Your Code is Collapsing - Refactoring Can Save You

I've never had such a bad conference... Even the ones i've had in the last two days weren't that bad. The conferencer had 6 or 7 slides, tooks pauses thinking what to say, finished early.

The whole crowd was so stumped that he didn't deliver half of what was promised in the tract that many of us got out of the conference before the end. No applause, nothing, plain silence...

I am sorry if the talk did not help you. I'm trying to find actionable feedback in what you wrote, but am having trouble.
If you mention that there were no applause, it means you left during the Q&A. There were applauses, and long ones, at the end of the Q&A session,  when I showed the final slide. I started the Q&A session early because the theoretical content had been delivered and I had planned to leave a lot of time for Q&A, where I gave a lot of important pointers.
I had very positive comments from people who came to see me after the talk.
There weren't many slides because I wanted people to focus on what was said and the questions and answers. The topic *is* abstract. Way more than HTML5 or the latest PHP framework.. As explained in the talk, the point was to provide leads and ideas for people to find their answers. Lack of refactoring is a very complex problem and a single talk cannot cover all the required concepts.  Some thinking needed to occur when I realized that only 3 people in a room of maybe 60 did not know what code smells are.
But the main takeaway for me is that  maybe this topic should only be addressed in workshops, since everybody's situation and understanding are so different. As mentioned at the end of the talk, I will upload a version of the slides with more text and references. Hoping you will take a look at them and get more from the presentation.

This was more of message type of presentation than a technical content type. As such, i found that it was quite insightful and had some funny moments. I thought it was generally well received. I like the fact that confoo.ca has different types of presentations and this one in a good example of this. Of course as seen in the other comment, everyone cannot be satisfied with everything.

It was a message that we should check has about refractoring

The concept of refractorign is not so simple.

I had fun.

Especially with the image of code "smell" with the cheese.