I’ve been back from SXSWi for a little bit now, so I thought I’d write a recap before it fades into the sunset of my memory.

It was my first time there, and my first time at any web conference, actually, so everything was 100% fresh for me. On day one the airline lost my luggage (Damn you, American Airlines!) but everything was smooth besides. I got myself checked in, found some great vegetarian enchiladas, and hit an opening night party (Where they accidentally served this non-drinker a Jack and Coke in place of a Diet Coke. That was a big gulp of surprise!)

SXSWi was a blur of panels and people, business cards and food, and parties. I couldn’t possibly set it all down here and convey how inspiring and fun it was. I’ve never had so much energy on so little sleep. It’s invigorating to be around around literally thousands of web pros. Most of us do our daily work alone or in small teams, and it’s incredibly refreshing to get together and trade stories, tips, and germs.

Panel-wise, the main standouts were:

• Jason Santa Maria & Rob Weychert’s Field Guide To Design Inspiration - A great show on how to integrate design into your daily life
  
• Mark Boulton and Richard Rutter’s Web Typography Sucks !important - This one wins my award for Best Presentation. Web typography is really in a sad state. Mark and Richard did an excellent job and showed me the path to redemption. Do yourself a favor and check out their slides and the podcast of the panel.
  
• Alec Cove’s Beautiful Algorithms - As is evidenced by the fancy leaves in this site, I loves my algorithms. This was a treasure trove of inspiration.
• Jim Coudal and Brendan Dawes’s Short Attention Span - Use your ADD to make a profit!
  
• Jeremy Keith and Derek Featherstone’s Ajax Kung Fu Meets Accessibility Feng Shui - I had to buy Kieth’s book after this one. (Ka-ching for Kieth!) He laid out a very smart workflow for AJAX that degrades gracefully.
• Matt Mullenweg’s Scaling Your Community - He started Wordpress, so pay attention kids.
• Kevin Rose and Kent Nichol’s (among others) Future of Video on the Internet. - You know it’s at least going to be a fun panel when there’s a drinking game involved. All the panelists had beers. Take a drink if someone says ‘paradigm’, another when someone asks a question.

Other Highlights:

• Real Mexican food! Not like the bland ‘philly style’ stuff I get around here. You really can’t go wrong, at least not at any of the places I chanced.
• Lifehacker party / meeting Gina Trapani at her book signing - Lifehacker is my blog of choice. I sometimes worry that I waste more time reading it than their tips save me. I had Gina sign the page in her book where she introduces her Todo.txt system. That little guy has changed the way I work.
  
• The Drupal session at BarCamp - Easily the most fun “party” I went to. How cool is it to hang around with other Drupalers and actually get smarter while the free drinks are flying around!
  
• Bowling, which was fun despite my…
  
• Blisters!

I met many charming and attractive people and we had great meals and conversations about life and the web. Way too many to count here, but it was particularly nice for me to meet and hang out with so many Philly folks. I think we might all have been there. There were some I already knew, and some I hadn’t met yet. In a funny way it was like being back at home.

Now I’m going to risk some dirty looks and say that I just don’t get Twitter. Twitter is a service that accepts SMS messages from your phone and broadcasts them to your friends, a group, or the web. (I think.) And it was all over SXSW. Everywhere you turned it was Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. I’m sorry but I don’t see what’s so useful or enjoyable about sending or reading messages about how you’re at some bar or that you just spotted some celebrity. Maybe I’m just too private a person, but I don’t feel the need to send or receive constant micro-updates on my friends. It’s just kind of boring.

And now, please enjoy the Flickr set!

I’m heading off to Austin this Friday for SXSW Interactive. Megan will be staying behind to keep us in business, so I’ll be messing with Texas solo. So if you see a dude drunk with freedom… that won’t be me. I’m more likely to lose my confidence without my better half. I’m going to try to be as sociable as possible but all this coding has gotten me out of practice. I’ll have to draw on all my former rock god powers to be the charming extrovert I need to be.

I’m going to hit up as many coding, entrepreneurial, and design sessions as I can, and hit all the parties I can worm my way into. So if you see this guy come on over and say hi.

The second half of our interview with Phillyist.com is now online in which we talk about our awesome clients and the weird rock opera I was in which had me singing about camera tripods in uncomfortable places.  Read it here.

