Web Components and Model Driven Views – Alex Russell

Alex Russell’s presentation was a really interesting look at the state of modern browsers along with the deatails on some really shiny but potentially controversial new features that are currently being worked on in webkit.

First was a look at how the speed of new browser versions being released affects the progress of the web. With slides based on the browser adoption graphs in this ars technica article, it’s clear that Internet Explorer users tend to be much slower to upgrade their browsers. Especially with Firefox’s new release schedule both Chrome and Firefox are seeing much faster uptake of new versions. Faster releases means browsers are beginning to evolve more quickly resulting in a faster rate of progress. All of which can only be good for the web.

Moving beyond this Alex took a look at aspect of web components. First up was scoped CSS, the idea here being that you can “scope” CSS to a specific element. In this way that CSS will only apply to the children of that element.

Next was a look at Web Components. The first part of this is API that allows you to extend the DOM and create your own custom elements. The example given was the creation of a Comment object. Next a feature called DOM Shadow allows you to “hide” or make private the subtree that your custom object is created from so that it’s invisible to anything else. Interestingly, this is already something used in the development of video controls in webkit. This allows you to make something with divs and spans but hide the implementation details from the world. Depending on your point of view this is either fantastic news or will leave you feeling a little bit icky.

Lastly was a look at templating and model driven views which really do look good. It allows a template to be bound to data in such a way that when the data changes the template is updated. Definitely looks to be useful.

To see the full set of slides head over to http://infrequently.org/11/fronteers/fronteers.html

The New Developer Workflow – Divya Manian

This presentation was a walkthrough of steps that make-up the work flow of a modern web developer from using Version Control to deciding what browser features to use and when to use polyfills or not, vendor prefixes, CSS preprocessors and build scripts.

I enjoyed the walk-through of the features and capabilities of Compass (a CSS preprocessor). From a personal stand-point I’ve ever used SASS or LESS but seeing some of the features that Divya talked about I can see some worthwhile use-cases (time to try it out on a personal project maybe ).

The New Developer Workflow Slides

HTML5 Forms – KISS time – Robert Nyman

Robert’s presentation was an honest look at the features of HTML5 forms and provided really good practical information on where the issues are and where as a developer you need to be careful.

Of particular interest was a number of caveats around using form validation features. For example: Required attribute will pass if you just submit a space. Email validation can’t cope with international characters e.g: röbert@kissonline.com won’t work. Pattern attributes can be submitted if they are empty (This is counter-intuitive though a commenter at the end of the session pointed out it makes sense that you would to use the required attr as well).

Overall the key takeaway here was the new HTML5 form features are cool, but like everything else they need to be used with care.

CreativeJS – beauty in the browser – Seb Lee-Delisle

This was perhaps the most surprising presentation of the event. Seb has a fantastic speaking style, very down to earth and good humoured. His presentation was in two parts, first was looking at how to create beautiful particle effects using JavaScript. Seb showed some very simple code which produced fantastic results. The approach was to create effects such as smoke and roman-candle like firework effects by approximating the physics and making it look just about right rather than spending a lot longer nailing an effect based on a 100% accurate physics model.

To play with all of this the files are on github. https://github.com/sebleedelisle/JavaScript-PixelPounding-demos

The next part was Seb’s software which turned the audiences mobiles into a giant display. This was mind-blowingly creative and a fascinating demonstration. The problems involved in this are pretty big, first was that of synchronising the signals sent to the phones so they would display in sync. This was done by measuring the delay from sending data to each phone. The next, even bigger problem was that of identifying where in the audience a given phone was. My understanding is that the software sends a pattern to each phone which it then looks for in the camera pointing at the audience. Having identified the location the audiences phones could then be used like a big display. Very cool stuff indeed!

jQuery and the Open Source Process – John Resig

John Resig talked in detail about how JQuery became popular through being very responsive to users in the early days and through building and fostering a community by being open and transparent.

