After a little time to reflect, here's my thoughts on the recent ACM West conference (thanks to all the work of Ann Theis!):

When we first launched this site I struggled with a good, sustainable solution in regards to keeping style consistent while allowing everyone to post their own content without moderation. As I had already had the unfortunate experience of trying to deal with the obscure mass of code generated by wysiwyg editors like TinyMCE and Dreamweaver, I felt like I needed a better solution. What I came up with was a simple style guide that explained a few basic html tags (lists, breaks, headings, etc.) along with a few defined style tags (for changing fonts and indenting text.) As many of you would have likely told me from the start, this solution produced poor to disastrous results. Even the simplest code resembled hieroglyphics to the majority of our staff, and for those who did manage to decipher it errors were rampant with missing closing tags, back slashes instead of forward slashes, and numerous other distortions.

Stuck on an RTD bus in the midst of Denver's first significant snow storm of the year -- what better time to start a blog? The 21st century bus ride can be quite a privilege -- my laptop is wirelessly connected to my cell phone(lost in my backpack somewhere) via bluetooth. Using Sprint's unlimited phone-as-modem plan I'm browsing the internet at near-DSL speed while managing my morning work email and posting to this blog. I remember when the bus was a hassle, a restrictive gap in my work-day -- now I barely even notice that I'm stuck in this winter-wonderland car jam.