I just spent last Thursday and Friday at Web Directions South 2009. This was my 2nd Web Directions South conference, and it was good.

It was a bit of a commute Thursday morning, but after some train, plane and automobile action (well, in reverse of that order), I was happily ensconced for the opening talk.

WDS09 is a one kilo raw chicken, left out for two days and the salmonella bacteria of ideas multiply and infect everyone. To whip that poorly formed metaphor horse a tad more (there’s another!), I was sick the whole time with idea poisoning.

There were some fantastic presentations, but three stood out for me, mainly because of a practical bent that related to pre-existing conditions; projects already underway and a few percolating ideas.

The first was the un-sexy topic of optimising page-ready times in Mark Stanton’s Speed Matters presentation. I had an understanding of image sprites and combining css and javascript, but I didn’t realise what a difference all the techniques presented could make in decreasing page-ready and page-load times. Mark used as an example the webdirections.org page, and got page-ready times in IE6 down from 22 seconds to 6.

Also over the last two years I’ve become a fan of Dmitry Baranovskiy’s talks on web vector graphics, and after his entertaining presentation on Canvas this year, I am going to put that (somewhat misplaced) two year animation course I did to use on some personal projects using Dmitry’s award winning Raphaël javascript library. I already have a small sample utilising some almost forgotten Maths learning, and only very basic in the terms of Raphaël  functions used… a circle and a move - but more to come.

Mark Birbeck gave a good overview of RDFa, how it’s currently being used, and some ideas on how to use RDFa information on a page to do some cool integrations. For example, using a simple jQuery script you could scan a page for book ISBN numbers and show book covers from Amazon as a hover-over. In this way, depending on the RDFa information on the page, you could do some interesting and useful mashups. My brain meats are jiggling with the possibilities.

All the talks I attended gave me something to take away, but I’m especially waiting for the podcast of Dan Hill’s closing key note, because I had to leave 10 minutes before the end so that I wouldn’t miss my flight. From what I did experience, Mr Hill gave me a new perspective of visualising data and what may be gleaned from a wider environment from indirect metrics. Sounds very dry how I just typed it, but I’d suggest keeping an eye out for slides and podcast.

All Web Directions podcasts (including talks from previous events) will be available from this RSS (well, I assume they will).