Recovered files
Recovered Handouts and Session Files
These are the files SkillSwap published alongside its sessions, put back at the addresses they were downloaded from. Nothing here has been converted, re-saved or modernised: they are the original 2003 to 2006 files, which means most of them are PowerPoint and one of them is a zip.
Expect them to feel old. A 2003 deck opens in current software but was designed for a 1024 by 768 projector, and the accessibility handout argues for things that are now simply how the web works. That is the point of keeping them.
Session Handouts
| File | From | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Design for Accessibility | Andy Budd, 31 March 2003 | PowerPoint, 879 KB |
| Search Engine Promotion: No Tricks, Just Common Sense and Elbow Grease | Rosie Freshwater, 1 September 2003 | PowerPoint show, 292 KB |
| Information Architecture | Caroline White, 17 November 2003 | PowerPoint, 104 KB |
| Design for Accessibility (PDF) | Andy Budd, 31 March 2003 | |
| CSS overview | Jeremy Keith, 19 May 2003 | PowerPoint show |
| CSS box model | Jeremy Keith, 19 May 2003 | PowerPoint show |
| CSS positioning | Jeremy Keith, 19 May 2003 | PowerPoint show |
| CSS typography | Jeremy Keith, 19 May 2003 | PowerPoint show |
| CSS application | Jeremy Keith, 19 May 2003 | PowerPoint show |
| DOM scripting workshop examples | Not dated in the original index | Web page |
| Photoshop session handout | Not dated in the original index | |
| Mac OS X session handout | Not dated in the original index | |
| The business of freelancing, part one | Not dated in the original index | PowerPoint show |
| The business of freelancing, part two | Not dated in the original index | PowerPoint show |
| Design for accessibility, show version | Not dated in the original index | PowerPoint show |
Where These Came From
The five itemised handouts are listed on the original presentation index, which is reproduced as the lecture notes archive. The rest were published but never indexed, and were found by working through the addresses that other sites had linked.
One is worth singling out: the DOM scripting examples page is not a document but a working demo, written for a session on scripting and still functional in a current browser. It is served exactly as it was.
Opening These Files Now
Most of what is here is PowerPoint from 2003 to 2006, in two variants. A .ppt file is an editable presentation and a .pps file is the same thing set to open straight into a slideshow — a distinction that mattered when the alternative was emailing a file to somebody who might not have the application. Both open in current versions of PowerPoint, in Keynote, and in the free office suites, with some layout drift.
Expect that drift rather than being surprised by it. Fonts that were installed on a 2003 machine are substituted, line breaks move, and slides designed for a 1024 by 768 projector sit inside a modern widescreen frame with space on either side. None of that has been corrected here, because correcting it would mean editing somebody else’s document.
The PDFs are straightforward and open anywhere. The one HTML file is not a document at all but a working page from a scripting workshop, and it still runs in a current browser.
What Each Set of Files Is
The five itemised handouts belong to the 2003 talks and are listed with their speakers and dates on the lecture notes page. Those are the ones the original presentation index named, which is how their attribution is known.
The CSS Based Design set is five separate slide shows covering an overview, the box model, positioning, typography and application. They were published together as one archive and are served individually here so each can be opened on its own.
The remaining files were published by the site but never listed in its index, so they carry no date or speaker attribution in the record. There is a Photoshop session handout, a Mac OS X session handout, and a two-part talk on the business of freelancing. That last one is the most unexpected inclusion in the whole set: a technical community running a session on how to price work and manage clients, which is the sort of thing a trade teaches itself precisely because nobody else will.
The accessibility talk exists twice, as an editable presentation and as a slideshow, and as a PDF. All three are kept because all three were published, and the PDF is the one that other sites linked to.
The DOM Scripting Demo
One file here is different in kind from the rest and worth singling out. The DOM scripting examples page is not a handout describing a technique; it is the technique, running. It was built for a scripting workshop as a self-contained page that steps through its own examples, and it still works in a current browser two decades later.
