Five and Lime

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!

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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