In your @font-face – Jake Archibald

Jake’s talk was very good – highly entertaining and also packed with interesting details about the potential issues and pitfalls in using web-fonts today.

There’s a number of problems to solve from how browsers treat @font-face, how to reduce the weight of fonts to download by reducing the glyphs used, to the way in which browser actually download the fonts to use them. All in all it’s a royal mess. Lastly Jake looked at how the way browser download fonts affects the final rendering.

Bottom line was that it really shouldn’t be this hard.

Jakes slides can be found at http://speakerdeck.com/u/jaffathecake/p/in-your-font-face

The Prestige of being a web developer – Christian Heilmann

Christian’s closing presentation was built around a theme of the film “the Prestige“. Christian made lots of good points about how we can be better developers by being inventive, learning from others, contributing to projects through documentation or submitting bugs and being open about what we do.

Slides and audio with a transcript are available on Christian’s blog

And that was it.

A big thank-you to the speakers and organisers for putting on an excellent conference.

Here’s an overview of Day One.

The Future is Native – Aral Balkan

Aral Balkan presented the opening keynote with a presentation looking at where web experiences sit in relation to experiences provided by native applications. In a nutshell this presentation was about inspiring developers to embrace Use Experience (UX), to focus on the user’s needs rather than focus on technical considerations at the beginning.

Aral advocated a notion of “Write once, optimise everywhere”, starting with progressive enhancement as a basis, then optimising for features, and then to optimise for specific devices. I personally feel this is good ideal to aim for, however my immediate thought was that it’s important to be pragmatic and choose the battles to fight in terms of what devices you optimise for.

Towards the end of Aral’s presentation he looked at how UX is difficult; as you move away from face to face communication towards using a device you’re losing visual and audible cues. This means getting things right can be difficult but the right UX provides the “Superman effect” which in other words is to make the user feel empowered and feel good about their interactions with an application.

Accessibility for the Modern Web – Derek Featherstone

Derek Featherstone, gave a great talk on what considerations there are around building web applications that take into account accessibility. Firstly he looked at work he’d done in the past that had been criticised as being a collection of hacks. These were scripts that added accessibility features to existing applications, for example: keyboard accessible you tube controls, and adding keyboard accessible controls to google maps. Derek went on to explain that the need for such “hacks” is because of decisions someone else made.

Following on from these inital examples Derek walked through a number of real-world examples where odd markup decisions had been made to provide (in come cases) a certain look and feel rather than using the best-fit native elements. For example Amazon use a convoluted customized checkbox widget rather than use a checkbox. Another example was Gmail’s compose links being a span with an onclick rather than a link.

Looking at examples of real-world problems the key points made were around choosing the right control for the job. Buttons for actions link to take the user somewhere. If you’re needing to use tabindex=0 to make something focusable then this a good point to reconsidering if you’re using the right control.

Another issue considered was management of focus. If a link opens a dialogue then once the user has closed the dialogue the focus should go back to the link that opened the dialogue. For a keyboard user focus is crucial and if you send focus to the top of the page constantly then you’re providing a very poor user experience.

Derek also provided some examples of use of tabindex had resulted in “keyboard trap”, in this case it was a form that had focus controlled in such a way that you couldn’t get to to certain fields through the use of tabbing to move through the fields.

Looking at keyboard interactivity Derek pointed out the caveats of using role=button on links. As assistive technology that support aria roles announces a link with role=button as a button the user will expect to be able to use the spacebar to activate it. However unless the site author has added keyboard handling to allow for this spacebar will do nothing. This is something that’s all too easy to do and whilst trying to be well-meaning the addition of such a role has impaired accessibility.

Derek’s presentation provided lots of great examples and practical advice and it’s definitely made me want to dive in to everything that we’re building an re-evaluate what improvements we can make to provide a better experience for all our users. In addition I feel it’s important to get a good sense for what a baseline experience should be so that it becomes a given that we build accessibility into sites rather than facing the prospect of retro-fitting it afterwards, as that’s always going to be more expensive in terms of time and effort.