It is also an unusually honest artefact. The script inside credits where part of it came from — a post by another developer — in a comment, which is the sort of attribution that gets stripped out of polished material. It uses the techniques that were current at the time: adding behaviour after the page loads, walking the document to find elements rather than querying for them, and rewriting links on the fly.
That it still functions is not really a compliment to the code. It is a property of the platform: a page written against the web in 2005 mostly still runs, which is the reason an archive of web material is worth keeping at all rather than merely describing.
Why These Are Kept at Their Original Addresses
Every file here is served from the address it was downloaded from when it was published. That is not sentimentality about URLs; it is the only way a link made to one of these handouts in 2005 still works.
Other sites did link to them. The accessibility handout in particular was cited from several places, which is why it exists here in three formats rather than one — the editable presentation, the slideshow version, and the PDF, all of which were published and any of which somebody may have linked.
The practical consequence is that this page is an index rather than the point. The files do not need this page in order to be reachable, and a visitor arriving directly at one of them will get the file rather than a redirect to a listing. That is deliberate, and it is the difference between preserving a link and merely acknowledging it.
What Is Not Here
Nothing from the Brighton run between 2008 and 2013. Those evenings published no slides and no handouts, so what survives of them is a title, the speaker’s own abstract written before the event, and a recording in ten cases out of forty-seven. The recordings are linked from the individual event pages rather than collected here, because they are hosted where they were originally published rather than on this site.
Nothing from 2005 or 2006 either. That period ran longer, workshop-shaped sessions and published neither notes nor recordings, which leaves ten sessions recorded with their subject, date and venue but nothing of their content.
So this page covers a single stretch — roughly 2003 to 2006 — and it exists because that stretch happened to be the one where publishing the material was the habit. It is a reminder that what survives of anything is mostly a function of somebody’s filing decision at the time rather than of how good it was.
A Note on Ownership
These handouts were written by the people who gave the talks. They were published here by the site in 2003 to 2006 as the material for its own sessions, and they are served from the addresses they were published at, unaltered.
That is the basis on which they are kept: not as a collection assembled from elsewhere, but as the site’s own published material restored to where it was. Nothing has been converted, re-saved, re-titled or repackaged beyond splitting one archive into the five slide shows it contained so each can be linked individually.
Treat the contents as you would any other author’s work. The names and dates on the lecture notes page are the attribution the original index recorded, and where a file was published without being listed there, no attribution is claimed for it here.
How These Were Recovered
The five itemised handouts were found by working from the original presentation index, which named each talk with its speaker, its date and the file it linked. That index is the reason those five can be attributed at all, and it is reproduced as the lecture notes page.
The rest were harder. They were published but never listed, so there was no index entry pointing at them. They were located by working through the addresses that other sites had linked over the years and by following the naming pattern the listed files used — a handout for a session on freelancing, for instance, turns out to exist in two parts under sequential names.
Two of them very nearly did not make it. A talk’s notes published as a single archive containing five separate slide shows is easy to miss entirely, because the index entry names the talk rather than the contents. And a working demo page with a file extension nobody uses any more reads as a broken link rather than as a document, which is how it stayed unlisted for two decades.
What is certainly still missing is unknown, which is the honest position. There is no manifest of everything the site ever published, so this page holds what could be found rather than what existed.
One Practical Warning
Two of the files here are large by the standards of the material — the accessibility presentation is 879 KB and one of the PDFs runs to over two megabytes. Both were sized for downloading over a connection that made that a decision rather than an afterthought, which is part of what they document.
If a file will not open, the likeliest cause is the application rather than the file. A .pps is a slideshow rather than a document and some viewers refuse it while opening the equivalent .ppt without complaint; where both variants of the same talk exist here, try the other one.
Formats in One Line Each
A .ppt is an editable PowerPoint presentation. A .pps is the same content saved to open directly into a slideshow. A PDF opens anywhere and cannot be edited. A .htm is a web page, and the one here is a working demo rather than a document. Everything opens in current software; nothing has been converted.