Barcamp Brighton 2 is coming soon - March 15th and 16th 2008 - and is going to be held at the University Campus at Falmer in the Union building. It sounds like its going to be able to be a larger affair than the last one which will be excellent, but unfortunately I'm not going to be able to make this one. I'm a bit sorry about this but we've already committed to be somewhere else at a gathering in advance of a wedding a bit later in the year. I'm sure BarcampBrighton 2 will be great and I look forward to keeping up with updates via twitter, flickr and various attendees blogs and wish the organisers lots of luck.

Labels: barcampbrighton

// posted by Jane @ 7:26 PM   

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So, having had a few days to think about, here are my thoughts about barcamp Brighton.

Having it the weekend after dConstruct was good because lots of people were already down in Brighton for dConstruct, and so people who might not have normally made the effort to get down to Brighton came along and everyone benefited. It probably added to the attractiveness of the proposition on this occasion. It also meant that people were already in a "learning" mode.

Having it the weekend after dConstruct was bad because lots of people (including me) were hungover after the after party and so some of them turned up pretty late on Saturday (I'm talking after lunch here). Also, some people only seemed to attend on Saturday as my impressions were that there were quite a few less people around on Sunday. I guess this is due to people having long distances to travel and so is understandable BUT means that people who would have been prepared to stay around all weekend potentially missed out (the tickets sold out in 21 minutes after all).

Overall, and after the success (and possibly due to the success) of this barcamp I don't think that the next barcamp Brighton needs to follow dConstruct to be a success - it may be a different crowd, but I have no doubts it would still be a rewarding experience and would have plenty of willing participants.

Labels: barcampbrighton, Brighton, event

// posted by Jane @ 7:20 PM   

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Whilst at barcamp Brighton I spent some time talking to Paul and Phil from BT Osmosoft (who sponsored vast amounts of pizza and beer) and amongst other things they were reminding me about tiddlywiki, a single page wiki file. I made use of tiddlywiki within monkeyGTD for a while, but haven't revisited for some time.

Armed with a USB stick with sample tiddlywiki sites on I decided to give it a go for storing test cases for a project I'm working on at the moment. I set it up and got it running pretty quickly, although I decided to forgo the "If running on safari run these commands" instructions and work on firefox instead (anything for a quiet life!). I deemed this a success and took the wiki into work and set it up there, along with creating a project based one to store tasks and stuff. Of course, I'd missed the fact that this was a single user only wiki by design and so it wasn't long before Simon inadvertently overwrote my changes.

A few searches of google and various suggestions later I stumbled upon tiddlylock. This solution is nothing more complicated than a tiddler with code in it and tagged with systemConfig, but it seems to do the job nicely enough. Now if I make some changes to the wiki, and Simon attempts to make changes too, it tells him that I have it locked at the moment, so he can read it, but won't be able to edit. With some discipline from both of us, i.e. saving our changes immediately, this will become a workable solution which doesn't involve us having to find a server somewhere and install and maintain a full wiki solution.

Labels: barcampbrighton, tiddlywiki, wiki

// posted by Jane @ 6:53 PM   

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Sunday arrived and having headed home to bed on Saturday evening I strolled into the office at around 9am to see what was happening. The first, and only, issue arose when Ian arrived and informed us that breakfast was half an hour late due to Pret's oven breaking down or something. We pushed the sessions back by 15 minutes and soon caught up again, so no real damage done.

There were a few more Madgex people around and so we shared out the door watch duties between us so that we could all try and see some sessions, oh, and play table football :-)



I managed to see 4 sessions in total:

• Multi Lingual Sites - a discussion - led by Sjors Timmer
• i18n and l10n - Mark Norman Francis
• CSS tips - Vicky Lamburn
• Web testing with Selenium - Kerry Buckley

These talks were quite a mixed bag and I found that the one I gained the most from was probably the discussion led by Sjors about multi lingual sites, something that I've recently become interested in. I found Norm's talk (i18n and l10n) dissapointing as it turned out to be heading towards a product demo (which failed) rather than a study into the concept. I still ended up with a lot of links and articles to follow and read.



