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.

During the sessions, I took notes and shared them via tweets. Some people seemed to have found that useful. Others did not. That’s understandable. Some speakers spoke very fast, and it was all I could do to keep up with note-taking, so when I had a break and could post a bunch of my notes as tweets, they sometimes came in a slew and showed up in a big block in the wonderful afeedapart.com.

Some would like afeedapart.com to be more of a chat room for participants at the conference to share thoughts that come up during a talk. I get that. Ultimately, though, afeedapart.com is pulling together anything coming in via the hashtag #aea. So if I’m sharing my notes via that hashtag, they are going to show up there. And since some people are clearly finding those notes useful (I had about 100 new Twitter followers yesterday), and several people asked me to keep sharing notes, I plan to keep doing so.

If this annoys you, you can mute my tweets (or any tweets with #aea in them) within Twitter’s stream, via muuter.com. Or afeedapart.com has now added a mute feature, which you can access by clicking above one of my tweets. Apparently there is not an unmute feature, so click it and I or anyone else will be gone forever.

In these notes, I am trying to condense down the thoughts shared in the sessions, at least as I perceive them, and occassionally share a few of my thoughts on what is being said. If you decide to mute that, because it is annoying you, no problem: I understand. I hope you don’t, but I get it if you do.

And in case you are wondering, I am not using afeedapart.com to actually take my notes. I am actually doing so within Dreamweaver. What I did was to type out the alphabet, copy and paste it four additional times, then add ABCDE. This is 135 characters, just enough for a tweet plus a space and #aea. I then resized my code view window in Dreamweaver to exactly fit that line length. Then, as long as I take a note that does not go longer than one line, I can be pretty sure it will fit within one tweet. That way I don’t need to worry about trying to cut characters if a note is longer than what is allowed.

Anyhow, I am just a web designing dude doing the tweets, as Jared Spool might say. Just thought I would share a few thoughts on that process. Enjoy An Event Apart Minneapolis. I know I am.