Just in time for everyone's favorite spooktacular holiday, we've gotten our site full of Halloween spirit. If you're here and the holiday hasn't passed yet, then you've probably noticed that our traditional white and blue site has changed to orange, yellow and black.

I will be speaking at this year's MinneWebCon, the University of Minnesota's web conference, on April 6th, 2009. This is the second year of the conference, providing a full-day of continuing education for web professionals. My session, entitled "It's the Little Things", will cover user interaction and design, and how the smallest of details can change your users' experiences.

This presentation will focus on trends and best practices in design and development conventions for user controls and how they affect the user experience—negatively or positively. Through the course of the session, we will discover various problems affecting smooth user interaction. Then I will identify ways to enhance controls and layouts in order to both speed up required user tasks and make them easier to use.

There are many other great sessions this year and I'm definitely looking forward to seeing and hearing from so many smart colleagues.There's limited space available and it's filling up fast. Head on over to the MinneWebCon site and register to attend today.

On the Twitter homepage, the site describes itself as "…a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?" But the communication ability of Twitter extends well beyond what you do on a daily basis. Lisa was giving a presentation called "It's a Google World—We Just Live In It" at the Minnesota Government IT Symposium and I tagged along to give support to her before and after her presentation for people with questions.