Read part one of a two-part interview we did with Phillyist.com this week. Thanks to Jillian Ashley Blair Ivey and Phillyist for thinking we’re interesting enough for two installments! The second half will run on Friday. Read it here.

This is about the most brilliant bit of marketing on the web right now. Have you ever wanted to eat an entire Thanksgiving meal complete with turkey and cranberry sauce as a smoothy? Or how about a bottle of beer including the glass bottle? Or some golf balls? Or a rake handle?

It’s not just that they’re showcasing a very powerful blender. It’s that they’ve struck the perfect style note in doing so. It’s hip and geeky without detracting from the obvious merits of the product. I can’t. Stop. Watching.

Will It Blend? | Presented By Blendtec

I just launched the Colbert Nation store. Cover your dorm wall and man-teets with some sweet ultra-conservative schwag!

The Colbert Nation - Eagles-nest

I thought Ben Franklin’s 300th birthday year would come and go without me getting too worked up. Don’t get me wrong. I love my history and Franklin’s the closest thing we have in America to a mythogical super hero. He’s one of those guys who can always cut you down to size when you start to feel full of yourself. “Hey Ben, I just made this pretty cool site with animations based on the weather forecast! What do you think?” “Not bad, chief. It reminds me a bit of when I charted the Gulf Stream, or when I invented the lightning rod. I’m sure someone’s life will someday be saved by your work, too.” What a prick.

So now he goes one step too far and insinuates himself in the header of my latest site, Phawker. He just stares out at me, mocking all I do and stand for while making snark all over the Philly “blogosphere”.* It’s eerie. I think his eyes follow you around the room. It’s bad enough that he’s on money. I never get $100 bills anyway. But now the old bastard’s got to mock me from my own work. I think I’ll give him a devil beard if he get’s out of line.

* A term he originally coined in The Poor Richard’s Almanac: “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time on the blog-o-speere; for that’s the stuff life is made of.”

This has been a very busy and exciting summer for us, and probably the best example of that for me happened last month when we launched ColbertNation.com. As you might know, the site is the official fan site for The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. The show is insanely popular and I knew it already had a huge audience. That means there’s a lot of eyes watching as we launch and that there’s not much room for error. So of course since I was confident that everything I could control was all set, there would be problems with things out of my control.

Knowing this, I had double-checked all the code and server settings, and scheduled the launch for a time when we’d have the least traffic. It coincidently coincided with the week that Stephen Colbert’s face was staring out at me from my desktop page-a-day calendar. I’ll back up for a second: This year I’ve been enjoying America the Calendar, which is the calendar version of America the Book written by John Stewart and the Daily Show writers. I’m a huge fan of the Daily Show and of course Colbert, and the calendar is filled with jokes about politics and media. But for the week of July 18th there was a week long gag demonstrating the different TV Journalist expressions. It’s funny on it’s own, but his expressions from that calendar were a day by day reflection of our launch status.

The punchline for me is in the timing. It all had to happen simulatneously, my launch, the heatwave and power issues at the host, and then these calendar pages staring out at me as I’m dealing with each issue as it comes up. That’s what makes it surreal.

I just dropped off a hulking banner at the printer today. (forgive the pun. it’s late and I need a joke.) It’s for the Philadelphia Live Arts and Fringe and it’s going to be 9ft x 30ft. HUGE! I think it’s going to hang from a smoke stack and be visible as you drive in from Jersey. Hell, it should be visible from Jersey. I’ll update here if it ends up going somewhere else.

In related news I broke Adobe Illustrator while making this. Apparently Illy won’t allow for dimensions larger than 227.5416 inches. I have to admit I was stumped for a minute on how to work around this. I ended up building it at 1/2 size and let the printer blow it up. 

This is the truthiest way I can think of to start off our blog. As you may know, we just launched the new ColbertNation.com. The site was so much fun to build, and because I’m a huge fan it was an exercise to contain my excitement and remain professional during the process. Well yesterday I went in for our wrap-up and training meeting, and then to see a taping of the show. It was a great way to mark the completion of a project and I rarely get a chance to do that in such a dramatic way. How often does a client perform for you after a project? Megan and I had the best seats, and it was a great episode. Stephen did a bit on Wikipedia involving elephants, and today the entry for elephants is blocked due to vandalising. That’s some real power he has over his audience.

Now I’m back at the office and it’s back to work and the final push toward our 5-year Anniversary Bash on 8/5!