KuraFire Network

Before going into any details, I just want to get this clear first: @media 2005 was excellent! Here are some of my impressions of the conference.

Without going into too many detail, as I've just gotten home from a flight back directly after the end of the conference (which was very upsetting to a lot of people, and I apologize for that - next time I'll be around for the afterparty, I promise!), here's some things I came across during the conference that stood out:

• The venue was very easy to find, but there wasn't enough airconditioning (or, water)
• A great focus (more than 50%!) on Accessibility
• Robin Christopherson's presentation was an eye-opener to probably everybody in the room. More on this in my article on Robin's presentation
• So many great people from the business were there, everyone having a great time and literally tons of good discussions
• Douglas Bowman lifting me out of the crowd (note: not literally) and showing off my website at the very start of his presentation (thanks for the plug, Doug!)
• A very sophisticated audience; effectively everybody there created fully CSS-powered websites

Over the coming week or more, I'll be writing an article for roughly each of the sessions we had at @media, where I'll discuss all of the great things that all the wonderful speakers have presented to us. For now, I'm going to leave it at this, except for a little note.

XFN

Being at @media is not just great for it being a conference on web standards and accessibility, of course. There's people to meet! Since I've always had a distinction between people I've met and suggested sites by people I hadn't (yet) met, going to @media meant for me to update my list of suggested sites. Big time, even, because a lot of people recognized me, including many people I didn't really know or hadn't ever even heard of before.

Now, in the Live Redesign process that's been taking place on this site for a while I've come to add XFN. What is XFN? XFN is the XHTML Friends Network, and it basically comes down to adding a rel="" attribute to links. You then put meaningful (semantic!) values in that attribute, such as "colleague" or "friend met" and-as you can guess by now-I had to change a lot of people's relation value.

The how's and why's of I've done this will be discussed in more detail another time, when I'm not bordering on falling asleep at my desk. Right now, all that matters is that I've converted all existing people on my Suggested Sites list to use their more updated, accurate rel value. In time (I've already done most of this, actually) I will go through all remaining content on the site and fix everything in there, too.

On a related note: Roger Johansson, my apologies for completely not realizing that you weren't actually on my list of suggested sites! Your blog has been an invaluable resource to me for a long time now, but thanks to my own randomized listing of sites, I never really noticed that you weren't on there! This is fixed now, though. ;-)

And with that I'm calling it a day. @media has been an amazing experience, and you will see many, many updates about it over the weekend and next week. Oh, and if you were there and we met, it was great meeting you and hope to see you again soon!

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