monkeyhelper

I'm pleased to say my proposal for this years XTech conference has been accepted. I'm talking about "Using socially authored content to provide new routes through existing content archives" (I know - snappy !). It's based off the work that Rattle have been doing with the BBC to look at ways to use socially authored media (i.e. Wikipedia, del.icio.us etc ...) to augment and generate new metadata for BBC content.

If you've not been to XTech before, you're in luck as it's over in Dublin this year, so it's only a quick Ryan Air flight away (check out last years schedule for a taste), the final schedule of speakers should be confirmed over the next week or so, but with Douglas Crockford, Simon Wardley and Steven Pemberton confirmed it's got to be good. I'll also be helping out with the Lightning Talks again this year, which always prove to be a giggle.

You can see more details over at the Rattle Blog ...

It’s been some time since the last post (over six months !), and I’ve been doing lots of interesting things but mainly for corporate clients. The upshot being I haven’t had any time for side projects, however it’s nice to see some of the things I’ve talked about previously seem to be popular memes around the web at the moment, specifically geolocation and the ubiquitous web.

In fact the ubiquitous web is the theme for this years XTech 2007. I’m pleased to say both Deb and I will be going and we’ll be involved in chairing sessions and we’re also part of the team running the 20:20 sessions. If you’re really quick you can still signup and come along to lovely Paris, I’d highly recommend it – it’s going to be lots of fun !

We’ll also be attending Reboot 9 this year (in Copenhagen again). I’ll be blogging bits from both conferences you can find out what the alphageeks are up to at the moment.

My presentation on Javascript and Rails is more or less finished. I’ll be doing the 15:00 session at Ruby and Rails 2006. I’ve used S5 again. It’s very apparent that Linux really isn’t up to creating and giving presentations – I’ll muddle through (probably having issues with projector resolutions again) but I’m feeling the need for some Mac and keynote goodness …

Anyhow the slides are here for your perusal.

Tags [monkeyhelper rubyandrails06]

I’ve been to quite a few conferences over the last year and have had a great time, meeting loads of people and having far too many ideas to try and follow up. Our (semi)-local Geek meetup has really taken off (Andrew and Dan have done a great job making this happen) and we’ve managed to pull together our own one day conference in the North ! It’s already over-subscribed but if you’re interested put your name down as there are bound to be a few last minute dropouts. The conference is titled ‘Ruby and Rails’ and is an intro to the shinest new language/framework on the block. I’ll be speaking about Ajax/Prototype/Script.aculo.us integration with Rails and hopefully a little on unobtrusive Javascript to enable pages to degrade gracefully. So if you want to learn about Ruby on Rails go check it out.

It’s taken a while but Deb has finished the new and improved www.urbanwide.com. I’m officially jealous as Monkeyhelper is just another boring Movable Type template variation whereas Deb has the 2.0 glow that I lust after – if only I had an artistic bone in my body …

It features some nice usage of the mms parsing libraries and photogallery integration plus all the usual Movable Type goodness you would expect. Go check it out and leave a comment !