A Tale of Two Conferences: WebContent 2011 and Texas JavaScript

Here at Viget, we all have an annual conference/training allowance, among our other awesome job perks ... And, we certainly put it to good use two weeks ago, when four Vigets traveled across the country to learn and make new friends!

For my training, I returned to my hometown of Chicago for WebContent 2011. This year's theme was "Going Mobile," and I spent two days soaking up a ton of information on content strategy and the mobile web. From a workshop on Content Strategy 101 to in-depth sessions on the latest mobile trends and their implications for your business, the conference's offerings gave me plenty of food for thought and a whole new list of ideas for tackling my clients' content issues. I also got to know a bunch of new faces in the web industry -- plus, I got to eat wonderful Chicago pizza for a few days!

Brand and strategy consultant Margot Bloomstein of Appropriate, Inc., speaking at WebContent 2011 -- and using Viget's own SpeakerRate to get feedback on her presentation

Meanwhile, while I was in the Midwest, three of our developers (Matt Henry, David Eisinger, and Patrick Reagan) headed for the border to attend Texas JavaScript Conference. It would've been pretty tough to assemble a better line-up of speakers for this year's TXJS. There were talks by JavaScript's creator, the man who made it his mission to save JavaScript from itself, and several other extraordinarily accomplished JavaScripters. There was a lot of great insight and information on offer and a great community to go along with it. Basically, the guys had a blast, and TXJS 2012 can't get here soon enough.

Paul Irish shows off his fancy Unicode selectors at TXJS 2011 (photo by greychr)