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!

“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.

The following is taken from the article:

The basic idea behind Semantic Web technology is that by signaling what kind of content you are publishing on an item-by-item or field-by-field basis, publishers can help make the meaning of their text readable by machines. If machines are able to determine the meaning of the content on a page, then our human brains don’t have to waste time determining, for example, which search results go beyond containing our keywords and actually mean what we are looking for.

Publishers will now be able to clearly designate content on a page as related to other particular content, as business card type information, as a calendar event, a review or as many other types of content. It will make Yahoo! a lot smarter and should shake up the world of Search Engine Optimization and web publishing, a lot.

It will be really interesting to see how Google and other search providers respond to Yahoo’s move.

Read the full article at ReadWriteWeb: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoo_supports_semantic_web.php