Tag Archives: interweb

Multipack’s March 2008 meeting

Posted on by
Reply

multipack.gifThe Multipack describes itself as “a community of multi-talented Web professionals from across the West Midlands” and attending one of their meetings has been high on my list for over a year now. This Saturday I finally made the effort to get to Birmingham for the March meeting and it was definitely worth it.

I got there a bit late so didn’t manage to speak with all of the 15 or so people in attendance as the seating was initially an awkward L-Shape but they seemed a friendly, knowledgeable bunch and people started moving around soon enough. Discussions ranged from Mark James (of FamFamFam fame) describing the features of his pseudo-UML source code generator, the merits (or not) of twittering ones every mundane thought and super-mobile notebooks. I also got to put a face to the name of Owen Gregory, had a general business chat with Noel Welsh and Dave Gurnell of Untyped, bumped into Sukhi Dehal again and had a good chat with Tim Gaunt on the train home who also happens to be a fellow Underscore subscriber.

I’m particularly excited by The Multipack as it’s (as far as I know) the only general interest gathering of web types round these parts, I like its relaxed beer and geekage attitude and although it’s a bit of a mission for me to get to – 1.5 hr journey each way including a £20 cab fair for the last stretch home from the train station (although that’s my fault for wanting to drink and living in the middle of nowhere) – I do think Birmingham is a sensible location for the meetings. I did also raise the subject of there being a mailing list aspect to the group which, as I’ve mentioned previously elsewhere, would mean that people don’t have to remember to visit a website to have a conversation; everyone’s got email, right?

If you’re into web and available for the next meeting on the 12th of April then you should definitely come along. It’s already in my diary.

Update: There *is* a mailing list, hooray. http://groups.google.com/group/multipack

The Bristol Digital Media Scene

Posted on by
Reply

I was in Bristol for a few days earlier this week for Skillswap (which my company sponsored) and the UWE Web Developer Conference; both were excellent events so kudos to Laura and Dan & team respectively.

Being at these events and rubbing shoulders with lots of smart people that are passionate about their particular corner of our industry was really inspiring and really brought home to me just how much there is happening in my birthplace. I’ll admit I was a tad jealous of those that can attend these events by simply jumping on their bikes and cycling in.

Anyway, if you can make it be sure to attend BarCamp Bristol. I’m gutted I can’t as I’m in Norwich but from what I heard this week, it’s going to be pretty special.

May The Source be with you

Posted on by
Reply

Web geekery:

The Standardista Rebels have established a secret base on the remote domain of squidoo.com. The Dark Lord of the Kludge, Darth Gates has sent web crawlers in search of this base and its commander, Luke Veloso. While Luke is out browsing around the base, he is locked up and his browser is crashed by a Wampa applet.

Meanwhile, back at the base, the hacker-blogger Tantek Solo announces his intention to leave the Rebels to repay the debt he owes to the vile gangster Digg the Hutt (much to the displeasure of Princess Molly). But after Tantek discovers that Luke has not returned from his browsing patrol, he delays his departure and leaves the base to look for him.

*chuckle*

http://www.andyrutledge.com/web-wars.php

JigsawUK

Posted on by
Reply

I came across JigsawUK just now after following a link from The Multipack’s blog.

According to their front page it is:

…a wiki for young British digital media companies and organisations to:

* Showcase new Internet and mobile projects
* Advertise digital media jobs
* Announce events and conferences
* Find funding and advice

Sounds good to me. Unfotunately their mailing list seems to be closed to non Yahoo ID users and seeing as I’ve managed to be on many Yahoo Groups lists (and eGroups before) without a Yahoo ID, I’m buggered if I’m going to start now.

JigsawUK
the Multipack

RSS to Email

Posted on by
Reply

I can’t be arsed with RSS feeds; they are too high maintenance and I just don’t have the time to read them any more, especially so since I became a freelance web developer again and all my time is spent working or trying to get work.

I thought the Google Reader might work for me but it still means that I have to remember to read a webpage a few time a day or week. However I can do mailing lists and I’ve trained myself to take them and leave them when time permits.

With this in mind I set about writing my own RSS –> email gateway but just before I started coding I figured I’d best check to see if anyone else had already written one.

Well they had:
http://www.rssfwd.com/

Kicks botty.

Midlands interweb groups

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve only been living in the midlands for a few months now but have already found two promising groups: The Multi Pack and PHP West Midlands.

Multipack seems to be a bit more designery but they are organised, have a great website and put on meet-ups. It seems that some of the organisers are also involved with Geek in the park which unfortunately I can’t attend due to other commitments.

