After finding out that my talk has been accepted, the next most important question on my mind when approaching a conference is, “when am I speaking?” I was just wondering this about RailsConf 2007, when lo and behold, I find that Dr Nic has gifted the world with an uber-spiffy tool: myconfplan.com [no longer available].

The gist of myconfplan is that you can sign up, tick off the sessions you figure on attending, and then tell the world about it. Not only can you use it for the aforesaid vanity, but you can also track the crowd popularity of various talks – pretty nifty. Oh, and for the more fragile among us, you can now deal with the mental anguish a lack of omnipresence can cause at a multi-track conference. Picking between Dan Benjamin and Robert Martin is something some of us really need to tackle in our own homes.

For me, myconfplan kills two birds with one stone: I now know when I’m speaking (was this published elsewhere? O’Reilly’s conference site seems a bit lacking in usability) and I can also publish my own plans in all their glory. Yay vanity!

Of course, myconfplan isn’t all roses – it also gives us speakers a heavy does of reality as to what folks think of our talk proposal skills. Which brings up an interesting point: in a multi-track conference, the talk title and abstract are king, since they’re all most people ever have to go by when deciding what to do with the next 45 minutes of their conference-going life.

Next year I need to spiff up my talk titles… “The Business of Rails” – boring! I wonder if “Capitalists on Rails” would’ve doubled the attendence? ;-)