Web Directions North was wonderful. Excellent, articulate, timely, friendly. The best conference I have ever been to. It was that good. I will definitely be checking out the line up next year and plan on attending if it stacks up to this year.

I was really looking forward to meeting Manu Sporny of RDFa fame. His session didn’t disappoint. I really feel this is the most important future of the internet and am interested in it’s successful advancement – even helping if I can.

I also enjoyed CSS and design presentations by Elliot Jay Stocks and Dan Cederholm. Both encouraged use of advanced CSS techniques. I made a list from Dan’s presentation of techniques to experiment with. This is important for me to evolve my skills and keep current.

The Ajax: State of the Art presentation was well done and well worth listening too. They showcased a web based text editor that uses some pretty advanced web skillz – Bespin. Proposes some interesting new capabilities: command line integration, available everywhere, etc. It will be interesting to take it for a test drive when it is available.

I also captured interesting notes from Brian Fling on mobile development; Kevin Larson on reading research; Dan Connoly on the State of the Web; and more.

The closing keynote sent us off with words of encouragement and confidence. Really that was the theme of the conference, “Ignore the gloom & doom and make a bright future”. It was great to associate with like minds who are positive about the future.

Now I’m looking forward to getting home, kissing my wife and patting my children on the head. Goodbye new friends and I’ll see you soon on the intertubes.