CSS3 Secrets: Ten things you might not know about CSS3 – Lea Verou

Lea provided a great showcase of cool tips and tricks you can achieve with CSS3. Lots of interesting and cool stuff here. I particularly like the gradient tricks for faux-columns and the background-origin tips. Interestingly this highlights something I love about working with CSS in that creative approaches to problems can yield really good results. One of the best examples of this was the use of nth-child selectors to provide layout control based on the number of elements.

You too can be a bedwetting antf**ker: Bruce Lawson

Bruce’s Presentation highly entertaining presentation walked us through the new elements in HTML5, noting problems that currently existing in the specifications. This was a good overview of what’s new in HTML5 and where new elements provide more options for describing your content with more appropriate semantics.

Go with the flow: Stephen Hay

Stephen gave a talk on the exciting features of CSS Regions. CSS regions are just appearing on the horizon in terms of current browser support, but that doesn’t diminish what interest creative possibilities they open up. I’d definitely recommend checking out the deck.

The future of CSS—Current Experiments and Near Future Reality – Tab Atkins Jr

In this presentation Tab Atkins Jr (who works for google as a CSS specification writer) outlined a lot of cool features that are coming into CSS specifications and in some cases these are things that are starting to be implemented albeit experimentally in most cases.

Image function

background: image("foo.webp", "foo.svg", "foo.png", blue);
background: image(rgba(0,0,255,.2)), url(foo.jpg);

This allows fall-backs in the first example the first item that loads is used.
The second example allows a transparent colour to be overlaid an image.

Flexbox

I particularly liked the flexbox example which demonstrated an input and button with the flex() used for the width so that it takes up the remaining space up to the button.

<div style="display: flexbox;">
	<input style="width: flex(); display: block;">
	<button>foo</button>
</div>

Calc

The calc() function (I can see this coming in very handy):

calc(50% + 20px)
calc(100% / 7)

attr() lets you pull values from attributes on the element.

width: attr(data-size as px, 100px);

CSS vars!!!

@var $header-color #006;
@var $main-color #06c;
@var $secondary-color #c06;
a { color: $main-color; }
a:visited { color: $secondary-color; }
h1 {
  color: $header-color;
  background: linear-gradient(left,$main-color, transparent 25%);
}

Tab noted that a lot of innovation was happening in the CSS preprocessor space and this was being recognised and informing some of the newer specs.

To see the full range of examples Tab’s Slides can be seen here: http://www.xanthir.com/talks/2011-10-06/

Passion. Purpose. Promise. Pursuit – Leslie Jensen-Inman

The final presentation of day one was a call to action to embrace the things we are passionate about, define our purpose, make commitments to ourselves and others (promise) and to pursue these goals to make greats things and do good.

This was a sound message, and it’s easy to see how it can apply to being a web developer. Also something that we don’t often do is step back and evaluate ourselves and look at where we are heading and rationalise our interests with what we want to achieve.

Passion. Purpose. Promise. Pursuit. slide deck on Speaker Deck

For Day two see: Fronteers Conference Day 2

Photo by geekgrunge

Last weekend I attended FOSDEM in Brussels.

Here’s a few of my chosen highlights:

James Turnbull – DevOps – More than Marketing

This was a good overview of the devops mentality, and how operations and developers can work together more effectively for the greater good.

In his presentation James Turnbull related how Operations people need to be involved in projects from the beginning. Otherwise there’s a tendency for developers to build something and then just throw it over the wall. Often this results in systems failing over as soon as there’s load. When things do go wrong, each side blames the other. Involvement from the beginning helps to avoid these “blame storms”. After-all It’s far better to spend time working on fixing the actual problem and ensuring it doesn’t happen again.

