Nominations close on September 21, the shortlist will be announced on October 7, and then the McFarlane Prize will be awarded at Web Directions South on October 14.

Founded in 2006, in memory of the late Nigel McFarlane, The McFarlane Prize is awarded to an Australian designer or team for a site launched or significantly upgraded between September 20th 2009 and September 21 2010. Sites may be designed for Australian or non Australian individuals, organisations, companies or governments, but must be designed and developed by an individual or team which works in Australia for an Australian company, or by Australian citizens or permanent residents. Anyone may nominate a site, and there is no cost for nominating or being nominated for the prize.

We’re very proud of the prize, the way it has grown over the years, and in particular the way it has provided inspiration to Australian web designers and developers to push for “the things that matter” about the web within their organisation and on their projects. We’re very much looking forward to some more great submissions again this year — be sure to get that nomination in by September 21.

Enter Amped — the Hackday, reloaded.

We’ve taken the traditional hack day, pulled it apart, thought long and hard about what’s great, what’s not so great, and how as many different kinds of web folks can come together for one intense 10 hour period of hacking, designing and making amazing things.

Then we’ve assembled all the pieces to create an event that’s challenging, inspirational, and more fun that it should be legal to have with technology.

Amped USA follows Web Directions USA, in Atlanta, Georgia Saturday September 25th. Amped AU follows Web Directions South, in Sydney, Australia, Saturday October 16th. Both are free — but sign up now as places will go fast.

Whether you’re a developer, designer, an IA, IxD, whatever your role, at Amped you’ll find

• challenges to engage you
• mentors to inspire you and bring out your best
• prizes including an all expenses paid trip for Tokyo for Web Directions East for the top FOUR place getters
• A sensational closing party

Not only that, but Amped is catered, with food and drink to keep you energized throughout the day.

And best of all, thanks to our generous partners, Amped is free.

How does it work?

Step 1 — sign up. Places will go fast!

Step 2 — in the weeks leading up to Amped, we’ll let you know more about the challenges, so you can be prepared to hit the ground running on the day

Step 3 — turn up ready to rock on the day

The challenges will help provide structure to your work on the day — you’ll be able to choose from a range of possible challenges focussing on front end design and development, interaction design, data and information visualisation, back end development, mobile web application development and more.

Each challenge area will have mentors on hand to help you, and there’ll be prizes for the best work on each challenge.

Then, the winners from each challenge go into the Amped smackdown — with the overall winners off to Tokyo for an all expenses paid trip to Web Directions East

Then it all wraps up with a fantastic party — food and drink, music and more.

It’s free, fun, and open to everyone, but places are limited, and will go fast. So register now, and clear your diary for Saturday September 25 [Atlanta] or October 16 [Sydney].

We cover selectors, properties, media queries, and more in real depth — so if you’re comfortable with CSS, and want to really get up to speed with CSS3, I promise this will do it for you.

And it’s just $14.95.

Plus, I’ve lined up all kinds of goodies for attendees, so you could save many times the cost on conference tickets, books and software.

If you are at all interested in getting more acquainted with CSS3, then do check it out. HTML5 was a lot of fun, and I know this course will be as well

John

SitePoint are in need of a talented PHP developer — check out their job description at our jobs board and get your application in — you never know, they might even end up sending you to Web Directions in Sydney this year!

Tech23’s on Thursday 19th August, in Surry Hills, and you can go for just $165. Just check the special rate checkbox when registering

Here’s how it works.

Each day, there’s a new lesson, which should take an hour or so of your time, featuring in depth articles, videos, screencasts, and hands on exercises. Then on Fridays there’s two, 1 hour live Q and A sessions (timed so that at least one will be at a reasonable hour for you wherever you are in the world). There’s also an attendee only forum

If you’re not sure whether HTML5 is ready for prime time, then rest assured the course is all about real world, practical solutions using HTML5, as well as background information to help you decide which aspects of the language are useful for you right now (trust me plenty is).

This is going to be a fantastic course, and I’m really looking forward to it. So if you can find an hour a day for the next two weeks, you can be right on top of HTML5 before you know it.

Help us make it all worthwhile by spreading the word about these amongst everyone you know who might be interested — there’s something here for everyone who works on the web!

• Remy Sharp, “Browsers with Wings — HTML5 APIs”
• Sandi Wassmer, “Inclusive design is for everyone”
• Patrick Lauke, “Brave New World of HTML5”
• Christian Crumlish, “Designing for play”
• Simon Willison, “Building crowdsourcing applications”
• John Resig, “Testing mobile JavaScript”
• Mark Boulton, “Designing grid systems”
• Tom Hughes-Croucher, “An introduction to server-side JavaScript”

Hannah Donovan — Telling Stories Through Design

Hannah, the creative director at Last.fm, gave a really insightful and generous presentation drawing from her experiences there and what she has learned about making the most of the role of the designer. Plus she had some great slides: be sure to check them out!

Relly Annett-Baker — All the small things

Relly’s candid, quickfire style made for one of the best presentations on content I have seen. Specifically, it’s on the topic of Microcopy — lots of take aways for just about anyone who creates web sites here.

Steve Souders — Even faster web sites

As always, web apps are evolving faster than the browsers they run in. Steve discusses the time-saving techniques used by the world’s most popular web sites to create a faster user experience, increase revenue, and reduce operating costs.

More coming soon!

But our home will always be Sydney, and we’re pretty sure we’ve lined up the best speaker list yet for this year’s event. Headlining are Scott Thomas, the lead web designer of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, Josh Williams, founder of Gowalla, Blinksale and Icon Buffet. There’s also Steve Souders, Google’s high performance guru, author of High Performance websites (having seen him speak at @media, this is not to be missed), wonderful designer Dan Rubin, Michal Migurski of Stamen Design, one of the world’s leading information visualization experts, user research powerhouse Juliet Melton, and numerous others.

HTML5, CSS3, JQuery, server-side JavaScript, UX, IxD, geo-location, data visualization are just some of the subject areas on the menu, and once more, Web Directions South will feature 4 tracks, including the W3C track we started last year.

There’s also workshops by Dan Rubin (CSS3), Juliet Melton (User Research), Ben Schwarz (HTML5) and Craig Sharkie (JQuery for Designers), and of course plenty of social activities to get and keep you connected.

And, keep Saturday, October 16th free, for an amazing, free new event we’ll be announcing very very soon. You’ll not want to miss it.

Early bird registration of $300 off, at just $899 (inc. GST) is available until July 31, and if you’ve got some budget from financial year 2009/10 burning a hole in your pocket, then you’ve got until Wednesday week to register this financial year.

We can’t wait until October for Web Directions South, and we hope to see you there!

There’s plenty of great examples you can learn from (remember, “view source” is not a sin, it’s how we all learned everything we know!), including this one from Doug Schepers.

So, you’ve got a few days to go to town, learn something new, and be very much in the running for some very cool prizes.

And if you want a great looking overview of SVG, done in SVG, see Doug’s sides from our recent @media conference.