Some of you may have heard the rumor that Marco Tabini and I are working on something. You might have heard bits and pieces… but very few of you have heard the full story of how it came about, what it is, and where it's going.
This post is not that announcement.
This post is about my upcoming presentation at php|works 2008! (I know, I'm a jerk.)
On the last day of php|works 2008 – 14 Nov to be specific – I'm giving a session titled "Mobilizing the Web". This presentation is a bit more generalized and focused on what you need to make a site mobile (or mobile-friendly), not the specific code on how to do it. The specifc case study used is my work launching Mobile.FoxNews.com… currently the #7 mobile site online according to Comscore's M:Metrics. Here's the synopsis for detail:
Even with the prevalence of the iPhone, building websites that are readable and useful to Mobile Users can still be a challenge. The limitations on images, Javascript, and different broken rendering systems make it seem like 1998 all over again… except without the FLASH tags. Come learn the top five tips and tricks learned during the building of mobile.foxnews.com to make your site and applications useful on most mobile devices.
The different thing about this presentation is that it's not tied to PHP specifically. This year's php|works is combined with PyWorks. Py as in Python. While I'm not a Python guy, this is an interesting opportunity to come together with people who think about similar problems using a different toolset. Personally, I think most developers spend too much time re-figuring out how to build the wheel instead of looking at how others did it and improving. Sometimes this leads to huge advances in how things are done but more often this just makes us resolve a problem that has been solved dozens of times before…
Hopefully joint conferences like this will encourage a bit more collaboration and idea sharing.