12:05 - 12:35pm - Robin Christopher
Nattering on about accessibility when the presentation is titled "The Art of Attractive Yet Usable Site", should have been entitled "The Art of Accessibility". Too late to move now, as it is 12:31pm. Would love it if Mr. Christopher would have shown a few sites that were beautiful, usable, and accessible, and then deconstructed it from there to make his points. I am sold on accessibility, but they way it is presented most of the time becomes irritating.

Lunch

2pm - Daniel Burka - Digg / Pownce
Is the Change Worth It?
Rely on previous feedback
Know your community, stay in touch
Anticipate areas of friction
Focus groups & usability studies
Decide how to measure success
Gathering Feedback
Type 1: Positive Feedback!
Type 2: Bug reports
Type 3: Negative Feedback
Type 4: Expert Feedback
Type 5: Implicit Feedback (most important & most ignored) - watch patterns of how real people use the system. Watch what they do when they use your site.
Observing user behavior
Objective metrics
Speaks for the silent users
Reacting to Feedback:
Step 1: Don't do anything!
Step 2: Identify themes & strong ideas
Step 3: Engage your community
Step 4: Iterate

2:35pm - Matt Mullenweg - WordPress
The Architecture behind WordPress.com
The fundamentals of Architecture:
Scaling
Platform
Business
Community
People
Sept. 2006 - 18 mill Global Uniques #202 in US
Sept. 2007 - 88 mill Global Uniques #17 in US

Scaling the Platform
Matt's Magic Mini-Cluster
7 Boxes - $1,500/month
2 load balancers with any CPU, 2 gb memory, any disk, pound + wackamole + spread
2 databases with any CPU, 4 gb+ memory, fast disks, RAID, master + slave mysql setup
3 Web nodes - fast CPU, 2 gb memory, any disks, lightspeed or well-configured Apache
Boxes and Lines
HyperDB - Open Source enterprise scale out database
Put everything in subversion (I hate svn, Matt loves it)
Be stateless (encrypt username & password put in cookies, very scalable)
Memcached
... Just use WordPress
2007.wordcamp.com/ go to see presentation on this.
See Other: photomatt.net/about

Scaling Business - many businesses start out doing something very different than what their business is now.
What scales with page use? Ads. WP.com decided to go with ads for folks who came to a page via a search (IE & AOL browsers).
VIP - for the class of users who want a custom theme

Scaling People
Hiring - super super important
Great People = rich environment + worthwhile problems
5 things in hiring, in order of importance
Personality fit - hiring someone is like getting married
Ability to Learn
Taste
Passion for the space
Familiarity with technologies
Not Hiring is important, if you have doubts let it pass.
People ask questions about economies of scale, spam, and databases.

During the afternoon break, I found myself back at the bean bags conversing with folk. Lost track of time, and missed most of Matt Haughey's presentation on communities.

4:30 pm - Heidi Pollack - Taking Your Application Mobile
Blue Pulse, a mobile start up with people from 160 countries
1st large mobile site: FIFA 2006
There is a big misconception that most mobile phones are high end, this is not true. Biggest markets are Africa & Asia and are using non-high end mobiles and do not have computers. They are consuming the mobile web by the byte, not all you can eat (unlimited data plans)
176 px and 10k
How many browsers do you code for? Hundreds... Every phone has a different browser. Opera mini, radically different phone to phone.
When you develop for mobile you are throwing a dart at a target.
Code for 176 and 10k.
Motorola V3, unfortunately one of the most popular phones in the world right now, 30 characters by 8 lines.

Everything you need
CODE

Use this doctype to prevent quirksmode.

Markup:div, span, p, br, b, small, form, input, select, option, textarea, table, tr, td, img, style, class

Kind of abandon the semantic web - headings and lists too big. Wherever you can save characters.

CSS: color, background-color, border, margin, padding, text-align, vertical-align, font-size, text-decoration

Either stick to em or small pixels.

TOOLS
Firefox Extensions: Modify Headers, User Agent Switcher, WML Browser, XHTML Mobile Profile
WURFL (http://wurfl.sourceforge.net)

What to take moible:
Your users are bored (and need to fill time) or in need
Preserve your brand with logo, colors, and copy
Navigation links are over-rated
Use search rather than clicks in mobile

Drop down menus are bad for most phones, esp. Motorola V3.

During development:
Have a device list
Think like a phone
Learn to live with it
Mobile acid test (http://jwtmp.com/a)

Graceful degradation
Take a lot of screenshots
Think like a phone, the weirdest bugs in a world happen on phone browsers - most of the bugs are a result of faulty XML in the dtd.
The phone is hitting a proxy server, not yours, so sessioning is hard.

6pm - Kevin Rose of Digg
Demoing Digg & Pownce features.
Scaling
Memcached
Hire a DBA to review your schema
Hire an admin to review your apache conf
Visibility: Google analytics, custom stats, Nagios
Working with Large Communities
Blog!
Increase transparency (C&D's go to Chilling Effects)

When Digg launched it was PHP, then we went to Python. I am a PHP fan. At Pownce, Leah was excited by Django and it worked out.