James listed several things that are important to smooth running of services, such as testing everything, ensuring that failures are expected and building redundancy in to allow for that. Testing is something that developers tend to have had more experience in, so systems people can potentially learn a lot from that. There was a reference to ops people thinking that testing means monitoring, whereas apps people see this differently. For example, a check for a mail server port being open, doesn’t actually prove it can send mail.

The last part of the presentation covered how it’s always better to hit problems hard early on, to prevent them evolving into larger problems. In the final part of the presentation James explained how it’s typical that people fear change. If you are someone that makes changes people will hate you! However, the good news is that often fear of change is mostly irrational and it can be dealt with by listening to concerns and providing clear examples of how change will provide benefits.

Moving to the Client, HTML 5 is here – Christian Heilmann and Robert Nyman

Christian and Robert make a great double-act. The presentation was informative but also at the same time light-hearted. Between them they listed key features of HTML5 and how those things can practically help you. They made good practical points without relying on superfluous shiny demos.

First up was forms and how all of the additional features of HTML5 can make for much richer experiences. For example; there are plenty of new input field types, such as colourpicker, range, search, email, phone, autocomplete, etc. The benefit of these is that by providing a more semantically correct field the user-agent can provide a much better experience by providing client-based validation and specific controls that match the information in a much more meaningful way. Validation can provide hooks for CSS by providing valid/invalid pseudo-classes on each element. New events provide additional hooks for behavioural changes. For example onInputChange allows the developer to provide step by step validation should they wish. Obviously all of this doesn’t negate the need for server-side validation but it does all add-up to a richer experience for the end-user.

Next up was a walkthrough of what was possible with HTMLCanvas. Robert detailed how to create shapes fills and paths. Clip was particularly interesting as it provides a way to provide a mask which only allows what’s in the transparent part to be visible. There was mention of using ExplorerCanvas a JS library that converts canvas to vml for Internet Explorer versions that don’t support canvas.

The next subject was video. Flash is seen to be a black box whereas HTML5 audio and video are like any other HTML element. The big benefit with HTML5 audio and video is that they provide native controls provided by the browser. This is immediately much better for accessibility, but not only that HTML5 provides a far more extensive API. Vid.ly was mentioned as a great new way to provide video in many formats, e.g. webm, ogg, streaming for iOS etc. The particularly nice thing is that it provides a single universal url, and the correct video format will be supplied depending on the usage.

Web storage was up next with some examples of storing and retrieving JSON from storage. An interesting note was that 5mb is the limit on what can be stored without the user being asked if they allow it. A goal with web storage is that it should provide the ability to have a seamless offline experience. A point was made about the IE api being different by actually being the most robust for determining when it is offline.

Lastly there was some focus on some good examples of pratical demos that show off what is possible with HTML5. Shape detection e.g. Face detection. Nude.js was mentioned which is a library that looks to provide client-side nudity detection with JS and HTMLCanvas (potentially NSFW). Audio analysis, Image generation.

Overall a lot of ground was covered that made you think about what’s possible with HTML5.

Slides and Audio

• Slides
• Audio

I’m going M.A.D. (Monitoring and Metrics) – Spike Morelli

Spike’s presentation provided plenty of great reasons why you should look to having as much data about your application as possible. He showed some good examples of how metrics can provide great in-sights into what is happening with your code. I missed the early part of the talk due to cross over with the HTML5 one, but there were some interesting points about code metrics, e.g. code coverage, number of tests and lines of code. The lines of code metric in isolation doesn’t tell you very much. However when combined with the number of tests and code coverage, when the coverage increased and the number of lines dropped it was clear to see this was a point where the code was refactored.

Spike related how style-based metrics are useful too, e.g. Linting, PEP8 and that beautiful code should be rewarded. He then went on to say how Monitoring provides the means to see problems before they happen, for example monitoring memory on staging could spot a memory leak before it hits production. For me this raises the important point that monitoring staging and non-production systems can be worthwhile. Though clearly for that to be really effective you would need a good way of reproducing the load of production in your staging environments.

