This past week I attended, and was an organizer for, the annual conference for the National Association of Government Webmasters (NAGW). The first session I attended was an extensive pre-conference workshop, a “Social Media Boot Camp,” led by Adriel Hampton.

If you ask any given web designer what frustrates them most, my guess is most will tell you IE6.

We know the extra development time and costs that come from dealing with IE6 and other misbehaving older browsers. We know the feeling that it’s difficult to move forward when older browsers hold us back.

If you’re using Drupal for your blog, and you have the default “recent comments” block displaying, you may have discovered that it swiftly fills up with comments with the subject line of “Pingback.”

I found this annoying: I want to see real people comments, not computer comments.

Luckily, this is a pretty quick fix.

Assuming you’re using Views (and who isn’t?), a comments_recent view should be listed as disabled. Enable it and edit it.

The final speaker at An Event Apart Minneapolis was Jeff Veen, author of The Art and Science of Web Design, who is also one of the founders of TypeKit, which is bringing richer typography to the web.

Jeff’s session, “How the Web Works,” was described as follows:

Quite frankly, you know that a session for An Event Apart will be awesome when the speaker’s blog is unstoppablerobotninja.com and his Twitter handle is simply @beep. Ethan Marcotte, who strikes me as the web equivalent of a Zen master, spoke to us about “A Dao of Flexibility.” He recently wrote a ground-breaking article for A List Apart, Responsive Web Design, so I suspected this would be a pretty profound session.

One of the most invigorating presentations at An Event Apart Minneapolis was given by Kristina, author of Content Strategy for the Web. Her session, “Message and Medium: Better Content by Design,” was summarized as follows:

Erin Malone, co-author of Designing Social Interfaces, spoke at An Event Apart Minneapolis on the topic of “Patterns, Components, and Code, Oh My!” The session description was as follows:

Jeremy Keith, expert on JavaScript and HTML5, spoke to An Event Apart Minneapolis about “Paranormal Interactivity.” The session description describes this as:

Interaction is the secret sauce of the web. Understanding interaction is key to understanding the web as its own medium—it’s not print, it’s not television, and it’s certainly not the desktop. Find out how to wield HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to craft experiences that are native to the web.

The second day of An Event Apart began with Jeffrey Zeldman introducing Eric Meyer. Jeffrey pointed out that there was much one could say of Eric, but perhaps the simplest is to say that he has been documenting CSS since 1996, and browser makers have come to him to ask how to implement CSS in their browsers.