What’s the Isobar 50? Glad you asked:

Got questions? Get answers!

Let’s face it. Marketing in the digital age is hard. Where will you put your efforts? How do you know it will pay off? The Isobar 50 is our list of the top 50 challenges that online marketers are grappling with today, and our recommendations for dealing with them. If you’re an online marketer, this is the place to get answers to your most pressing marketing and online business questions.

I provided answers for three of the questions and I even sound like I know what I’m talking about:
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I haven’t posted about this yet. I’m an incredible idiot. I’m presenting at the Boston PHP group in October. My presentation is a couple of weeks before Steve Krug. No pressure.

I hope to see you there

Learn CSS (with me)

Is CSS still a mystery to you? Do you find yourself editing your styles over and over justo get them to display correctly in IE and Firefox? Have you created a powerful application, and want it to look nice and clean? Do you want to take your knowledge of CSS and Design to the next level?

In this presentation Rob Larsen will step through the basics of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS,) the visual language of the Web. Starting with the most fundamental concepts and finishing with concrete examples illustrating common patterns, this presentation will serve as a launching point for those new to CSS and will strengthen the understanding of the core principles for developer or designer more experienced with CSS.

In this event you will learn:

• Basics of CSS
• Design & Layout
• Web Standards
• Rich Visual Behaviors
• CSS1, CSS2, CSS3
• Frameworks, Abstractions, etc.
• Dealing with cross browser support
• Separation of style, content and behavior
• Testing
• Tips & Tricks

If you still fumble with CSS and want to take your experience to the next level, then this event is for you.

About the presenter:
Rob Larsen has more than 11 years of experience building and designing web sites and web applications. Currently he’s a Consultant at Isobar, working for some of the world’s largest brands.

Prior to joining Isobar, Rob was the Principal Presentation Engineer at Cramer. At Cramer, Rob and his team produced standards-based, accessible and SEO-friendly sites and rich media applications. Before that, Rob worked for several years as a consultant for clients like Compete, Duracell, Gillette, Boston’s Museum of Science, PC Connection, RSA Security, State Street Corporation and Webex.

Front End Performance for the Common Man: Practical Strategies to Speed Up Your Site from rob larsen on Vimeo.

Follow along with the presentation. (PowerPoint presentation)

Here’s the sample ant build script referenced in the deck. (Zip file)

And here’s the article mentioned in one of the early slides:
Why Front End Performance Matters to Everyone, Not Just the High Traffic Giants

I presented at Bocoup last night. It went really well. As always great people showed up and I think I did okay with my side of the bargain. I shot some video, we’ll see how that turns out. If it’s of reasonable quality I’ll be sure to share.

For anyone interested, here are a couple of downloads from last night.

Here’s the deck.

And this is the sample ant build script referenced in the deck.

I’m going to write up the build script in a little bit more depth some time over the next couple of weeks.

I’m in the middle of finishing up my presentation, so I figured I might as well make an effort to get some people to show up to see the results of my hard work

Here’s the write up:

Front End Performance for the Common Man: Practical Strategies to Speed Up Your Site

Day: Wednesday May 19th 2010
Time: 6:30pm – 8pm
Cost: Free

Rob Larsen will examine the core concepts and techniques behind the performance of the web’s fastest sites and will translate them into practical examples. This talk will cut across several technologies (JavaScript, CSS, Ant, Apache and more) to present a suite of tools any developer can use to speed up their site- no matter the size or budget. RSVP to The Event Page.

It’s going to be a really good talk- full of practical examples and advice for every flavor and level of web developer. You should totally go.

There’s always a slide about performance in my presentations. This time? Every slide will be about performance. I’m chomping at the bit to get started on this one.

The Bocoup guys were crazy enough to invite me down to talk about my favorite topic- front end performance. Here’s the write up:

Front End Performance for the Common Man: Practical Strategies to Speed Up Your Site

Day: Wednesday May 19th 2010
Time: 6:30pm – 8pm
Cost: Free

Rob Larsen will examine the core concepts and techniques behind the performance of the web’s fastest sites and will translate them into practical examples. This talk will cut across several technologies (JavaScript, CSS, Ant, Apache and more) to present a suite of tools any developer can use to speed up their site- no matter the size or budget. RSVP to The Event Page.

It’s going to be a really good talk- full of practical examples and advice for every flavor and level of web developer. You should totally go.

Actually, you should just go to all the Bocoup talks. Smart people talking about killer technology = fun times. I’ll be a regular there.

You’ve all seen this, but now here it is from the official channel.

Speaking of WordPress and HTML5, I’m knee deep in the process of getting DrunkenFist.com relaunched and I’ve been doing the WordPress component for the past few days. It’s super complicated. Which means, of course, I’m having a blast with it

Here’s the link I promised:

JavaScript 101: Adding Interactivity to Your Site Using the World’s Most Popular Programming Language

*A note on the title- I’m just repeating what Douglas Crockford said. To remix the quote about IBM, no JavaScript developer ever got fired for quoting Douglas Crockford**

**Don’t quote me on that

Again, I want to thank everyone that came out. It’s always fun to attend the Boston JS Meetups and presenting there is even cooler.

And here it is:

Slides.

Just in time for me to do it all over again tonight at the Boston JavaScript Meetup. Well, not completely all over again as it’s a new presentation tonight, but it’ll still be two times at NERD this week.

Check it out:

JavaScript 101: Using JavaScript to Add Interactivity to Your Web Site

Rob Larsen will lead an interactive session outlining the basic steps to getting started with using JavaScript using modern techniques. For the beginner it will serve as a road map to using JavaScript with confidence. For the more advanced user it will serve and a forum to discuss fundamental best practices as Rob will be soliciting feedback and discussion throughout.

It’ll be basically a step by step on getting JavaScript onto a page, in a modern, “best practices” way. Starting with attaching the script to the page using the script tag all the way through writing a function and attaching it to an element. Each step will be split into three levels of discussion:

1. For the beginners each will simply be presented as “this is how you do it”
2. For the intermediate user it will be “this is why we do it this way”
3. For the advanced user it will be a question- “where does this fall apart and how can we make it better”

It should be fun. I hope to see you there.