JordanH.net

Summer of ’10

Well, it’s fast approaching the end of August and it’s been quite a while since I last wrote on here. I’ve had a really good summer – it kicked off with BarCamp Blackpool, then WordCamp UK in Manchester, then I went to Alton Towers for the first time in many years, and then I went to Portugal for just short of two weeks to stay with relatives out in the peace and quiet of the eastern Algarve. Not to mention the two GeekUp Preston events which have been held (and there’s a website now too).

Yesterday was my GCSE results day – I was really chuffed with my results (I put it down to the Rails revision timetable app I coded ). Now as the end of summer looms, I’m preparing for college. I’m taking English Language, Economics, Government and Politics and Business Studies for A Levels in the hope of going into journalism further down the line.

It’s been a good summer!

WordCamp UK 2010

Wow. It doesn’t seem a year since I was typing up a post about last year’s WordCamp…

This year, WordCamp UK was held in Manchester, a little bit closer to home than Cardiff! Held at the Manchester Metropolitan University Business School, there were three main tracks (and a fourth communal area) and the same great variety of attendees and talks.

One of my favourite sessions of the weekend was How WordPress Themes Have Changed The World by Michael Kimb Jones. My main port of call in WordPress is theme development, so I was quite interested to see other people’s take on it all, and especially where the GPL themes market is heading to. Similarly, I found Jonny Allbut’s talk on WordPress Theme Frameworks and Template Tricks interesting, and I’m very excited about the beta of the Wonderflux theme framework this week. There were many other great sessions too – particularly the sessions by Simon Wheatley and Mike Little on their latest projects.

On Saturday afternoon I helped Jonny out with the Site doctors: Let the experts help you! session along with Mike Rawlings and John Reid. That was an interesting session and I hope the people who asked us for advice found it useful. (Also, to the guy who wanted the ‘Uncategorized’ category to be changed automatically, I wrote this quickly to add to your theme/plugin).

However, I felt that this year there was a certainly different atmosphere for WordCamp. Last year, it felt a lot more community-oriented, whereas this year it felt slightly less-so, and more enterprise-oriented. This is probably for a number of reasons. Perhaps the same-level table seating arrangement in Cardiff created more of a community feel, and maybe there was more time for chatting between sessions, something that has been entirely dependent on how much of the hour a session used up. And perhaps there were more attendees who were more from an enterprise background. I have to say that this didn’t detract from the great weekend, merely an observation of what has changed since last year. Simon Dickson picked up on this a bit during his session, and referred to the difference between the first WordCamp and Cardiff being similar to this.

Finally, and I’m reluctant to comment on this, there was the heated debate about the future of WordCamp UK. It was a shame that this was only brought up at the end – it left quite a sour taste after such a good weekend. Jane Wells representing Automattic dropped the line during the feedback session that calling the event ‘WordCamp UK‘ was (in her words) “not acceptable”. Needless to say that this didn’t go down well.

I don’t think it is right for Automattic to assert their ethical policies and bureaucracy over what was a community-started event. It was organised entirely by the community – or to be more specific, the fantastic Tony Scott and Chi-Chi Ekweozor – and, after running without hindrance for three years, has recently become a registered organisation. For a company which does not even fund or help organise the event, what right do they have to dictate what we should and shouldn’t do? It feels in a way like a betrayal.

This is my sole objection at present to what was discussed – at the moment I am happy to leave the decisions about the future of WordCamp to the organisers and the Core Group. I just find it irresponsible of Matt/Automattic to effectively “change the rules” late in the game – rules which they don’t have much of a right to enforce. Yes, we could do what Matt loves to say and “vote with our feet” or something to that effect, but what does that do? Even if we were to start something like OpenCamp – which attracted some criticism on the mailing list today – we would just get the Thesis treatment from Matt and inherently the WordPress community.

It’s saddening that this controversy shrouds what was a really good, well-organised event. Once again, I met a lot of new and interesting people, but it also gave me the chance to catch up again with the fantastic people I met last year and have kept in contact with since. Whatever happens between now and the next WordCamp event in the UK, I’m sure the next time will be another good show.

Hello Young Rewired State Manchester

I can’t make this year’s Young Rewired State, but I’m going to pop along to the pre-event in Manchester this Thursday. It’s at MadLab and should be really good. Even if you’re interested in open data but not that interested in the hack week, come along and you’ll find it really interesting!

Government Websites and WordPress

The latest release of data from the Government highlights the costs of Government websites from April 2009 to March 2010. It gives a somewhat-detailed breakdown of the costs of 47 websites, along with the number of visits for the same period of time.

There are some sites there which have cost the taxpayer shocking amounts of money – including Business Link, which cost over £6m just for planning, over £4m for building and £4m for testing! On top of that there was £15m content provision costs and a staggering £4m per year to host – all for just 16m visits. Compare that with the WordPress-based Number10.gov.uk website, which receives almost as many visits – just short of 12m last year – but costs only £86k a year to host. Another WordPress-based site, Bis.gov.uk, received just over 1m visits last year, yet cost a measly £5k to host. Just to put that into perspective, you could host the BIS website at those costs for 1,250 years – over a millenium – and it would not even cost as much as it did to just plan Business Link!

Compared to the large Serco-made mess of the Business Link site, WordPress is clean and efficient, and doesn’t require a large infrastructure to run well. I suspect a large part of the Business Link £4m hosting fund is down to MS server license fees. The fact that WordPress comes with a user system and content management cuts out the costs of developing these too (which aren’t usually done too well, anyway). Using WordPress across the government keeps things consistent, and would keep training costs down in the long-term, as website staff won’t necessarily have to undergo much training if they’re moving from updating a WordPress website to another WordPress website.

