Anyone building websites nowadays owes a great deal of thanks to Eric Meyer (@meyerweb), both for his contributions to web standards and CSS in general as well as to our community with the books and articles he’s written and the An Event Apart conferences. Along with Jeffrey Zeldman, which I spoke with last month about AEA coming back to Atlanta, I fired up skype and talked a bit about conferences and speaking at conferences with Eric Meyer.

Talking with him about what he’s into right now, I got an emphatic “CSS3!”. We can definitely count on Eric to help us sort out the details within CSS3 as we all get deeper and deeper into it. As always he’s actively testing and writing about it for us all.

I asked him for a tip on first time talk givers. “The audience is on your side” is what he shared with me, people have come out to hear you either entertain, educate or inspire them so all they want you to do is just that. So you don’t need to apologize, or freak about winning the audience over, they all want you to succeed. Remember that you’re speaking because you have something great to say or share, so bring it! That’s great advice for me personally and one i’ll take into account the next time I get up in front of a group.

As with my last post on AEA Atlanta, the lineup looks amazing. Turns out this is a fairly unique lineup for an AEA event, so Atlanta you’re special!

Sarah Parmenter – @sazzy
Jason Santa Maria – @jasonsantamaria
Luke Wroblewski – @lukew
Andy Clarke – @Malarkey
Kristina Halvorson – @halvorson
Jeremy Keith – @adactio
Aarron Walter – @aarron
Jared Spool – @JMSPOOL
Ethan Marcotte – @BEEP
Jeffrey Veen – @veen
Eric Meyer – @meyerweb
Jeffrey Zeldman – @zeldman

Here’s more on the conference itself.

THE DESIGN CONFERENCE FOR PEOPLE WHO MAKE WEBSITES

An Event Apart is returning to Atlanta (http://aneventapart.com/2011/atlanta/)! Curated by Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman, the 2-day show features 12 cutting-edge speakers and sessions on leading design, code, and UX topics — subjects like designing with CSS3 and HTML5, responsive design, content strategy, web type, and more.

An Event Apart (aneventapart.com) is an intensely educational two-day learning session for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design. If you care about code as well as content, usability as well as design, An Event Apart is the conference for you.

They were cool enough to setup a discount code for us to share, so if you’re going save $100 when you register using the code AEAUNMAT.