I haven’t been to the Kings Arms in ages…I cant actually remember what the last gig was I went to there…Last night will definately be one of the gigs I’ll never forget.

Manda and I went to see the Dresden Dolls last night. It was fucken awesome!
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Don’t know why I haven’t made the effort to walk across the road to have a beer at The Schooner Tavern…however, last night I made the mammoth 245m walk to the Schooner to play bingo with Tineke, Sean, Mieke and Manda girl!
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So here I am back in Auckland, trying to get my shit together. The past week has been such a high but now I’m finding it quite a challenge to get all my thoughts in check…

I’ll briefly go over what I enjoyed on day two of the conference. I wont cover all the speakers, just the ones that I was enthused enough to take notes about. As you may remember day one ended at a restaurant with 13 hardcore geeks. Needless to say getting up the next day was a bit of a struggle (thanks to the kingfisher!) but there was a lot of coffee and redbull to keep up going.

• Russell Brown (one of the few NZ speakers) opened up day two with an excellent talk on content and community. Russell Brown has been in the ‘content’ industry for ages, working as a journalist, radio personality and founding Public Address. He started his speech with an audio clip of David Lange’s 1985 Oxford Union debate speech and ended with an excellent video of a Starwars/LoTR mashup. In between he spoke about how content creation is slowly moving away from the mass media and how there’s been a huge turn towards citizen journalism. All in all, a very good talk with a lot of excellent references!
• Russ Weakley who is the founder of the Web Standards Group was next up with a funny and passionate talk entitled: Let go and allow users to control their own experience. For me this was one of the best talks of the conference. Not only is Russ quick-witted and dry, but he really knows his shit. His whole speech was based around this hypothetical situation: “Image you were in control of a large website with inconsistent and unwieldy structure. What if you had total freedom to redevelop the website from the ground up? What would you do?” Russ covered a lot of really interesting and out-there ideas that challenge the way we structure website content. He gave us a whole new paradigm to web design and information architecture. Throw out hierarchy; tag everything (images, text, audio); have users search for the content they’re after and return all the tagged media that related to that search term; allow users to control what they see; allow user submitted content (wikis, comments, tags). A really great way of looking at IA…a little Utopian, but fucken rad, none-the-less.
• Dori Smith - author of several books, magazine contributor, speaker and leader of the Web Standards Organisation’s DOM Scripting task force - a geek extraordinaire gave a brief introduction to unobtrusive javascript. This was a good (albeit entry-level) talk on progressive enhancement and how it pertains to javascript. She showed us how easy it is to convert nasty looking attribute event handlers to beautiful, unobtrusive javascript. The only bad thing about this talk was the fact that there were idiot ego-centric geeks who felt it necessary to point out minor unimportant errors in markup and semantics. FFS!!! Those dicks should have their hands chopped off. Dori, if you happen to read this. I thought your talk was excellent and I look forward to any others you may give in the future!
• Donna Maurer - an amazing speaker from Australia who gave a captivating presentation on usability for rich Internet applications. There are a few basic guidelines that any application should adhere to (including RIA’s.) These are: it should be efficient, effective, satisfying, easy to learn, have good error management and good feedback. Donna went through several screencasts of popular ‘web2.0′ applications and discussed several positive and negative things about them. It was really informative to see these things pointed out. Some thing were as basic as making sure buttons look 3D - this is something computer users learnt years and years ago and keeping these common design/usability trends going really makes for a far superior user experience!
• The rest of the day went in quick a blur…Tony Chor from the IE7 team gave us a demo of IE7 and talked through some of the new features. The thing that struck me about this presentation was the passion and sense of humour Tony exuded. The final presentation was by Kathy Sierra entitled Now Go Change The World. This was an awesome show. She really had the audience in the palm of her hands. At the end of it I was more inspired and psyched about web design than I’ve been in bloody ages. It was great to end on such a high note as it made for an awesome start to an evening of drinking, dancing and schmoozing. Give the geeks some beer and they’ll dance the night away!

An amazing experience! The organisers did such an amazing job. Big big-ups to Mike Brown and the team for pulling off such an awesome event! I cant wait for next year!

technorati tag: webstock

Flickr has been going through a few growing pains of late. Their move to Yahoo! and the massive increase in users has resulted in a bit of a sluggish user experience (well for me at least).

But - flickr being the awesomeness that they are have redeemed themselves by releasing two new features:

1. clustering - this is the new, better way to explore photos through tags. You can still use tags like normal - like the ocean tag - but now flickr will return a cluster of relatated tags….like ocean sea sand or ocean sunset. You get the idea I’m sure.
2. interestingness - this I like a lot! This is like PageRank but for photos. If photos are real popular and have many hits/comments/fav’s then they’re likely to make it onto the interestingness page. Have a look at the explore page if you would like to see other ways to see interesting photos.

