Online CSS3 Conference

This week I presented at the Think Vitamin Online CSS3 Conference, kicking off the event with my presentation on CSS3 Selectors. I have now uploaded my slides and also my working file examples of the different selectors in use.

Presenting online proved to be a slightly weird experience. When presenting at a conference, even the brightest of stage lights in your eyes don’t prevent you from getting a feel for how the presentation is being received. I’m a Geordie and I am very aware that my natural pattern of speech is very fast despite not having a broad accent after 15 years of living away from the North East. The more presentations I do, the more I can pick up on the clues from the audience that I’ve started to speed up and become difficult to follow. Not so when presenting online. I essentially spent an hour pontificating to my MacBook Pro, and hoping that someone was listening and not completely confused!

The saving grace in all of this was that I had been promised by Greg from Carsonified that if anything was going wrong he would let me know – and I’d logged into AIM on my netbook so he could alert me easily. So I continued my presentation, assuming that no message meant all was well. After the presentation and a brief Q&A session I logged into Twitter and was immensely grateful to see so many lovely messages from attendees, who had obviously enjoyed the session. That feedback was worth a lot as I really had no idea how the session had gone.

Technically everything ran very smoothly, so all credit to Carsonified for that. There are some excellent online conferences planned for the future so if you haven’t been a virtual conference attendee yet, it is a great way to hear from speakers who normally would be found at the big name conferences – all from the comfort of your office or sofa!

I’m really happy to have been asked to speak at a few conferences and events this year. After years of being afraid of public speaking, and saying no to opportunities that came my way, I’ve started saying yes. So far no-one has thrown anything at me, I haven’t died and have actually started to enjoy the instant feedback you get when speaking. When you write a book, the feedback is very slow in coming – I still get emails about books that I wrote 5 years ago, which makes it harder to adjust what I am doing to improve. When speaking I get fast feedback during or straight after. I find out straight away if a way of explaining something works or doesn’t which can only improve my writing on these subjects as well as the next presentation that I do.