Blog posts

On Friday 13th June it’d be great to see those of you within reach of North London at a little get together Iain Archer and I are putting on as part of the Breathing Space series. From 8pm at St. Luke’s Church, West Holloway, Iain and his band will be hosting an evening of music featuring Julie McKee, Burning Codes and Foreign Slippers. Each artist will perform a selection of their songs, and then they’ll all gather to chat about their music and perform a few “in the round.” ...

mad.ly – Rails 2.1 Time Zone Support: An Overview Helpful overview of one of a number of great improvements coming up in the next version of rails (tags: rubyonrails timezone) Mapping Xenophobic Attacks in South Africa | White African More great work being undertaken using the Ushahidi engine (tags: africa ict4d nptech ushahidi)

Despite years of progress by web standards advocates, and a significant improvement in the quality of the HTML on the web, many of us still end up grappling with outmoded, broken HTML on a regular basis. When confronted with a large site filled with broken pages it can be hard to know where to start. Elliotte Rusty Harold’s Refactoring HTML offers a step by step recipe book for migrating such sites to clean, semantic code. ...

I’m getting my event blogging a little out of order but a few words on last weekend’s excellent geeKyoto seemed in order. Put together by Ben Hammersley and Mark Simpkins to see what a group of self-identified geeks would say in response to the question “We broke the world, how are we going to fix it?” the event brought together a couple of hundred of us in a hall in Central London for a Saturday for a fascinating journey through a wealth of ideas. ...

With all the talk of credit crunches, sub-prime mortgage crises, and all that follows from them it can be difficult to know how to make sense of it all. When you add in the fact that money is a far more complicated beast than most of us realise it’s pretty bewildering. Ann Pettifor is an expert in getting to grips with these issues, communicating them and campaigning on them. And I’m very pleased to say that you can now find her blogging at debtonation.org, the result of a quick project Jenny Brown and I have been working on. ...

In trying to get to grips with the NESTA Innovation Edge conference I’ve kept returning to Tim Berners-Lee’s appearance early on in proceedings. Berners-Lee himself didn’t offer anything groundbreaking, but made a series of sensible comments on innovation, the potential of the web, and providing space for creative people to get on with exploring their ideas. But his comments were rather awkwardly juxtaposed with a claim in NESTA’s video introducing him that he could have become rich beyond measure from the web had he not chosen to give it all away. ...

I promised a few of my own thoughts after liveblogging the " Are online social networks the new cities" at yesterday’s Innovation Edge conference. I’ve not had much time to reflect on the session, which is a shame as it’s a question that touches on a lot of areas of interest for me, but being so broad it can be hard to impose an appropriate structure on the conversation, particularly with such a large audience. ...

Today I’m at NESTA’s Innovation Edge conference and did a little live blogging. These notes are largely unedited, so they’re likely to be a bit sketchy and may be missing bits and pieces as my attention shifted. For context, feel free to post a comment and I’ll catch up with them when I can. The panel: Michael Birch - CEO Bebo Jon Gisby - Director, New Media and Technology, C4 Sir Richard Leese CBD - Leader, Manchester City Council Charlie Leadbeater - Chair Charlie asked about twitter as he usually does to see who’s using it. A lot of us were. ...

Reviewing The Definitive Guide To Django a few months ago I noted that the key place that book lacked was in examples. As befits the work of the creators of a framework, it did very well at explaining the underlying philosophies and working through all manner of implementation details, but it wasn’t the book for those who just want to dive in and build something. If that’s how you like to use technical books, then Learning Website Development With Django may be more what you’re looking for. ...

An update to David Mercer’s now two year old Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites, this version has been revised for the CMS’ latest version and guides the user through from setting up a development environment and installing drupal through to building custom themes and deploying a fully built site. The book is designed to be read sequentially and assumes very little prior Drupal knowledge, though a little familiarity with the interface would be helpful, and a lot of willingness to explore and experiment are going to be necessary for complete newcomers. The first few chapters–focussed on explaining the benefits of using drupal and guide the user through the initial setup–are a little clunky and may deter those not comfortable with installing databases and scripting languages. The style improves as the book progresses and Mercer covers his topics well, with a considerably better structure than several Packt publications I’ve seen lately. (sadly the book retains Packt’s ) ...