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!

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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