Gospelcon 2006
Well, I suppose it is official now, because the new website has gone live. I will be a speaker at this year's Gospelcon, the Internet ministry conference put on by Gospel Communications, the driving force behind BibleGateway.com, among other things. The conference is a tad on the pricey side, but there will be a myriad of technological and theological topics covered by a number speakers, most of which more knowledgeable and eloquent than I. Basically, you can think of it like a Christian SXSW: geeks teaching geeks to be geeky.
For instance, last year's conference featured representatives from Zend, the world's leading company for PHP, which is in turn the world's most popular server-side web scripting language. Jeff Veen was also a presenter. You might know him as one of the guys from Adaptive Path who created Measure Map, now works for Google, and who worked alongside the guy who coined Ajax.
From this year's list of scheduled speakers, I am especially looking forward to presentations from the Agathon Group, who will be giving a presentation on advanced PHP. I also expect that Beth Jusino's topic of "Pyro Web Marketing" will be pretty cool. I will be sure to attend Paul Yuen's workshop for advanced Flash. He's the one who designed the cool new Gospelcon site, by the way.
As for me, I hope to bring a bit of healthy Biblical conviction for not making the gospel accessible to all of God's people. Basically, I hope to get the point across that nested tables are for the birds, and that using web standards and accessible best practices is not rocket science, but just plain good business. Hopefully I'll get to meet some of you in Chicago, and maybe do a skill-swap of some sorts, where we can all brainstorm about better front-end code.
Anyway, the point of this posting is not to brag or to go for the hard-sell, but I would be remiss if I did not at least make mention of it here, since they were kind enough to invite me to speak. If you or someone you know is interested in learning how to utilize the Internet for outreach, please do check it out.