Practical Go Programming – Andrew Gerrand

This was a really good presentation, taking the example of building out a URL shortener using GO. It went all the way from dealing with the basics to a Master/Slave configuration using RPC, finishing with a great demo showing a realtime graph of live testing against the master and the read-only slaves.

Due to the code example based nature of this presentation, the best way to see this is to take a look at the slide deck which is available here: Practical Go Programming

Go intrigues me and I came away thinking I would certainly look to take a close look at it, time allowing .

The Storage Technologies Behind Facebook Messages – Nicolas Spiegelberg

This talk went into great detail about the HBase set-up used at facebook where they condense many sources of message; emails, sms and chat into a consolidated approach that allows people to talk to their friends without needing to care about the medium. It started off with a glossy video describing the high-level problem and their high level solution to combine message into one simple approach.

The details on the amounts of data were amazing, 15 Billion emails, 120 Billion chat messages amounting to 25TB data per month. As people aren’t deleting data this solution needs to provide greater and greater amounts of storage on an ongoing basis.

HBase solves this problem by providing a strong consistency model, automatic failover, multiple shards per server for load balancing and to prevent cascading failures. The other interesting point is that it allows them to take down a large amount of machines and keep running with the rest. This is handy for when they are running dark launches where they were testing some of the new messaging features without exposing it to users but to put it under live load conditions. All of this helps them meet the goal of having zero data loss.

An interesting facet of the talk was where they talked about their contributions to the HBase project. It sounded like they are very actively involved and there’s good cross-company collaboration on the project which is certainly good to hear.

In Summary

In summary Fosdem 2011 was a great experience, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

One thing I did learn was that staying in the centre of Brussels is probably overall easier for socialising in the evening vs getting to and from the venue. However this did at least give me a great opportunity to take a walk and see more of the city.

Everything was very well organised. The only downside was that I couldn’t see some of the presentations I wanted to because I had been to other presentations first. Some tracks like the configuration management one were full from start to finish so. That said, there were so many great presentations happening it was really easy to go and find something else interesting.

This was my first Fosdem and it was excellent, I look forward to next year.

Whilst we were out there our trip co-incided with a YUI 3 event so we thought it would be rude not to head along to that.

YUI 3.0 Event at Brickhouse

Before DjangoCon started, Cyril and I got the plane to San Francisco and went over to Yahoo’s Brickhouse to met up with old friend and ex-colleague Ben Ward and to see the YUI 3.0 presentation in the evening. After a swift bit of awesome tex-mex Cyril and I went for a quick mooch around town before getting back in time to see Nate Koechley, Adam Moore and Matt Sweeney talk about YUI 3.0.

All in all I was really quite impressed with how YUI 3.0 is shaping up. As an ex-yahoo who is now using JQuery I feel it’s looking to have addressed some the things that other people have always criticised. Having used YUI 2 at Yahoo I never found the verbose namespacing that much of an issue but having now using JQuery I can kind of see what people were talking about. This is very much a thing of the past with YUI 3. Also something that I’ve struggled with using JQuery is that it’s such an abstraction. I tend to use JQuery for the stuff it does really well like selectors and events (JQuery’s event implementation is very simple and clear) but use standard JavaScript for most other things. YUI 3.0 sticks to making it’s interface follow existing JavaScript interfaces much more closely, whilst adding necessary features such as CSS selectors. Although I’ve yet to play with it I’m looking forward to trying it out, as I’m pretty sure I’m going to like it.

Afterwards Cyril, Tristan and Ben and I headed out for the second mexican of the day; it was like a marketplace team re-union sans fondue! (We made up for that later!).

DjangoCon Preparation

On the Friday (Evil)Rob, Cyril and I headed over to the GooglePlex , where we were taken on a tour of the facilities and met with the Open Source team. My take on the Googleplex is that it’s awesome but at the same time scary, because it’s clear that the intention is to provide everything so Google becomes the hub of every day. Still with facilities like that you’re going to want to work long hours!

