April craziness
April Fools
Okay, in case you were worried or wondering, yesterday's post was just a silly joke for April Fool's Day. I hope it didn't alarm anyone too much. I did make sure to post a silly picture of the baby-launching spring, to drive the point home it was all in good fun. The crazy photo alteration was done by David Barrett, the good man behind Antidis.com. For a nice listing of other pranks that were pulled around the web, be sure to check out Phu's list at IfElse.co.uk. The best one was Google Romance, Love is a Search Problem.
Dustin Insanity
Yesterday, I was also able to record another podcast with Dustin Diaz, which you can download here: Episode 08. I was basically just a pinch-hitter since his more famous guests were unable to connect due to technical difficulties. We talked about a little CSS / JavaScript, and played a hillarious game of Web 2.0 Pyramid. We also each did the beat-box, so you won't want to miss it. By the way, if you need a free way to record an audio chat, check out Gizmo.
Speaking of Dustin's ongoing craziness, he's been planning a sort of off the wall, ridiculous no-CSS day to be initiated on 04/05/06. That's right people, on April 5th, 2006 many people around the web will be letting their sites go "naked," without any CSS. This will be the great web equalizer, because for that one day, my site will look as good (or bad) as the likes of these design legends: Craig Erskine, Jeremy Keith, Matthew Pennell and Mike Davidson. I would encourage you to jump onboard the no-CSS bandwagon for a day.
Upcoming Events
So anyway, April looks like it will be a pretty insane month, with many exciting things happening. If things go according to plan, I'll be co-authoring a book on Textpattern pretty soon. If you have any tips for a first-time author, I'd be happy to hear them! Also, I've been invited to be a speaker at the 2006 GospelCon. It's a web conference put on by Gospel Communications, the people who are behind Bible Gateway. You could say it's a Christian SXSW.
The conference itself will not be until September, but I'm planning ahead. My presentation will be entitled Do We Really Care: Accessibility and the Gospel. Essentially, I will be raising the question: Now that the technology exists to make the web accessible to more people than ever before, why is the church lagging behind? Basically, if we really believe what we have to say is true, then why aren't we acting like it? I will also talk about some of the practical business benefits of using web standards: SEO, lower bandwidth costs, etc.
I'm actually pretty nervous about the notion of speaking to a bunch of established church leaders. I feel like I'm just some small fry, compared to many of the past speakers, such as Jeffrey Veen or the PHP guys from Zend. Anyway, that's all to report for now, please pray I can juggle all this and keep up with schoolwork too. At this point, I am pretty much fed up with Asbury.