Good job flickr peeps! I’m loving it more and more!

It really saddens me when web designers/developers release a new design to the web and fail to build it using modern day markup.

Telecom, I’m talking to you. Its 2005, not 1998. Web browsers have come a long way since the dawn of the web. Please please try and keep up.

Telecom has just launched a new design for Whitepages.co.nz. Its not all that bad looking. Much like the old site but with rounded corners.

This site is aimed at a massive audience - all of New Zealand; from your rural farmer to your inner-city web geek. You’d expect a website with such a massive audience to be accessible…HA! You’d be wrong!

View the site in Internet Explorer - like the most of the country would. Try to increase the font size. Notice how nothing happens? How is my poor almost-blind granny going to be able to read the ever-so-small text? I’ll tell you. She aint!

Come on Telecom! Pull it together. Web Standards are a reality. Learn them, understand them, USE them!

I’m going to leave this post as is for the time being as I’m too annoyed to write properly so come back later to read a more thorough review.

Backpack is the new release from the makers of Basecamp, 37signals. Backpack, in a nutshell, is a personal organiser. Its seems like a ‘home’ version of Basecamp. It has pretty much the same features as Basecamp but it’s been arranged in a slightly different manner.

Pages

You create pages in your ‘backack’ and add certain things to it, namely:

• Text blocks, or Notes
• Files
• Images
• Lists
• Links

They give you some examples of pages you could create like a page to organize a craft project, store favorites in your city, a portfolio, client mock-up presentations, etc. The possibilities are endless!

The free version allows you to have up to 3 pages. You can, of course delete and reuse these as you see fit. Another cool feature of the pages is that you can share them with other people.

Reminders

This is probably my favorite feature of Backpack. As you can excpect from pretty much everything 37signals do the interface is really simple and a joy to use. Backpack can remind you in two ways - there’s the regular old email method (which i’ve tested - and as a result remembered to blog about Backpack this morning :) ) or there’s the SMS method (which is currently unavailable in New Zealand).

I’ve recently discovered the usefullness of a shared calendar thanks to Mozilla Calendar and Apple iCal. Both of these products make use of the iCalendar format. What this means is that i can have one centralised online calendar and subscribe to it using either Apple iCal or Sunbird. Nice you say - but what has this got to do with Backpack? Well - the reminder system in Backpack automatically creates an iCalendar link that you can subscribe to. Sweet as! My life just got a whole lot easier!

Changes

Now this is where things get interesting…You can track changes that other people have made to any page you are sharing. It shows you a chronological list of the changes made and by whom and it also generates an RSS feed of those changes. Phat, I love RSS - the more I can get, the better!

And?

And - I love it! I can see myself using this daily. I can see my mum using this daily! Go 37signals! Such a tight little application that is so open you can pretty much do what you want with it.

In the past few months I’ve been buying/downloading/listening to a lot of music. Most of it has been New Zealand music - which is as good as anything else - however, I’ve been listening to some international stars, too.

I can only be arsed to write about two of the newest CDs I’ve purchased…so without any more key-tapping here we go.

…And you will know us by the trail of the dead - Worlds Apart

I discovered this band years ago - about the same time I discovered At The Drive-in. Since then, At The Drive-in turned into Mars Volta (their new album is totally mind-blowing) and I finally purchased a TOD CD: Worlds Apart.

In a word: WOW!

These guys are really fucken good! This album is a bit of change from their previous work, which is very loud and very noisy - ala Pixies. Worlds Apart is a plunge into a prog-rock/epic-orchestral world that is seeded with unexpected breaks and symphonic interjections.

I recommend this album to anyone. No matter what sound you’re into at the moment this album will most definitely meet your business needs!

Butch Cassidy Sound System - Butches Brew

And on the other end of the scale we have this wonderful album.

Butch Cassidy Sound System is a 26-year-old musician, writer and producer called Michael Hunter. This dude put a lot of time and effort into getting this album to sound as if it was made in the early 70s. In my opinion he got it spot on!

Butches Brew sounds as authentic as any of those 70s reggae or soul albums you used to be able to find in op shops before the Kingsland hipsters bought them all. Michael Hunter plays all the instruments on most of the tracks. Not only that, but he also mastered the album from two inch tape, to achieve the authentic organic sound often missing from other dub soundsystems.

Don’t expect just reggae, however. This album covers most of the arse-shaking genres from rare hip-hop and r’n'b grooves to funk and modern day house music.

Another highly recommended album - especially for you Kiwis who are often up for some skankin’ reggae!

I maintain the New Zealand Web Developers Forum. I’ve recently moved it over to a new host and along with that I also upgraded to the latest version of the forum software.

