I attend a lot of conferences. Unlike many of the speakers I see and meet at these conferences, I have been attending conferences longer than I've been speaking at them. For some reason, it seems lately that a considerable number of speakers and organizers feel that some speakers get "too many sessions". They think speakers should be limited to a set number of sessions, or even particular conferences. NOTE: I don't mean me, I've never submitted more than two abstracts to a given conference.
What I find odd is that those comments are coming from fellow speakers and conference organizers, NOT from attendees, at least as far as I know.
Remember, I am a newbie speaker, I've been an attendee far longer than I've been speaking. As an attendee, I have attended a lot of sessions. Some of those sessions were presented by awful speakers and some of those sessions were presented by brilliant speakers. There is nothing worse than sitting through an hour (or more) of a terrible speaker. So, as an attendee, you begin to seek out good speakers. If I had a choice between two sessions with content that interested me, one given by a speaker known to me (as good) and the other by a speaker not known to me (or known as bad), I AM PICKING THE SPEAKER I KNOW AND LIKE. I don't mean that I know the speaker, like I am friends with them. I strictly mean, know, as in attended one of their sessions. Remember, I am writing as an attendee here.
Take it one step further. I will evaluate the merits of a conference on whether or not I see names I know. This isn't to say I won't go to a conference if I don't know the speakers, but certainly, if one or two of my "favorites" will be there, I am more likely to go.
It seems to me that certain individuals (also speakers) are the "tail wagging the dog" complaining that others get too many sessions. For some reason, organizers are listening to those complaints. Ultimately, I think that just punishes attendees. Good speakers with consistently good evaluations who continue to submit quality abstracts shouldn't be limited. Period.
NE LUG and Twitter Bootstrap
Fri, May 17th 2013 11:14a Kathy Brown On Tuesday, I spoke at the NE LUG meeting. I gave a quick presentation to get started with Twitter Bootstrap (slides on slideshare), and then we continued with a lengthy discussion about using Bootstrap with XPages. There were a lot of great questions and everyone seemed enthusiastic about trying it out.
So here are the slides (which aren’t much, it was much more about showing what Bootstrap can do, including some live demo and about the discussion, but here you go anway : – ) ). [read] Keywords: xpages twitter
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Article: Simple Validation with XPages
Thu, May 16th 2013 8:36a Kathy Brown In the “May” edition of the Dev Tips Newsletter, I wrote about simple validation with XPages:
Of course there is really simple validation for XPages, which includes checking the “Required field” option on an edit box and entering the error message to display to the user. However, some elements do not have this option, and what if you want the field to have validation other than whether or not it is required?
Read more… [read] Keywords: xpages
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Do You Use Planet Lotus?
Wed, May 15th 2013 9:14a Kathy Brown While speedsponsoring at IamLUG last week, we decided to ask attendees if they had heard of Planet Lotus, and if so, do they check it regularly.
Surprisingly, there were quite a few attendees that had never heard of Planet Lotus. There were also a few that had heard of it, but never visit the site. Now that wouldn’t surprise me as much as a conference like Connect, where a lot of people know about the conference via their IBM sales person, or IBM’s site. It DOES surprise me at [read] Keywords: ibm
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Even More On Abstract Writing
Tue, May 14th 2013 7:58a Kathy Brown The topic has popped up again, on more than one blog. Abstract writing.
Russ Maher’s take on it
Which was follow up to this post
And Wes’ post here
And possibly others I missed.
So I read Russ’ before and after abstracts. A few things that *I* think an abstract should have:
PROPER GRAMMAR – ’nuff said (see what I did there, that isn’t proper grammar)
A hook – It doesn’t have to be super cheesy (really it should NOT be super cheesy), but SOMETH [read] Keywords: xpages
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IamLUG 2013
Mon, May 13th 2013 7:47a Kathy Brown I have been lucky enough to attend all four IamLUGs and I have to say this was best one yet. The combination of attendees, speakers, sessions, sponsors, food, weather (so much better than August!) was just perfect.
The attendees – I really felt like every attendee was happy to be there. Everyone seemed eager to learn and meet new people. I took part in my first ever speed sponsoring as a sponsor on Monday night and everyone seemed genuinely interested in learning about the sponsors a [read] Keywords: ibm
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Speaking at NE LUG – TUESDAY!
Fri, May 10th 2013 10:22a Kathy Brown With IamLUG this week, next Tuesday has snuck up on me!
I will be speaking at the New England Lotus User Group meeting on Tuesday, May 14th at 6PM in the IBM Innovation Center, Waltham, MA.
I will be discussing Twitter Bootstrap, and this will hopefully be an interactive session. i.e. we will all speak, I won’t just be speaking AT you. : – )
For more details, go to http://nelotus.org. [read] Keywords: ibm
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Article – Typeahead and Tooltips with Twitter Bootstrap
Fri, May 10th 2013 7:56a Kathy Brown I’ve written my third article on Twitter Bootstrap and XPages over at SocialBizUg.org, Typeahead and Tooltips with Twitter Bootstrap. Where I cover… well, typeahead and tooltips. : – )
Note that I’ve just heard that Bootstrap is dropping their typeahead for typeahead.js, but fear not, the information I show in the article is still useful for understanding the different methods of using Bootstrap components in XPages.
Getting Started with Twitter Bootstrap Part 1 is he [read] Keywords: xpages twitter
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Notes Dev Tips Newsletter is Out
Fri, May 3rd 2013 9:18a Kathy Brown Now that the articles are on SocialBizUg.org, they are out as soon as they are edited, so I don’t know if this is April or May. : – )
Tom and I cover website performance, seeing into the future, Twitter Bootstrap and XPages validation. As always, if you have any questions or tips to share, please let us know! And follow @NotesDevTips on Twitter!
http://bitly.com/bundles/runningnotes/6 [read] Keywords: notes
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Odd Problem with Mercurial and Bitbucket and Domino
Mon, Apr 29th 2013 8:25a Kathy Brown I’ve been using source control for a while now. I’m a convert and a huge fan. I’ve been using Mercurial in Domino Designer 9 pushed up to Bitbucket. I’ve had several different projects, some alone and some with a team. I’ve gotten to the point where I prefer to use source control over not using it.
However.
I ran into an odd problem. I created a new NSF in Designer. I shared it up to bitbucket. I opened up a new VM and pulled down a clone of the reposi [read] Keywords: domino
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Curing Matt
Fri, Apr 26th 2013 1:21p Kathy Brown What would you do if your son was sick? And there was medicine to help him? But the funding for that medicine didn’t exist? Unfortunately that is the situation with my friend, Troy Reimer. Here is a page with more information, and HERE is a page where you find out more about an event to help fund the study to make more medicine. [read] Keywords:
