

From there I got to Vienna, catching the connection flight to Frankfurt and then hopping on a Lufthansa plane to touch down in Vancouver 10 hours later…at 1:30pm to be precise. So as you can imagine – all a bit of a hassle. But it’s worth it.

I am staying at the Renaissance Vancouver Hotel Harbourside during my stay – it is also the venue of the conference, which makes attending a little bit more convenient. The only bad thing so far: the weather. It is pretty foggy and rainy, so you do not see much of the beautiful Vancouver area scenery with all the mountains etc.

Anyways, the conference starts tomorrow and I am really looking forward to that…