DjangoCon Day One

After helping out on the registration desk we caught Guido’s talk about AppEngine and it sounds like in the future it’s going to be possible to get Django’s ORM talking to BigTable directly which would be fantastic. It was also interesting to see Guido’s code review app which I got some pictures of someone has ported this to standard Django app and I hope they post details at some point.

Adrian Holovaty’s presentation on the history of Django was really interesting. It really proved the idea of putting something together and then iterating on it.

Christian Hammond and David Trowbridge talked about ReviewBoard and their utility apps Djblets. Really liked the look of the Djblet called siteconfig. It’s basically a way to create an interface for Django settings. Review Board itself is something I’ve been meaning to play with, Cyril asked the question I’d wanted to ask which was, is there support for bazaar and apparently there is. Excellent!

Malcolm Treddinnick’s talk about the Django ORM was really impressive, mainly it made it really clear how much effort has gone into the queryset refactoring. Also it came across that the ORM is much more flexible when it comes to creating custom query methods something which was borne out by the next presentation.

Justin Bronn talked about his project GeoDjango. GeoDjango takes your breath away as it’s got support for a huge range of geo formats and standards and it makes some truly astonishing things possible. What I didn’t realise is tha GeoDjango uses Geo Queryset methods to perform spatial operations with spatial databases such as PostGIS. An example was shown of an imported dataset of all of the states in the US which had been mapped as polygons. Justin demonstrated in the admin how it’s possible to change the co-ordinates of the polygon through a draggable interface and save it. All kinds of queries can be made to find where objects intersect or whether they’re contained within a boundary etc. Brilliant work.

To close day one, Cal Henderson gave an brilliant presentation on “Why he hates Django”. It was mostly a massive piss-take but with some serious points thrown in, and really covered a lot of areas in Django that are no-doubt going to be addressed at some point in the future.

Day Two

I saw Mark Ramm talk about what Django could learn from Zope. I thought there were some interesting points made. The main one though is just the general point that the Django community shouldn’t become blinkered and should look to benefit where possible from other work within the Python Web development community.

Malcolm’s talk on Code and patch design was good – he cut right to the point on what’s needed to make a good contribution and pretty much everything he said was common sense.

The Django Success stories was quite interesting as it really focussed on practical things that people had learnt using Django in their work and I think as a general point some of the most interesting stuff learned from attending DjangoCon came from hearing about what people are building with Django. Definitely should be more of that at future DjangoCons.

Lastly after a live eposide of TWiD, Adrian and Jacob hosted a session to close DjangoCon to cover what’s going to be happening in the future. After detailing their recommendations they opened up to the audience to make their “I want a Pony” requests. Utimately Django’s future is looking really good and I came away from the whole event pleased about the direction it’s all going in and looking forward to be able to contribute back to the project in whatever way possible.

Well done to Rob for all his efforts in putting together the conference. Google also did an amazing job of hosting it and I’m looking forward to the next one.

San Francisco

With DjangoCon over I took a couple of days to visit San Francisco where I caught up with Ben and Cyril for a great meal at Spork after spending a bit of time in the Haight seeing the Grateful Dead house and buying a load of awesome Deadhead stickers etc!

I also enjoyed an epic walk from the centre of the city out to the Golden Gate bridge prior to meeting up with some Yahoo’s for Fondue at San Mateo. I made sure to take the chance to sample several of the city’s finest coffee shops including checking out the Japanese Syphon bar at the Blue Bottle. San Francisco is awesome and I hope that I can visit again soon!

The first DJUGL (Django Users Group London) Meetup is happening on the 19th May at GCAP HQ in Leicester square at 7pm.

I’ll be presenting “Django from a developers point of view” where I’ll be talking about my thoughts on what makes Django a good framework choice.

It’s worth pointing out that the organisers welcome anyone who’s new to Django alongside seasoned Django developers alike.

