The Unheard Word

I’m a bit concerned, after some recent comments on some of the email lists to which I subscribe, about the attitude of some web standards advocates towards others.

My journey to a career in web development and design was quite a gradual one. I drifted into it one day when I was bored. I made a horrific attempt (of which I was extraordinarily pleased and proud at the time) at a home page at GeoCities. Thankfully, that site from way back in 1998 is long since dead and buried! I remember well my pain…

The reason I moved away from Feedburner was because I thought it was difficult to exit the service and was afraid of my feed subscribers getting stuck. However, last night I had a really great chat to Rick Klaus from Feedburner, and he explained a lot of things that now make sense. I see I was quite wrong in my fear that there was no easy way to exit.

I was totally delighted to see the different approach Derek Featherstone has taken when putting his presentation from the Web Essentials 05 conference online.

Rather than just upload his prepared slides, Derek has created a new website, Simply Accessible.

Well, that was short and sweet. I’ve already exited FeedBurner’s service.

Feedburner has no “exit strategy” and once you get people signing up to your blog’s feeds via a Feedburner link, you’re pretty much stuck with Feedburner forever (unless you’re paying for a premium service that will forward feeds forever for you).

I’ve been back for a week now and couldn’t let the occasion go by without remarking on it. Because it was, truly, a remarkable conference.

Firstly the line-up of international speakers was great.