After the closing talk, and the clean up session, we headed off to the Madgex Arms for a few pints before heading home to recover.

Labels: barcampbrighton, Brighton, conference, event

// posted by Jane @ 6:42 PM   

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Ok, so starting off the day with a hangover was inevitable, but not ideal. I got to the office at around 9.30 and started helping out. We had a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it in before the attendees started to arrive, and in fact several arrived early. We hadn't even finishing putting name tags together and so I had to head downstairs armed only with a list (in the order that people registered in) and name badges for those people with first names beginning with A, B or T. I was hugely intimidated opening the door and facing a vast amount of people in the foyer. Still, I got them processed, and it wasn't long before reinforments in the guise of Alex and Gillian appeared to help out. Phew! I obviously wasn't the only one with a hangover as people continue to drift in up until around 2pm, meaning that one of us had to be on the door to let people in and out. At around 2ish, Glenn, Sally and I decided that we'd done enough of this, and that people could phone from now on as the next sets of sessions were about to start.

I managed to attend quite a few sessions during the afternoon and evening, and I have to say I really enjoyed them. The sessions I saw were:

• Social Media - the cats at Nixon McInnes
• Social network portability - James Littlejohn, Tantek Celik, Jeremy Keith and Glenn Jones
• The perfect cup of tea - John Sutherland
• hAvatar - Alper.nl
• How Clearleft work - James Box, Paul Annett and Andy Budd

Following on from dConstruct yesterday this list of things to read, or look into just continues to grow.

The food sponsors have been incredibly generous, with lots of pret food for breakfast, a wonderful spread from The Cherry Tree Mediteranean Deli (which Ryan Carson decided to throw away after lunch rather than leave around for people to nibble on - what a waste of truly wonderful food) and loads of pizzas and beer. Not forgetting the generous amounts of fruit, chocolate, crisps and soft drinks too.

I've got a few talks I want to attend tomorrow, especially the Internationalisation and Localisation one - as this is relevant to my last project and a recent blog post so I'm hopeful that I can work my helping out duties around them.

Labels: barcampbrighton, Brighton, conference, event

// posted by Jane @ 11:30 PM   

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It had been a busy few days over at Madgex. We are one of the premium sponsors at dConstruct, running the backnetwork and hosting barcampbrighton over the weekend. To be fair, its been business as normal most of the time, but we did have to pack all our kit away this evening in preparation for an office shuffle.



Our t-shirts turned up this afternoon for dConstruct and then five of us headed off to the Dome to setup our stand for dConstruct and after a bit of fun working out what how to put the thing up, we ended up with a pretty good looking area. I'm meeting Nick tomorrow morning to set up the PCs before registration and then we're good to go. We've also got flyers in all of the dConstruct bags for the various jobs we are recruiting for at the moment (mainly C# developers, creative designer types and an information architect).



I took advantage of being there this evening to register ahead of time, and so am now happily sorting through my schwag, and stickering stuff.

After a quick burger at GBK, where most of the rest of the geek community of Brighton were, we headed off to Heist for a few pre-conference beers at the pre-conference party.

Taken from backnetwork, here is my blogroll prior to the conference kicking off properly - it'll be interesting to see whether it grows over the weekend.

• Alex Goluszko
• Alex Farran
• Alex Laurie
• Andy Budd
• Aral Balkan
• Bruce Boughton
• Clive Walker
• Dan Glegg
• Danny Hope
• David Stone
• Denise Wilton
• Glenn Jones
• Ian Ozsvald
• James Wragg
• James Box
• Jay Caines-Gooby
• Jeremy Keith
• Jessica Spengler
• Jez Nicholson
• Johanna Hunt
• John Montgomery
• Jonathan Markwell
• Josh Russell
• Natalie Downe
• Nick Tong
• Niqui Merret
• Paul Silver
• Paul Annett
• Richard Dallaway
• Richard Rutter
• Rosie Sherry
• Seb Seb
• Simon Willison
• Sophie Barrett
• Tom Hume

Labels: barcampbrighton, dConstruct, dConstruct07, madgex, photos

// posted by Jane @ 11:08 PM   

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