Earlier this evening I went back to punbb.org to see if anyone had replied to my month old bug report. I noticed they released a brand new version - what a surprise!

I had to get it, and for good reason. The forum software produces the most beautiful, semantic XHTML. The guys at punBB have put in a lot of hard work, and many hours of front end coding to get it to look and feel so good. I think it may even be the only semantic web standards based forum product out there!

This is the browser that saved the World Wide Web. In a time where mediocre, non-standards compliant browsers are the norm, someone somewhere decided to pick up the old Netscape source code (which was released to the open-source community) and develop a browser that would comply to the W3C standards.

Background

Back in September ‘02 the very first version of Firefox was released to the world. Since then there have been releases every few months - each version getting closer and closer to the perfect browser.

Firefox grew out of the desire to make the best browser available , bar none. Ex-Netscape browser developers decided to show the world what a browser could look like if it were developed using the Gecko engine. Using the core Netscape code, they stripped out all the unnecessary UI and functionality, tweaked what was left and ended up with a speedy, easy-to-use, standards-compliant browser.

As it turns out, this is exactly what the web world wanted - and why not? I feel the team at Firefox says it best: The target market for Firefox includes all users who wish to use the Internet safely and efficiently.

Extensions

This is probably Firefox’s biggest selling point for me - extensions allow the user to customise the browser as they need.

Want to add some development tools? Why don’t you try Web Developers extension? How about a GMail mail notifier, or perhaps you want to try your hand at the mouse gesture extensions?

Those are just three of hundreds and Firefox has a good looking extension manager to help manage all the extensions you’re likely to end up with. Most extensions come with advanced preferences - so don’t forget to see what else your new extension can do!

Note: Not all extensions are going to work with Firefox 1.0(PR) right away. It always takes a week or so for the extension developers to release new versions. To make sure you’ve always got the most recent version of an extension just click the blue Update button located at the bottom of the extension manager.

User Interface

This is a difficult topic to discuss as the interface is VERY customisable. Not only can you download themes for Firefox, you can modify the the menus, toolbars, and tabs.

The latest version of Firefox has a few very smart tweaks to its interface and usability.

Tab close buttons

Earlier versions of Firefox haven’t had close buttons that were worth mentioning, but now they do :)

Find as you type

Find as you type is a handy little feature that has always been in Firefox. The only difference now is that they’ve given it an interface. To see it in action simply surf to a webpage and start typing. You’ll notice the Find as you type bar appear at the bottom of the browser window. Firefox will automatically search the text on a page the moment you start typing. Cool, huh?!

Popup blocking notifier

Thanks to internet scum, browsers are coming with built in popup blockers. A popup ad is one of those annoying windows that invades your screen most of the day if you use IE. Firefox warns you that the page you’re viewing is trying to popup a new window. By right-clicking on the notifier you are able to chose what you’d like to do about it: block all popups, allows all popups; etc…

RSS Autodiscover

This is a long awaited addition to Firefox. Native RSS and ATOM feed reading capabilities. Firefox looks for the inclusion of a <link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS” href=”atom.xml”> tag. If it finds one it shows the RSS icon in the bottom right hand corner of the browser. More about this below.

RSS Feed Options

There are two ways to feed your RSS aggregation needs.

1. Built in Live Bookmarks

   This is a great new feature I’ve been looking forward to. Firefox has approached RSS aggregation from a nice angle - it lets you view RSS feed headlines in the Bookmarks Toolbar or Bookmarks menu. You simply click on one of the headlines and it takes you directly to that article.

   Firefox will autodetect an RSS feed on a site and notify you by showing the orange RSS icon in the bottom right corner of the browser. Clicking on this icon will bring up the Subscribe To RSS dialog. Click OK, and away you go!

2. Sage (A lightweight RSS and ATOM feed aggregator)

   Up until the addition of Live Bookmarks Sage was the only way to read RSS feeds with Firefox. I’ve been using it for a while now. It is my preferred method for reading feeds.

   Sage will read RSS feeds that are in a Bookmarks folder that you predefine so make sure to keep all your RSS feed URLs in the same Bookmarks folder.

   Sage makes use of the side bar and the browser window (as you can see in the image below.)

   

   Sage takes an RSS feed and generates a simple CSS-styled XHTML file with all the RSS content nicely displayed. There is an awesome option that allows you to use a custom style sheet so you can have your RSS articles look any way you wish.

And…?

Firefox has saved the web - the only problem is not many people know that. As an avid web surfer, and web developer, I see Firefox as the best thing since the internet itself. I’m able to build websites according to a set of rules and know that Firefox will render the websites perfectly. The Firefox crew have, indeed, created the best browser!

If you want any more information about Firefox check these links:

• Get Extensions and Themes
• Spread the Word!
• Support Forum
• Firefox Forums
• Firefox Help