If you wish to attend please register at the DJUGL event page as at time of writing there’s only 28 tickets left.

I’m pleased to announce that after a hiatus the WSG London events are back! The next event is on the subject of “findability” as part of London Web Week on Wednesday 28th May.

“Findability” is a term coined by Peter Morville, which refers to how possible it is to locate or navigate something.

The presentations for this event will cover the basic concepts of what findability is and why it’s important as well as practical examples of how you can achieve a findable website. We’ll also be looking at FireEagle which is a site that is all about making people and services findable.

Here’s the list of speakers and their presentations:

• Cyril Doussin – The concepts of findability
• Stuart Colville (yours truly) – Building websites with findability in mind
• Steve Marshall- Finding yourself with Fire Eagle

To find out more details and to register to attend the event please visit the WSG London Mini Site

SXSWi is the geek excursion of the year for me. It’s a chance to catch up with old friends meet new people and to generally geek-out in one of the coolest cities I’ve ever been to, Austin Texas.

This year to do something slightly unusual Cyril, Tristan and myself had decided to head to Houston, hire a car then drive to Austin at some point after seeing a bit more of Texas. After a 10 hour flight we got the car and headed out onto the highway towards San Antonio where we had planned to meet up with Opera’s Chris Mills and the internet’s Carl Camera and his family.

The drive was eye-opening in several ways. Having never seen any part of the US other than Austin for the last 2 years running I was looking forward to our little road-trip. What was surprising though was how long the bill-boards and hoardings were with us between Houston and San Antonio. If I recall correctly it seemed as if they only stopped for about 30 minutes of the 3 and a half hour drive; where at which point they were replaced with longhorn cattle and ranches and then as we drew closer to San Antonio the billboards and advertising started up again and it made me realise how much people are bombarded with ads just by going about their daily business. Perhaps though if this is something that you’re used to you mentally block them out find them far less intrusive?

Remember the Alamo

I’d taken over driven after a quick pit-stop and was beginning to feel like I couldn’t wait to arrive. Fortunately the lights of San Antonio were twinkling in the distance and it wasn’t long before we were finding our way to the Hampon Inn. When we arrived we realised how dead tired we all were, so there was only one thing to do; check-in then hit the town and get our drink on!

Just across the road from hotel was the River Walk, a man-made river with a walk-way down each side. We found ourselves a mexican bar and tested out a jug of margarita before heading to an Irish pub for a few shots of tequila. After adjusting our body clocks with the night out we head back to the hampton for some kip.

The next morning we took full advantage of the Hampton’s breakfast bar before heading out to meet Chris and Carl and his family. We met up and went to have a look around the Alamo where we found a couple of people talking through the equipment of the period, including Bowie knives, Brown bess muskets and various other paraphenalia including bullet making equipment, tobacco and rations.

Esther’s Follies

After the Alamo we went to get some tex-mex before heading off to Austin to check in and get sorted out before heading to Esther’s Follies a comedy show held on 6th Street. I didn’t know what to expect but it was an awesome show, and despite there being a lot of stuff based on topical US politics I really enjoyed it. For me the Magician made it as his act was hilarious and the tricks were top notch too. It also has to be seen to be believed how they use the window behind the stage as part of the show. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend visiting Esther’s follies to anyone next time you’re in Austin.

The Rodeo

On the Friday afternoon a bunch of us headed out to the Rodeo and Carnival. The carnical featured a BBQ cook off where all of the food was free aside from the expectation of donations towards some childrens charities – great for meat eaters less so for vegetarians though there was so I’m told some fried cheese somewhere. The Rodeo was strange. After the announcer thanked George Bush and a prayer was said for the riders. We witnessed Bucking Broncos, Bull riding the whole works. There was even a special kids event with sheep riding, and there was me thinking that sort of thing only happened in Wales.

