Representing Clearleft, I wrote a little something for The Pastry Box. As Tantek pointed out, it’s somewhat ironic that it’s published on a third-party site, considering that I explicitly said “I really encourage you to publish on your own site.”
So here it is.
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I had the great pleasure of organising the Responsive Day Out here in Brighton last month. It was a lovely gathering of front-end developers and designers getting together to swap stories and cry on one another’s shoulders about the challenges involved in responsive design.
There were some well-known names on the roster: people who speak at international conferences and whose work you’d be familiar with. But there were also some first-timers: people who had never spoken at a conference before.
So why would I, as a conference organiser, ask someone who has never spoken before to get up on stage and share their thoughts?
The answer is simple: their writing. Reading the intelligent and cogent blog posts and articles that they had published made me want to hear what they had to say …and I wanted to introduce their smarts to an audience. These people took the time to write down and publish their thoughts, and that led directly to their appearance at a web conference.
I really encourage you to publish on your own site. If you don’t have your own site, I think you should. In the meantime, there are plenty of other wonderful online publications: 24 Ways, Smashing Magazine, A List Apart. Why not get in touch with them if you’ve got an idea for an article?
To say that communication is a valuable skill when you’re working on the web would be quite an understatement. In a very real sense, the web was made to allow us all to share and communicate. Anybody can do it. That’s one of the great things about the web. You don’t need to ask anybody for permission. If you have an idea or a technique or a question that you want to share, all you need to do is publish it …as long as you take the time to write your thoughts down.
Write. Publish. Share. Speak.