Here’s what they say about Multipack:

The Multipack is a community of multi-talented individuals from across the Midlands UK, that come together to discuss all the things web and share their knowledge, skills and talents.

PHP West Midlands is more of your standard mailing list affair but there are rumblings of upcoming meetings. Here’s the intro:

This is the home for a group in the West Midlands who discuss and assist each other in the use PHP and PHP related technologies such as MySQL, Linux, Apache, XAMPP and more.

I have not really been on a decent mailing list since Underscore which I have frequented on and off since leaving Bristol 8 years ago, but I’m hopeful about these two groups.

Related:
My Multipack Profile

Siftware is go

Posted on by
Reply

Well we’ve unpacked all of our boxes (apart from all of the ones in my office it seems), put as many again in the loft and all members of family Beale are settling nicely into our new life. I’m particularly liking the ability to have breakfast, lunch and dinner with the kids especially owing to the fact that lunch is loving prepared for me by my top bird, Cathie.

I’ve also had a nice trickle of work coming in which is very encouraging seeing as I’d budgeted for none for the first 3 months and the working from home thing is going well though that’s no surprise as my first year running Exponetic (Acksys actually, but the name changed) was from the back room of our London house.

A huge milestone was passed last night when I made my Siftware website live which promotes my Web Development and Internet Consultancy services which I’ll be providing for SME’s in the surrounding towns and cities such as Bristol, Birmingham, Hereford, Worcester, Malvern and not forgetting local Upton-upon-Severn.

I’m particularly pleased with some of the great testimonials from my clients that have been coming in over the past few days since I asked very nicely for them.

A milestone indeed so now I can focus on some of the smaller tasks in my list such as trialing some of the PHP5 dev frameworks like PHP Cake plus looking at the Beta 1 of CMS Made Simple.

Google reader

Posted on by
Reply

I stumbled across the beta Google reader just now and it looks really good.

If you, like me, don’t subscribe to loads of RSS feeds because you
always have too many other apps open and already don’t have enough hours in the day then maybe Google Reader is for you too.

Here’s how they describe it:


Spend your time reading what you care about most
Reader automatically gets the latest news and updates for your favorite sites. You can sort your reading list by relevance, which will guess what’s most relevant to you based on how you use Google Reader (such as which items you decide to actually read).

So it’s a combined feed with fuzzy logic, categories, starring (like Gmail) and some – shock horror – Ajaxy stuff.

All the clever stuff to one side a simple thing that makes it for me is the Google homepage block so I can add it to my personalised homepage. This means there’s a fighting chance that I might actually read some of the items when I’m happening to open a browser window.

http://www.google.co.uk/reader

Performancing: The perfect Blogging Firefox extension?

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been playing with my Firefox extensions this morning as I recently re-installed windows at home and wanted to make sure that it had all of the essentials that I use at work. So this led me to ‘waste’ 15 mins browsing the Extensions repository and I came up with a real find, Performancing:

Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox

  • Works with all major blog software
  • Easy WYSIWYG Editing
  • Trackback, Technorati and Del.icio.us support

Once installed, just hit F8 or click the little
pencil icon at the bottom right of your browser window to bring up the
blog editor and easily post to your WordPress, MovableType or Blogger
blogs.

As the text says I have a blog editor in my browser that I can tap away at whilst surfing using the same window.

It also allows one to drag and drop formatted text or images from the browser window above or there is the fallback option to selct text, right-click and ‘Blog this page’ from the relevant context menu.

Set-up was a doddle I just selected ‘Custom blog’ then ‘WordPress’ and I then had to specify the URL to the XML-RPC script that comes with WordPress. As a nice touch it prefilled this with a default URL example for WordPress which saved me having to look-up what the page was called. Other than that I simply specified my username and password and here I am writing my first entry.

It’s hard to fault quality software like this but a few niggles were:

  • There is a, beta admitedly, spellchecker (Yay!) but I couldn’t get it to work, probably my fault;
  • The cursor keys didn’t always work in the editor window, up and down would scroll the browser pane above (and the editor window *definitely* had focus);
  • There is superbly thought out ‘upload image’ option for inserting images and unfortunately it doesn’t support scp

Here’s a screenshot:

That URL again: http://performancing.com/firefox

WordPress spam plugin

Posted on by
1

After getting over 200 comment spams in 2 days I decided to implement an automatic spam blacklist system as manual parsing wasn’t cutting it any more.

Akismet seems good:

We can’t stand spam.

Who can? You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

http://akismet.com/