Left Out in the Cold
I realised today that it’s less than a month before YAPC::NA. It’s strange but I don’t feel in anyway connected to the conference. This could be because there is no associated blog. As there is no feed to let me know when anything has been announced I end up just forgetting about the whole thing entirely. And when I go to the actual site and the first thing listed in “what’s new” is “site updated” I really don’t feel any the wiser. I also didn’t receive an email when my talk was accepted. It seems that you were supposed to find out by looking at the conference schedule on the web-site. I wasn’t expecting this and I’m still a bit surprised that I haven’t heard anything regarding slides or written materials.
I have also found their wiki hard to use as I haven’t been able to find a way to search it. Maybe there is a way but it isn’t obvious to me. I also only found out that they have a mailing list because one of my friends mentioned it to me in passing. I couldn’t find anything about this list on the conference web-site. I did subscribe to the mailing list today as I took the time to look for it in google. Reading through the archives for the past month I discovered that Damian Conway has had to cancel. I was really looking forward to seeing him in Houston.
This is the first American YAPC conference I’ve been to since 2001 and I feel as if there are lots of things I would know if I had been to more recent conferences.
May 27th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
The Perl community could use some help in the marketing and design departments.
June 2nd, 2007 at 5:02 am
The ACT system is still working on getting the ‘news’ functionality implemented on the production server, but I followed YAPC::EU’s workaround. There is now an RSS feed for the site to provide news updates.
The functionality for sending e-mails for ‘accepted talks’ has been implemented on the production server, but it was after I had already accepted the majority of the talks. I should have followed up with all of the speakers after accepting submissions. That was an error on my part. I wasn’t sure if you would get an e-mail or not. As an organizer, I get an e-mail each time someone changes something in their talk.
I’ve also added a custom Google search for the site at the bottom of the left menu. It’s a little iffy on some of the results, as it returns the history on some of the wiki pages.
Thanks for giving me the ‘push’ I needed to get some of that stuff done!
June 6th, 2007 at 6:09 am
Wow. Thank you – both the RSS and the search box really help.