JordanH.net

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.

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!

National Hack the Government Day and Rewired State: Culture

You might remember Young Rewired State held at Google’s UK offices in August last year. It was fantastic, and several really good ideas came out of it. Towards the end of March, Rewired State – an awesome bunch of people who organise hack days to show the government the benefits of open data – held a few more events over a series of weeks which were aimed at furthering this goal. I was lucky enough to be able to attend National Hack the Government Day, and Rewired State: Culture held the following weekend, both at The Guardian’s offices at King’s Place.

National Hack the Government Day was really fantastic. I met a load of people who I knew from Young Rewired State, and was thrilled and extremely grateful that other devs would happily lend me a hand with my project. I decided to look at the Digital Economy Bill, and soon took up @charlesarthur’s challenge to try and develop a tool to compare differences between subsequent revisions of a Parliamentary Bill – something which he originally described in a Guardian article, and I discussed in a post on the Tomorrow’s Web blog before the event.

I first decided to look at the PDF versions of Bills – after all, they came in one file which contained everything, and I could just strip away all the headers and footers, line numbers and page numbers, and it would all be fine, right? Nope. After doing all that, I ended up with paragraphs of text with odd line breaks, formatted for print, yet rather unreadable by machine. I went back to the drawing board. I was rather reluctant to use the HTML versions because I knew they contained even more external formatting such as the site headers and footers, but I was determined to give it a try. With a little beginner Ruby help from Ben Griffifths, I scraped the contents page of a Bill, grabbed all the links to other sections of the Bill and scraped the contents of those as well. I stripped away all the nonsense such as line numbers and page numbers and combined it all together to get a finished, clean copy of a Bill. I then modified some code written by Ross Scrivener to compare the two bills and it worked really well.

After adding a caching layer, I’ve made it available for download here, and an online version has been kindly hosted by GetAVote.org here. The Rewired State project page for more info can be found here. I won a Vodafone 360 phone* for my project, along with a project called expendituremap. There were some really cool projects shown at the presentation, which ran alongside the presentation for the DotGovLabs event.

The following Saturday, I was back again for Rewired State: Culture. After having some really nice bacon barms on arrival at The Guardian, I worked with James Darling, Dan Morris, Johnathan Lister and Lawrence Job (who I worked with on TFHell last year ) to create TAPCulture, a concept to encourage young people to visit cultural venues such as museums and art galleries through location-based social networking. We mainly made more of a concept, but James and I did manage to geocode every museum and art gallery in the UK (resulting in a ban from the Google Maps API), so you could type in your town and see all the museums nearby.

I thoroughly enjoyed both events, mainly because of the amazing developers who attend, the fantastic people who organise them and the great sense of community spirit you get when you’re working on a project. I can’t wait for the next events and give a massive thanks to everyone who helped make it what it was.

* Quite bizarrely, the phone was in Spanish, the power supply was European and the phone is locked to Vodafone Spain. Any help would be appreciated in getting it unlocked for use in the UK

BarCamp Blackpool SVN Slides

My slides from my talk at BarCamp Blackpool about Getting Started with Subversion have been uploaded to SlideShare:

PHPNW 2009

PHPNW 2009 was AWESOME

This year it was held at the Manchester Conference Centre which seemed a much more suited venue than last year at the G-MEX, with two theatre-style rooms and a nice hall used for food and exhibitors.

Since I was helping out, I couldn’t see all the talks I was hoping to see, but they were all recorded and I think they will be online soon. However, the talks I did see were really interesting and I came away from the event with a load of things I’m meaning to follow up on!

Probably one of the best talks was ‘Tools and Talent’ by Plusnet developer Rowan Merewood. It was quite insightful into how to pester a development group into using a new tool and how to prepare for a large-scale migration between platforms. It was also rather humorous

It was quite good to see Microsoft doing a talk today. Despite the heckling, they showed off their new WebsiteSpark program and a new program called SketchFlow part of their Expression Studio series. They also had a prize draw, in which I won some Microsoft Points (and was also given some more by Phil – thanks!)

The day finished off with a meal and a free bar sponsored by Sun. There are further events on in the morning at the Museum of Science and Industry – I’ll try to get there but can’t guarantee anything.

On the whole, the event surpassed the expectations set by last year’s conference, and had a great line-up of talks and speakers as well as an equally-awesome group of attendees. See you all next year!

Jordan

Young Rewired State

This weekend, around 50 or so teenagers gathered at Google’s London HQ for an event hosted by Rewired State – an organization dedicated to making better government websites using data they provide through APIs and the like. The task for the weekend? To build an uber-cool app from government data or anything else you can find, then present it to a panel of people from the government and other, well-respected, organisations. The entire weekend was free and I got accommodation and a train ticket down to London and back too!

The train journey to London was awesome – first time I’ve taken the train anywhere far away. Preston to London in something amazing like 2 hours and 10 mins. Tube, of course, was busy as usual (not to mention half-closed… as usual) but it’s quite exciting getting it everywhere.

Google’s offices were located in Belgrave House, a fancy new office building a stone’s throw away from Victoria station, and inside you could find sofas, deckchairs and bean-bags galore (: Tons of free chocolate and drinks and crisps and sandwiches and Google Cupcakes too!

