Five and Lime

Yesterday was the end of an eventful week at Carsonified. We set ourselves the challenge of building a web app in four days. The whole process was blogged over at www.carsonfied.com and the end result is Matt (Multi Account Twitter Tweeter). Essentially it allows you to post the same message to one or many Twitter accounts. It is coded in Python and uses the Django web framework. Hard to believe now but we had little experience of either before the project began but we thought it would be good to see just how agile and easy to use Django is. Personally I was impressed.

The app is in many ways secondary to the experience. The end result showed how a team of people with diverse skills can pull together and achieve something great within a given time period. We can’t have done too bad as the project made it onto TechCrunch and sparked off something of a debate (145 comments at the time of writing). 1200 accounts have been added in the first 24 hours!

Be sure to check out the posts and videos over at www.carsonified.com and futureofwebapps.wordpress.com for more info and to chart the project from day one to four.

On Friday 13th June a bunch of us from Carsonified descended on RIBA in Lonon for our first ever FUEL conference. It was the first time we had run an event with this type of content and I felt it went really well. Despite having to follow the boys form Soocial and their love of Hasslehoff I felt my own talk went well. I got some positive feedback on the day and subsequently which is always nice. It’s always hard to know where to pitch things and I think for some attendees they probably found they knew most of the concepts and appliactions. Hopefully they were in the minority.

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There were some great presentations on the day, the majority of which are now available from the web site. You can also check out some of the tweets from the day using Summize.

Finally a huge thanks to Jean-Baptiste Feldis who came all the way of Paris for the day. He also brought me over a selection of French mustards (a personal fave of mine) which I am currently enjoying. Merci JB!

Over the last few weeks I have been attempting to perfect my home made pizza skills. It all started a couple of weekends ago when the fridge was bare apart from a few vege’s and cheese. The only issue was a distinct lack of yeast. As it turned out this isn’t a problem.

After scouring the web it turns out you can easily rustle up a pizza base with flour, oil, milk and baking powder (all of which were in the cupboard). The recipe I found was in cups but it doesn’t seem to matter, as long as you use the same cup for all measures it seems to work.
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Last Thursday (May 1st 2008) I ran my first ever full day workshop for Carsonified (AKA Carson Workshops). “How to build a PHP5 web app in a day” took place at the Carsonified HQ in Bath and welcomed ten attendees from around the UK. As I mentioned on the day I am humbled that the workshop sold out and that people wanted to travel from places as far flung as Manchester, Brighton and London.

The aim of the day was to end up building a simple lifestream app which pulls in external data from services such as Twitter, Flickr and Magnolia. To achieve this we looked at the concept of OOP, creating PHP5 classes, extending them, XML, cURL, REST, SMARTY, MVC and approaches to organising your applications directories. Classes and objects are one of the hardest things to explain, at least for me, so I hope attendees went away with an understanding of their use and how to use them in their own work!

Somehow I managed to bring the workshop in on time finishing just before the required “beer o’clock”, much to the relief of my voice and most likely the groups ears! Thanks to everyone who came along and took time  to come to Bath for the day. It was great to meet you all and I hope that you found the day of use.

Thanks also to everyone who has emailed or twittered about the workshop, it’s always great to get feedback and even better to know you enjoyed the workshop. See you at the next one!

Yesterday Carsonified launched a new conference called Fuel. The strapline line is “Powering your business with the new web” and I am down to speak. Whilst other Carsonified events focus heavily on web design and development Fuel is aimed at entrepreneurs and marketers who want to get to grips with the new breed of web tools that will help them communicate with their customers and build communities around their products and services.

In previous jobs I have conducted training and spoken in front of large numbers of people but it’s been a while so although excited I am sure there will be a few butterflies on the day. My talk is entitled “”Cheaponomics” and I will be talking about how you can use free and cheap web tools such as Basecamp, Google Calendar, WordPress and Blinksale to streamline your project management, share company information, communicate with your team and customers and look after your invoicing.
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ReadWriteWeb today announced that Yahoo would be indexing Microformats. This is great news in the move towards achieving the semantic web. I came across Microformats when reading Andy Clarke’s book “Transcending CSS” and have attempted to implement then on projects since then. This web site makes extensive use of hFeed, hEntry and hCard.

“But what’s the point of all this extra markup?” ask many of my webby friends. It’s easy to be convinced of the advantages of using Microformats if you read “Microformats: Empowering your markup for web 2.0” by John Allsopp. By applying simple agreed classes to markup we can enrich the meaning immensely, for example using hReview for any blog posts that are reviews. Given that the formats are published and stable search providers can create engines to mine this data and then make it available to web developers to create even more interesting applications. Imagine being able to query Yahoo for reviews on a concert and then aggregating them in your own site. This is one such application, the possibilities are endless.
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The daily postings from FOWA Miami which I had intended to write just didn’t happen. I had good intentions but then the workshops, conference, parties and the odd margarita put pay to that, not that I am complaining.

Instead I thought I would post some observations from our six days in Miami, in no particular order…
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The first major Carsonified event of the year is “The Future of Web Apps” which takes place in Miami Florida and I am lucky enough to be going.

The team rendez-vous’d at the office at 4.30 ready to catch the mini-bus to Heathrow. After a short detour to pick up Jo we were sipping a coffee in the departure lounge ready to catch the Virgin tin bird to Miami International. 10 hours later we touched down and were greeted by the fresh smelling heat of Miami. After a short ride to Ocean Drive we arrived and checked in at The Strand Hotel, a white art deco hotel right on the beach front. It’s always the little things that set hotels apart and for the Strand it’s Betty, the “Manager of Desires”. Seemingly it’s her job to keep us up to date on what’s going on and keep us happy with a supply of free cola, which is nice. If nothing else it’s a great job title.
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Firing up this web site yesterday I noticed that the screenshots supplied by the ma.gnolia.com bookmark JSON feed had grown in size. After having a look at the actual feed nothing appeared to have changed. However closer inspection revealed that the supplied thumbnail URL had an additional “/160″ at the end which as it turns out is the width in pixels of the now default screenshot.
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I am selling a couple of used but in good condition Netgear items on e-bay.

Netgear WGR614 54 Mbps Wireless Cable Router & Switch

Netgear WGPS606 54 Mbps Wireless Print Server & Switch

UPDATE: Both auctions have now finished and the items dispatched!