There are many smaller WordPress sites within the Government, however no others are big enough to have been covered by the dataset released. Hopefully in the future they will be.

In the new age of budget cuts it will soon become clear that, inside Government, sites which have a smaller footprint when it comes to infrastructure, along with smaller initial development costs will survive the axe – which is soon going to fall on sites which have ridiculously large budgets and hosting costs.

UPDATE: Turns out the BIS site is not using WordPress anymore. It was doing last year, probably was just an interim site.

BarCamp Blackpool

Yesterday, the second BarCamp Blackpool took place at the Pleasure Beach. It was an absolutely amazing event – everyone was really friendly, it was great to catch up with people I haven’t seen in a while and I met some interesting new people too!

The location was really really good. It all took place in the Paradise Room inside that big white building at the Pleasure Beach. During the day the room was partitioned off into three smaller rooms where talks could take place. Additionally, there were little booths around the back with tables and power, and you could alternatively lurk there at the back during a session (or between them) to chat or code . At night, the partitions were removed and we were treated to a sponsored bar (courtesy of @Plip) and buffet (sponsored by PayPal). There was also magic by Paul Sylvester – Josh’s dad – which was awesome and really funny. (Miles better than Ken Webster!)

The sessions were really interesting. I enjoyed the Xdebug talk by Ben Waine and he helped me to get it up and running on my MacBook after the talk. I also caught a bit of the next session, a talk on Twitter and TagWalk by Tim Hastings. In the afternoon, I caught the end of Jon Spriggs’ talk on the digital session board script he’d created. It’s a nice idea, but I think for the script to be really useful, the concept needs refining (especially in room allocation etc), the barrier to entry lowered and I’d like to see an API. Finally I went to Jeremy Coates‘ talk on using a Continuous Integration system like Hudson with Phing to automatically run unit tests, check code styles and run code through phpDocumentor, ready for deployment.

After the sessions were finished, we had an hour to kill, so many of us all followed @Thehodge around and around the building until we found the Horror Bar (hidden down some unmarked stairs past some toilets). Definately some interesting things down there, including a zebra skeleton, and it was quite funny watching (and cheering) all the people running out of the horror walkthrough accompanied by the chainsaw sound effect!

(Almost forgot about the awesome pie at lunch! Meat and potato ftw )

There’s no doubt this was a spot-on event. Everything was ran well and it was really enjoyable. A massive thanks to Gemma Cameron for organising it and thanks to all the sponsors and all the attendees for helping to make it happen! Roll on BarCamp Blackpool 3!

iPhone 4

I queued for a few hours last Thursday to buy an iPhone 4. It was worth the wait The “Retina” display is mind-blowingly sharp and bright, and works really well (despite almost all third-party apps not upscaling graphics – yet). For me, the most amazing feature is the HD Video Recording – I’ve found it really useful over the past week, at Lytham Club Day for example, and the improvements in the camera are really stunning compared with my old iPhone 3G.

However, that’s not without its problems. I am one of those with an iPhone suffering the left-hand antenna problem, but I invested in a bumper (daylight robbery!) to alleviate it. Though I am more concerned about the yellow marks on the screen, which haven’t quite faded away yet – despite what some people have reported on Mac forums online. Will be heading back to the O2 store for a swap when I think they’ll have more in stock.

Overall though, I’m really pleased. Multitasking is pretty good and the battery life seems rather long. All in all though, the real potential of iPhone 4 and iOS 4 will come with developers updating their apps to take advantage of the new features.

WordCamp UK 2010 Tickets

Grab ‘em while you can. Early Bird ticket sales end this weekend, and if you only even have a small interest in WordPress, you need to be there. The conference last year was amazing and I met so many fantastic people who were also very interested in WordPress. So what are you waiting for?

Thoughts on WordPress 3.0

It’s been in beta for a while (and, yes, I admit, I’ve been using nightly builds on here for a month or so), but WordPress 3.0 is finally out. Now includes some great new support for custom post types, menu management (originally by WooThemes) and the merge between WordPress and WordPress mu.

The new custom post type support could really do well at duplicating Tumblr functionality – although it’s still a bit strange because it’s dependant on at least the theme supporting it, and I’ve not really seen anything thrown about the community yet as to which post types should be considered standard for ‘tumblelog’ themes – obviously this is something that’s pretty important, because if you decide to change your theme and it defines differently-named post types (or misses a type out completely), you’ll ‘lose’ those posts somewhere inside your post table.

I think that WordPress still needs to raise its game in regards to multi-site functionality – it should work out of the box with something akin to ExpressionEngine’s Multiple Site Manager add-on – but it’s understandable that it’s early days. All in all, those who have been using Mu no longer will have to endure the delay between an update’s release and it being available to Mu, and presumably they can now also automatically install updates.

It’s all really great stuff in the build-up to WordCamp UK 2010 – which is taking place in Manchester in the middle of July.

GovCompare

This week I’ve been in London, anticipating the launch of the COINS dataset, thanks to Rewired State. The product of this has been an initial release of this awesome app, GovCompare (titled by Josh), where you can easily compare how much the UK government spends between two areas of government.

Murdoch to hide UK Times Articles from Search Engines

Rupert Murdoch has long threatened to block search engines from viewing his newspapers’ online content. To be honest, it won’t be a great loss – in fact it is probably more of a gain for Google. I mean, what is the point of carrying links in your search engine to content which is behind a paywall anyway?

I’m somewhat skeptical about how well the paywall will work. To be fair, if they can attract enough subscribers who value reading their news online over a free alternative, then it might not be too bad. Otherwise, they’ll end up lumping it with Sky subscriptions and claim the site gained thousands more subscribers.

I’ve yet to see an interesting business model for online news which is sustainable, other than advertising. The eyes of many a businessman will be watching how The Times’ venture works out.