Scott Davis

Presentations

Lizard Brain Web Design

"There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone." (Bjarne Stroustrup)

The "lizard brain" is the oldest part of the human brain -- the part responsible for autonomic functions like breathing, heart rate, and navigating websites. OK, maybe not that last part, but your website should be easy to use. Stupid easy. Lizard brain easy. Any time your user spends figuring out how to do something -- even for a split second -- is wasted time due to poor design. Inspired by Steve Krug's book "Don't Make Me Think", this talk answers the question, "Why is that website so hard to use?"

In this talk, we look at what make a "good" website "good". Simple changes in the layout or sort order can yield drastic improvements. We'll get inside the heads of typical users and see how their view of our website is drastically different than what we painstakingly planned out. You'll learn how to cater to "Browsers" and "Searchers" -- the human kind, not the software kind. "Lizard Brain Web Design" answers these questions and more in a funny and informative way.

A Quick Look at jQuery

"The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate." (Joseph Priestley)

There is a good reason that jQuery is called the "Write Less, Do More" JavaScript Library. It makes doing the thinks you normally do with JavaScript -- grabbing an element or a collection of elements, adding and removing CSS classes to elements, handling events -- not only easy but natural. jQuery "gets" Ajax in a way that I haven't seen other libraries "get" it.

In this talk, we explore the jQuery AJAX library. We start at the Core, and then move on to Selectors, Traversing, Manipulation, Events, and more. The fluent interfaces make jQuery a great tool for beginners and advanced developers alike.

Solr: Adding Lucene Search to your Website

"A man travels the world over in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it." (George Moore)

Without search capabilities, the web wouldn't be nearly as useful as it is today. Public websites have the luxury of letting Google do the indexing for them. For business applications that run behind the firewall, you need to go the extra step yourself. Lucene is an incredibly powerful open source indexing library. Solr makes it trivial to roll out Lucene by offering RESTful and JSON-based interfaces.

In this talk, we'll add local search capabilities to an existing website. We'll make indexing a natural part of the CRUD lifecycle, and demonstrate how easy it is to get Google-like capabilities behind the firewall.

Web 2.0 Checklist: Deconstructing Modern Websites

"The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned." (Antonio Gramsci)

There are plenty of sarcastic "Web 2.0" checklists out there -- be perpetually in BETA, when in doubt add rounded corners, etc. While we can all laugh at the superficial aspects of the Web 2.0 revolution, there are plenty of serious aspects to it as well. Is your website mash-up friendly or hostile? Do you tell your visitors when things change (via RSS or Atom syndication), or do you expect them to check in daily for updates? Is your website a silo or a part of a larger ecosystem?

In this talk, we discuss what makes a "modern shiny Web 2.0" website look the way it does. But we go beyond simple look and feel as we catalog the common features in modern websites and show you how to implement them yourself.