Meta Refresh 2013

The design and engineering of user interface on the web

Meta Refresh is a conference on the construction of the user experience on the web. The 2013 edition is about letting go. It’s about learning the skills necessary to build experiences which cannot possibly exist on any medium apart from the internet. It will showcase people who have a deep understanding of what the internet is, and what it can be; people who have built experiences and who can recount their experiences doing so.

http://metarefresh.in/2013

The details

Meta Refresh 2013 is a single-track event over two days. All proposals will be evaluated by the program committee consisting of:

The program committee will not consider public voting when making selections, as the current form of voting has a weak correlation to relevance, but will instead look at the discussion each proposal generates. If there is a proposal you find notable, please leave a comment.

For this year’s event, we are seeking original presentations from practising designers and frontend engineers on why something should be done the way you say, rather than how. The conference stage is a place to convince the audience to your point of view. Howto guides go on the website.

As a single track event, you will have the full audience in the room with you, and we expect you to keep it engaged. Please submit examples of prior speaking experience, or a video introducing yourself and your topic, plus proof that you practice what you preach.

Attendance is free for selected speakers. HasGeek will cover your travel to and accommodation in Bangalore from anywhere in the world. As our budget is limited, we will prefer speakers from locations closer home, but will do our best to cover for anyone exceptional. If you are able to raise support for your trip, we will count that towards an event sponsorship.

There are no sponsored sessions at Meta Refresh. Your speaking opportunity is at the discretion of the program committee alone.

If your proposal is not accepted, you can buy a ticket at the same rate as was available on the day of your proposal.

Discounted tickets are available from http://metarefresh.doattend.com/

Dates

We will make the first round of confirmations by late December, a second round by mid-January, and will finalize the schedule in early February. More specific dates as they get closer. The event is on Feb 22-23.

Commitment to open source

HasGeek believes in open source as the foundation of the internet. Our aim is to strengthen these foundations for future generations. If your talk describes a codebase for developers to work with, we require that it is available under a permissive open source license, a license that does not impose itself on subsequent work.

Hosted by

Meta Refresh is an umbrella forum for conversations about different aspects of design and product including: UX and interaction design CMS, content management, publishing and content marketing Information architecture more

Aniket Pant

@aniketpant

Why Static Site Generators are so awesome?

Submitted Dec 11, 2012

Most of the web development crowd shunned static websites years ago and went for alternatives like WordPress and Tumblr for blogging. In the last one year, Jekyll has made a massive comeback and it is one of the best static website generators out there. The talk would focus on some key topics regarding the same.

Outline

First Draft

Jekyll is a brilliant static website generator used by some really amazing companies like Github. The talk would cover topics ranging from why should one choose Jekyll to the massive advantages it carries

The session will comprise of the following —

  1. What is Jekyll?
  2. So, what does Jekyll do?
  3. The performance gain
  4. The massive flexibility
  5. Allows to work with haml and sass (or any other css preprocessor you want to put in)
  6. How can you host using Jekyll for free?

The simple reason for preferring Jekyll over any other method for building websites, is the simplicity of it’s working.

Jekyll is a brilliant static website generator used by some really amazing companies like Github. The talk would cover topics ranging from why should one choose Jekyll to the massive advantages it carries

UPDATE #1

I am changing the draft after a great response by Benjamin Lupton. The ideas he has given me to put into the talk are interesting and they do create a lot more scope than just restricting the talk to Jekyll.

The session will comprise of the following —

  1. Introduction to Static Site Generators
  2. How do they work?
  3. The performance gain
  4. The massive flexibility
  5. Allows to work with haml and sass (or any other css preprocessor you want to put in)
  6. Looking at different generators – Jekyll, Octopress, DocPad, Stacey, Kirby and Movable Type
  7. How do they handle rendering, why do they do it different, why is X better than Y?
  8. Why are static site generators becoming popular now? What were the events leading up to it? Why is the history important to understand the cultivation of the innovations.
  9. Who are the key players behind them, why did they work on them, why do they continue to work on them?

Speaker bio

I recently moved my blog from WordPress to Jekyll. I thought it would take a couple of days, but I was able to wind up the process in two days to be exact (leaving out the design).

So, I am Aniket and I am 19. I have been working with web development not for long but in this time I have worked on a number of applications (a majority of which were written using Codeigniter). I have recently moved on to working with Laravel but my forté lies in front-end semantics.

Comments

{{ gettext('Login to leave a comment') }}

{{ gettext('Post a comment…') }}
{{ gettext('New comment') }}
{{ formTitle }}

{{ errorMsg }}

{{ gettext('No comments posted yet') }}

Hosted by

Meta Refresh is an umbrella forum for conversations about different aspects of design and product including: UX and interaction design CMS, content management, publishing and content marketing Information architecture more