The next three days worth of entries are going to cover the conference, my opinions of San Francisco, and other adventures that happened (specifically on Tuesday, April 20th). Some of it may get technical and business related, but if that part is boring there are still the non-conference related parts. Ultimately, this was the event which gave me the impetus to make my first ever visit to California.
In reading about parking for the conference center, I learned that SF generally discourages individual vehicle travel. They try to encourage public transportation. Public transportation might be an option if one is paying an inflated price for a hotel inside the city (I see a hotel as a place to sleep at night....I expect cleanliness and security and don't care about extras). But it doesn't work when one is staying in the next city in order to get reasonable hotel prices. Either the Drupal site or the convention center site basically hinted at the fact that the costs to park individual vehicles was out of sight to enforce SF's vision.
Although I got up at 6am and tried to get everthing done quickly (including breakfast), somehow, I did not seem to get out of the hotel until after 8am. The first session was at 8:30. Being about thirteen miles from the convention center, I was obviously going to be late for the first session.
Most of the ride was on US 101, which is an interstate like road. And, like most interstates leading into big cities, there were traffic jams in the morning. US 101 gives some nice brief views of the San Francisco Bay.
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As I got into the city, I noticed that on some streets the right lane was reserved for buses and taxis. I'm not sure what might have happened (in terms of potential tickets and fines) if you needed to get into that lane to make a right turn. I saw some trolley cars but they did not look like the images I've seen; instead they were just buses powered by electric.
Basically, I'm just not one for big, congested cities. I try to avoid them on these trips. I can do okay if a city has a population of half a million or less, but all bets are off after that. SF has close to 800,000.
I chose a parking garage fairly close to the Moscone Convention Center. When entering, you had to take a ticket. The ticket had to be kept with the driver and the driver had to pay before going back to their car. Then, they would have fifteen minutes to return to their car, drive through the maze of the parking garage, and put the stamped ticket into a machine to be able to leave. If they exceeded fifteen minutes, there would be extra charges. My solution is to just have staff and/or machines on the exits where people could pay (and if they couldn't afford that many staff people, machines would be fine). It's just an extra level of stress to worry about whether you're going to get out of the garage (particularly if you're on the top level and leaving when many others are leaving) within fifteen minutes.
When I got to the convention center area, there was not one but THREE convention centers with that name. The West Moscone Center was brand new and nothing was happening there for three weeks. One down. Then I had to decide between North or South. I tried North next. Of course, the Drupal conference was in Moscone South.
Thoroughly late, I got into an overflow room for the first session. It was just about the basics of Drupal, so I found I didn't miss much. This was the only session happening. For the rest of the time, there were five to six sessions going on at any given time slot.
The booklet of sessions listed only the session title, room number, and time. It did not include a description. Most people were carrying laptops around with them. I had left mine in my trunk for lighter travel on foot to the convention center. Besides, I had no idea what kind of people I might meet in SF and really didn't want to be carrying a laptop around the downtown area. But, it became apparent that I would need my laptop to be able to read the descriptions of the sessions and determine which I wanted to attend.
I attended a session about Drupal Views (I know this is meaningless to anyone who is not familiar with the workings of Drupal). It was pretty good and certainly gave me the impetus to make more use of Views. It allows the blocks or side panels to be different for each web page, rather than having the same ones on every page. There are many other possibilities with Views.
The conference rate did not include meals. If people wanted a boxed lunch for three days, it would cost $150. The alternative was to find restaurants within walking distance of the convention center. I decided to go to actual restaurants and not just Subway during the conference. I wanted to try Tex Mex (I've tried Mexican many times, but never outright Tex Mex). But, after walking in the wrong direction, I found a restaurant called Mel's Drive In. It reminded me of that show called Alice which was on in the late 70s/early 80s. Despite this not being an official Mexican restaurant, I was still able to get a delicious taco salad. The nice part about this was that although it was a real restaurant, the food was delivered fast and the wait staff were great. They even gave a 10% off coupon if you returned the next day. After lunch, I retrieved my laptop from the car.
The keynote speaker was Dries Buytaert, who created Drupal ten years ago....in his college dorm room. It was designed to make it easier for people to make web pages without having technical knowledge. He expected ten people would use it. He recalled how in previous years, the conferences consisted of about forty people. This conference had 3,000+ people. Some had planned to come from Europe, but could not do so because of the volcanic eruption in Iceland. They were instead having user group meetings at the same time throughout Europe. The whole point of his speech was to never underestimate how a simple idea can blossom into a phenomenon. As Drupal is open source, there are thousands of people working on improvements, modules, documentation, etc. There is a huge user community waiting to help anyone that runs into problems. Best of all, the software is free (though people charge to set it up, customize it, write documentation targetted to specific types of users, etc.). It was revealed that the next Drupal convention would be in Copenhagen, Denmark. In that case, I won't be attending the next Drupal convention.
There were a few boring technical sessions in the afternoon. People continued to walk out and the speakers did not make the presentations very interesting. I can probably learn more by looking up the information online.
The last session of the day was VERY inspiring, however. It was not technical; it was business oriented. The presenter was from Boise, Idaho. He talked about the need to avoid being a generalist and instead to focus on niches. Find one or more industries, or even parts of a particular industry that you know very well or in which you have a strong interest, and target said segments. The speaker called them "verticals." In this case, you must also try to offer all services related to their online presence. Don't merely offer web design. Offer hosting, content development, online marketing, and anything else unique to the industry that fits within their online presence. If you are unable to do all of these things, subcontract out the parts you can't do (obviously reflecting the subcontractor's fee in your estimate). Develop unique services. As an example, the speaker focuses on photocopy stores. He provides two sites with continuously updated information about the industry. His clients can have feeds from these two sites automatically placed on their own sites...for a price. These non-client sites he developed also serve as free advertising for his services. In some cases, you can get into a niche where there is simply no competition. Or, your services can be unique enough that either they complement others' work or drive clients to you. He pointed out that there is plenty of opportunity as long as people try to develop something unique for an existing "vertical." When asked about whether he has to worry about no compete clauses (e.g. not being allowed to develop sites for two stores within the same city), he explained that he will only accept such a term if the company pays for it. He does have some companies that pay him simply not to develop web sites for their local competitors.
Overall, the last presentation really brightened things up and got me excited for the conference. It gave me a lot of ideas.
When I got to the parking garage and presented my ticket, I was in for a real shock. The fee was $28 for one day of parking. I was not looking forward to two more days of this.
My next hotel was again in South San Francisco. All of the hotels were surrounding the San Francisco International Airport (located in South San Francisco). In Choice Hotel brands, it seems the hotels near the airports are typically inexpensive, yet clean and secure. But this one came with an added bonus. It was near a railroad. Thankfully, neither the planes nor the trains kept me awake at night.
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