SXSW interactive panels

This year I found on the whole that I didn’t see any panels that were absolutely incredible or that stood out. I’m thinking though with all of the choices it certainly is possible to be unlucky and I felt this was how it played out for me this year but I’ll be back next year without a doubt.

Of the panels I did see I most enjoyed the “Scaling boot camp panel” for it’s inisght into problems faced with scaling of real sites including Twitter, and the “Design Hurts” Panel with John Gruber and Michael Lopp. I particularly liked John Gruber’s explanation of the apple logo which went something along the lines of:

If you take away the bite it’s just an apple. The bite represents original Sin. When you think about it this makes sense as Apple stands for temptation.

One thing noticeable in all of the panels that I went to there’s a distinct lack of anything remotely technical. I would really like to see more practical presentations next year if possible as otherwise there’s a tendency for panels to get to conceptual, theory based and wishy washy. Cool thing with SXSW is that if you’re not enjoying the particular panel you’ve chosen you can kick back and hack away on something or head out for coffee to geek out with friends old and new.

The Social

It was great to hang out with friends in Austin, the parties were good but sometimes the queues meant foosball in Buffalo Billiards was a better option. The FireEagle bash was great and in particular this year the closing party was awesome, great venue, good tunes, drinks on tap. What more could you ask for except for a trip to the Ihop to round it all of. Cheers Dustin.

I enjoyed meeting lot’s of new faces whilst out and about. I also found that I most enjoy hearing people’s passion for what they do on the web, afterall that’s a big reason why we all head out to Austin year after year and for me that’s reason enough to keep SXSWi on the calendar for next year too.

SXSWi will be upon us faster than a group of web devs heading to the bar. This year to liven things up a bit I’m heading there with Cyril Doussin and Tristan Turpin via Houston and San Antonio before we hit Austin at some point on the Thursday. After which I’ve no doubt you’ll find me attempting to take on the locals at the foosball tables.

This will be my third time in Austin for SXSWi and I couldn’t agree more with the “Guide to SXSW for newbs and veterans”. One thing in particular is to not worry in the slightest about which panels you do or don’t make it to. Best to work out the few you like the sound of, relax and if you don’t find yourself where you though you’d be, just swing by one of the other rooms. Sometimes the most interesting panels are the ones that you just wander into.

The same goes for the evening events, the more unplanned the better

So to assist in unplanning your SXSW I’ve hacked together a ical file for all of the SXSW interactive events using the rather brilliant Beautiful Soup HTML parser.

After downloading the main SXSWi 2008 schedule page, Beautiful soup made it trivial to grab all of the links for the sessions, so that I could then fetch the page for each panel (with a little judicous caching) and then use Beautiful soup again to extract all the necessary details from the markup which contains hcal microformatty goodness. I then wrote this out to a file and the job’s a good’un.

You can either subscribe to the sxswi08 panel schedule ical (.ics) file here OR download it to your desktop as a zip.

Fortunately the evening events page is just a page full of microformats so extracting that to an ical file is a lot more straightforward by using Brian Suda’s x2v – so here’s the sxswi evening events ical (.ics) file and archived as a zip.

If you notice any problems with either ical file then be sure to let me know so I can fix it up.

Lastly if you’re heading over to Austin for SXSWi be sure to say Hi.

Expect the next WSG event organised by Tom and Neil to be announced in the not too distant future. Cheers to both of them for stepping in, I’m sure they’ll do the WSG proud.

The RNIB web access team are putting on a free event at the Westminster University, New Cavendish street campus on Tuesday 5th June at 7pm, where Shawn Lawton Henry of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative will speak about WCAG 2.0.

I saw Shawn speak as part of an accessibility panel at SXSW06 and I was impressed that she really got across the practicalities of implementing Accessibility guidelines which is really important to anyone that’s actually going to be building accessible websites.

For more details of the topics that will be covered on the night, visit the event page and sign-up a soon as possible, capacity of the venue is limited.

The venue has been provided thanks to the support of the support of the Department of Electronics, Communications and Software Engineering