Seattle Design Conference - DAY 2, morning

BLOGGING/RSS [everyone] *****!
-This session was electrifying - like when I saw the web for the first time
-speaker made the claim that Blogging/RSS is as big as when the web was first introduced
-Blogging is content management that works (and its free). He made the claim that it is just as good as a $100,000 Content Management System
-Search engines favor blogs over traditional sites because they have tons of cross-linking (this boosts rankings. They are also favored because the nature of a blog is frequently updated content (also boosts rankings)
-A blog gives twice the visibility than a web site gives
-adding an entry to a blog automatically:
1. makes you add meta information,
2. adds to your RSS feed,
3. archives your data-soon, browsers are going to be less used than RSS readers. Web sites will not be the first place people will go
-The speaker will hold a Bloging/RSS conference in January
-netnewswire is the best news aggregator for Mac
-feedster.com is like yahoo for RSS-Talk to Lyman Kirkland about blogs (newsroom.lds.org mgr.)
-Pushing google ads on your blog will earn you money
-Movable Type is the best blogging platform to date (VERY hard to configure if you are dumb like me.

DESIGNING FORMS [ia, vd, frontend] *****
-EXCELLENT examples of what to do, and what not to do.
-this would be good for the usability guidelines for the LDS.org redesign
-(this session was actually yesterday - I forgot to blog it)

KEYNOTE [vd] ***
-Just an hour long plug to get us to use Photoshop CS-Now that I am hardly using Photoshop I need to make sure I keep on it so if I ever switch back to Adobe I am not lost. Their software is changing a lot. I should probably use it more where possible (Fireworks is just SO much more useful for web design)

STUDIO MX [vd, frontend] **
-Just an hour-long plug to get us to use MX Studio. There were a few "AH-HA"s but I mostly knew all of this stuff

EXTENDING DREAMWEAVER [vd, frontend] ***
-Went into detail on how to extend and customize Dreamweaver.
-excellent introduction to customizing Dreamweaver
-excellent intro to behaviors-I fell asleep and almost spilled my Sprite (maybe I will get Coke next time)
(I will need to rewatch the above sessions - I stayed up until 3am trying to get Movable Type (my Blogging software) to work. I kept going crosseyed. Thanks, Pete for saving me and helping to finally getting it to work!)
-LUNCH- (and nap time)