The final speaker of the first day at An Event Apart Minneapolis was Greg Rewis from Adobe. Yes, Adobe was a sponsor of An Event Apart, so this was a promo for Adobe in general and Dreamweaver CS5 in specific, but Greg made clear that he not only promotes Dreamweaver, he uses it quite a bit, just like many of us do. I had the delight of chatting with Greg for a while after the first day finished: he’s quite a character and does a great job explaining the things Adobe has done to make the lives of working designers and developers easier.

One of the key people from whom I learned how to do standards-based markup and CSS is Dan Cederholm, through his books Web Standards Solutions and Bulletproof Web Design. He has a real knack for taking the complex and challenging and transforming into something seemingly simple and doable. So the opportunity to hear him talk about CSS3 at An Event Apart Minneapolis was a real treat.

One of the most charming presentations at An Event Apart Minneapolis was from Aarron Walter, who talked to us about learning to love humans, something we have all struggled with from time to time, I’m sure. Aarron is also the author of Building Findable Websites, which I am reading and enjoying right now.

Really, the only flaw in the presentation is that Aarron is apparently originally from Iowa. I tried not to hold that against him, as I’m a Minnesotan. I jest of course, I suppose because I’m human.

On Monday afternoon of An Event Apart Minneapolis, the first presentation was given by Luke Wroblewski, with a simple but revolutionary message for us: Web products should be designed for mobile first. Below is a summary of my notes: unless I specify otherwise, these brilliant thoughts are his.

In short, even if you’re not planning on releasing a mobile version, design web products for mobile first.

All of the presentations at An Event Apart Minneapolis were fantastic, but I probably laughed the hardest at Jared Spool’s presentation on the “Anatomy of Design Decisions.” The cursed airlines had delayed Dan Cederholm’s flight to Minneapolis, so Jared was called upon to do Dan’s presentation on CSS3. Or so Jared joked.

The second speaker at An Event Apart Minneapolis was Whitney Hess, who spoke about Do It Yourself User Experience techniques in “DIY UX: Give Your Users an Upgrade.” Below are summaries of my notes. These are Whitney’s excellent thoughts, not mine. Hopefully I captured them accurately, but this is a poor substitute for the engaging, practical presentation Whitney gave. You have to go to An Event Apart for that!

Here are some of my notes that I took during Jeffrey Zeldman’s excellent talk at An Event Apart Minneapolis, Web 2.1: The Medium Comes of Age. It is inevitably impossible to capture everything that is excellent in such a talk, and it is always possible that I may get something wrong. Feel free to let me know if that is the case.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend An Event Apart for my first time. It was as mind-blowing an experience as possible. The opportunity to learn in person from many of the people who taught me web design through their books and their blog posts and their articles, well, it was an exceptional experience.

I set up this blog a year ago. I felt I had something to share about Drupal, about web and graphic design, web standards, accessibility, usability and other fun things related to the web.

I wrote an initial post September 2009. I have not written since.

At times, I thought of writing up some new Drupal technique I discovered, if for no other reason than to document it for my own reference.

And yet, I didn't.

After a great deal of pondering, I’ve decided to give this blogging thing a whirl. That’s me: always on the leading edge.

I used to write a great deal more than I do these days. Life gets in the way, alas. I’ve been blessed in that the past five years have been very kind to me, if a tad busy. Now, however, I’m looking forward to a chance to express some thoughts a bit less cryptically than what Twitter allows, and hopefully on subjects a bit more germane to my interests than is appropriate for Facebook.