Right, back to the hacking. The morning started off by discussing ideas. I was interested in doing something transportey so I went and discussed ideas with other people interested in the same. There, I met up with Horatio Caine who wanted to make a real-time bus info website for use on mobiles etc. (Currently this isn’t available on the TfL website.) We started work, and later was introduced to James and Lawrence, who arrived later on in the day and decided to work with us too.

We soon had our idea being developed – called, quite jokingly, TFHell – we scraped bus route information and generated the times ourselves, as a proof-of-concept of what could be done quite easily, if Transport for London would release their data on buses like many other councils have around the country. Take a look at Oxford’s Buses for example.

The final day, we narrowly missed launching a demo for our presentation, so we had to work with screenshots of our mockups for our pitch. Since we lacked a demo, this made our project look like it had just been mocked-up for the presentation, and so it didn’t really reflect the effort gone into the project generating the random times etc. However, we won the award for “most likely to be bought by Google”, and now have a cool demo online you can check out here.

The project that won “best in show” was SchoolRoutr 2.0 Beta, an ingenious app which could find the safest route to school from your house, routing around crime locations mentioned in news articles. This was developed by Stephen Mount.

It was quite sad to see the weekend come to a close, it was so cool being in Google and with loads of other people all focused on developing awesome new ideas. In the case of TFHell, I hope we can lobby Transport for London to release the data they have on live buses, and then we can take it further to do a proper launch. Thanks to everyone who came to the weekend, organised it, and to the judges for giving our project an award. (:

There is also talk of another Hack the Government day next May. I’ve pencilled that one into my calendar!

WordCamp UK 2009

Well I’ve just about recovered from a superb weekend down in sunny Cardiff for WordCamp UK. It was interesting, to say the least, and I met up with loads of amazing people who I have a lot of respect for in the industry!

Having booked the hotel at the last minute, I headed down early Saturday morning, made it down in about four hours. The morning started with a quick introduction session, going around the 130 people in the room, each giving quick overview of themselves and something they do with WordPress. I thought this worked really well and showed off the many interests and uses people have for WordPress. Surprisingly, it seemed that over half of the room make some living from WordPress too.

One of the notable sessions I attended was Jonny Allbut’s presentation about the WordPress site development process. It was really interesting and quite detailed, and named quite a few useful plugins. Another interesting session was Simon Dickson’s talk on WordPress being used in the government, and the controversy surrounding the launch of Number10.gov.uk on WordPress.

The evening social on the Saturday was really good. It was great to chat with people and I could put names to faces of people I’ve known for quite a while on Twitter and the like! I also had some time to chat with Matt Mullenweg, who was really interesting and called me a ‘natural’ with David Coveney’s camera

There was quite a bit of heated discussion in the wrap-up session when it was suggested that an enterprise-aimed event along the lines of WordCamp should also be run. Personally I don’t like the idea that much because I fear of it alienating the community and taking away the community spirit from WordPress.

However, on the whole, the weekend was a great success and I am looking forward to WordCamp UK 2010, which has been penned in at 17th-18th July 2010. However, I’m sure I’ll see a lot of you around before then, if not in conversation online! Thanks to everyone who organized, presented at, and attended the event!

Jordan

UPDATE: Can’t believe I forgot about the highlight of the weekend – the free bricks mints given out by the hotel. Oh we had a lot of fun with those

Conferences, Conferences, Conferences!

If you hadn’t guessed already… I’m gonna give a quick mention to two conferences coming up:

First off, WordCamp UK is taking place in Cardiff in less than a month’s time! I’m going and I’m rather excited about it – I was planning on going last year but didn’t quite get round to it. There are still a few tickets left I believe and they are well worth it. It’s a 2-day conference with Matt Mullenweg making an appearance too.

Secondly, the PHPNW’09 conference has just opened for ticket sales – it will be held on 10th October 2009 at the Manchester Conference Centre near Manchester Piccadilly station. There is also a Call for Papers and local members of the community are encouraged to give speaking a try. I really enjoyed last year’s conference!

Just thought I’d give a quick shout out! Will you be attending?

And I'm Back!

After a little bit of downtime (you can blame some bloody Turkish hackers for that), my blog is back on new servers. Everything pretty much was salvaged but I wanted to move it somewhere where security might be a bit tighter so it’s now sitting on what is hopefully a rather secure VPS!

I am hoping to post more often on here now – I get so many ideas for posts and by the time I get round to writing them, I think to myself that the idea has probably been and gone, and that I’ve probably missed the boat with it. Maybe that won’t happen so much in future.

I would like to write more about some of the music I’ve been listening to recently as I’m quite a big fan of indie artists and move through different groups quite quickly. I’m also willing to take some suggestions of new bands to try!

Well it’s 1:30am now and I’m falling asleep. Before I go, just want to send some link-love over to Francis’ new blog – A General Repository. He’s jumped aboard the WordPress bandwagon now and I’m looking forward to reading some of his upcoming posts! Check it out at http://ageneralrepository.wordpress.com/

Jordan

Preston Tweetup registration open

The first Preston Tweetup (organised by the folks at the Preston Blog) has been dated for Tuesday 17th March at the New Continental pub. You can buy tickets via Eventbrite and the first 50 people get a free drink!

The event should be really good, as Preston is alive with ‘twitterers’ and there will be quite a few more there than at GeekUp Preston, so it will be interesting to see the non-technical peoples’ take on the web. There’s going to be a discussion about how the web can be used during the 2012 Preston Guild. It will be really interesting.

See you there!