This is the blog of Jordan Hatch, a web developer and WordPress fan from north-west England.
// October 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Events
My slides from my talk at BarCamp Blackpool about Getting Started with Subversion have been uploaded to SlideShare:
// October 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // Events, Technology
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
// August 24th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Events
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!
// July 21st, 2009 // No Comments » // Events, Technology
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
// July 2nd, 2009 // No Comments » // Events
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?
// June 20th, 2009 // No Comments » // Events, Myself, Technology
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
// February 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // Events
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!
// December 24th, 2008 // No Comments » // Events, Myself
Merry Christmas from JordanH.net!
Have a great Christmas and a happy new year! Thanks for reading my blog this year and I hope I’ll keep it up (and maybe post a little more frequently) throughout the years to come.
How are you spending Christmas this year? Personally, I’ll be playing Guitar Hero: World Tour for most of tomorrow, and some CoD: WaW later on. Considering we seem to have bought FOUR turkeys this year (don’t ask me why!), we may be eating turkey all the way through 2009 too!
Have a great time,
Jordan
// October 15th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Events, Technology
It’s quite typical in this day and age to turn on the television and see yet another news report about starving children in Africa, people dying in Bangladesh or something similar, and it’s quite typical to disregard it as nothing much and flick over to another channel. It’s not hard to think that poverty is something that doesn’t affect us and is only a problem in third-world countries. I think it’s time we all thought again.
Poverty is something that can be very close to home. Albeit not to the extremes which are saw in places like Africa and Asia, it’s still there and something, which again, is very easy to turn a blind eye to. You may find these facts hard to believe, but one-fifth of the UK’s population don’t have enough to live on. That includes almost 4 million children. The amount of children in poverty has doubled since the last generation, despite advances in technology and availability of benefits.
We’ve all wore the white band, but has that actually meant something to us? Of course we can’t donate millions ourselves, and most of the time we can’t see an actual change, but there are tons of things we can do which, when done by a lot of people, can make a huge difference. There is a great list here of a small things you could do which could make a big difference on the lives of people in poverty all over the world.
Yes, your average Joe doesn’t have a million pounds to give away, but there’s nothing stopping him clicking a button or donating the money he’d spend on a coffee to help out those in need.
Today is Blog Action Day, and thousands of blogs around the world are joining together to make a combined effort to make people aware of world poverty. This is a great example of how many people can do a small thing, but when it’s combined together makes a massive difference.
There’s an endless amount of things you can do to help, and it’s amazing what the world can do when people pull together.
Photo from SamPac on Flickr. Statistics from Oxfam and JRF. Part of Blog Action Day 2008.
// August 8th, 2008 // No Comments » // Events, Media
I tuned in to BBC at 12:45pm today, quite excited about the beginning of what would be a very unique Olympiad in its own right. Surrounded by the political controversy with Tibet, Human Rights and the censorship, it’s hard for you to appreciate the stunning work that the Chinese have done without your mind wondering over to the hardships that the nation likes to hide.
But the ceremony started off nevertheless, with a stunning countdown and then some amazing performances from 15,000 people. Along with an amazing fireworks display above the capital, the event was truly spectacular. No wonder the Chinese trust in the number eight as their lucky number…
