MMMeeja

Just a short, throw-away post today as I have a good amount of work on at the moment, but this was too good not to share!

Marshall Kirkpatrick, RSS guru and blogger for ReadWriteWeb was pimping his latest post on Twitter which was immediately followed by a tweet from Barry Carlyon from Leeds Student Radio.

The results could not have been scripted...

Made me chuckle anyway.

This is the second (and quite delayed) part of my write up of Barcamp Leeds 2008. It follows on from my previous post and covers the later part of Saturday afternoon and Sunday’s presentations.

Saturday Afternoon

I attended a talk on Business Networking for the Web 2.0 world, which unfortunately I found to be largely irrelevant. The round-table discussion descended into talking about talking and though I think that the leader had a strong case (i.e. that there should be a local interest group pitched between the geekiness of Barcamp and the business focus of Open Coffee), a lot more could have been acheived by just setting one up and inviting people.

Cloud Computing

Colin May gave an excellent introduction to cloud computing, with a high-level view of the options available. He argued, correctly, that academia has been using timesharing and grid computing for many years, and cloud computing is simply a repackaging of these concepts for the masses.

Colin covered the benefits and risks of relying on the cloud for essential services and concluded that none of the offerings were ready yet. This was quite controversial amongst the many sysadmins in the audience who made the point that relying on a single provider for any service leaves you at risk of outages.

Consensus was reached over the point that using the cloud is a decision to be made early on in the system design process and that developers and sysadmins must work together throughout the production process.

Colin finished off with a demonstration of Amazon’s EC2 service running an Ubuntu instance. This is something that I’ve been keen to play with for a while and his demo inspired me further.

That concluded my involvement with Saturday’s presentations and I retired to the pub.

Sunday

Sunday was an altogether more relaxed affair with an emphasis on fun. One of the highlights was presentation karaoke, where a speaker picks a random set of PowerPoint slides and makes up a presentation on the fly.

Website Performance

One of the more technical presentations on Sunday saw Tom from the Yahoo Developers Network present their YSlow tool. If you haven’t seen this tool before, I strongly suggest that you check it out.

Chatting with Tom and the other attendees revealed that websites are becoming much more like traditional software development, with debug builds and deployment scripts necessary for complex modern web applications.

TextMate

The last presentation of Sunday was Caius expounding on the joys of the TextMate editor for OS X. It is always useful to see how a power user leverages their tools and Caius certainly knew his way around the editor and its plugins.

Don’t think that I’ll be dumping vi any time soon though.

Thanks

I’d like to say thanks to the organisers and presenters for their hard work and to the other attendees whose willingness to learn and ask questions made the event thoroughly enjoyable. I’ll definitely be back!

It’s the afternoon of the first day of BarCamp Leeds 2008 and I thought I would write up my first impressions of the event. It has been good fun and quite educational so I’m looking forward to the afternoon’s talks.

The venue, Old Broadcasting House in Leeds, is about as perfect as it gets for an event like this - free wifi, copious coffee and plenty of spaces to present, chat or just hang out. The organisers deserve a lot of credit too, things have been running pretty smoothly.

The Talks

I’ve been to four presentations so far:

1. Introduction to Geocaching
2. A Geek’s Guide To VC
3. Design vs Usability
4. Linkbuilding For SEO

Introduction To Geocaching

This was a nice, easy talk to get into the BarCamp vibe. Presented by Alistair MacDonald, a committed geocacher.

He went through the basics of geocaching, covered a few of the rules and gave an introduction to the culture. As you can imagine with a geeky pastime like this, there are a lot of terms and practices to learn about.

A good talk to open BarCamp with.

A Geek’s Guide To VC

Tim Langley is a serial entrepreneur based in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. He has just started his third company with VC seed funding, so he should know his onions, and his talk didn’t disappoint.

He explained that all venture capitalists are looking for different things. Some are happy to invest in a good idea without a prototype, whilst others want to see some traction before committing money. Rising Stars, a Preston based growth fund were described as “getting it”.

Tim also explained that VCs don’t just bring money to the table, they have business exertise and contacts and can be very helpful to bring heavyweight industry experts onto your team.

For control freaks, there is a downside to securing venture capital - as soon as you sell 1% equity in your company, it is no longer yours to control because there are now legal requirements to act in the shareholders’ interests.

VCs are looking for flexibility and creativity from company founders because they know from experience that businesses change radically from the original visions at startup.

So, when to contact VCs? When you need the money is the best answer. The later that you get involved with VCs, the lower the amount of equity that you have to sell them.

Design vs Usability

Next up, Dean Vipond gave an interesting talk on the perceived clash between design and usability. Dean claimed that too many designers do not care about usability - controversial!

Dean presented the project lifecycle that he uses for design projects at Orange, a highly iterative methodology. The final takeaway was that usability should be a part of the brief for designers, developers and QA.

Link Building For SEO

Just after lunch came Mark Rushworth with a talk on linkbuilding. As the number of attendees was pretty small, Mark transformed the session into a predominantly question and answer session.

I took advantage of this and quizzed him about improvements and suggestions for MMMeeja, particularly focussing on getting links for landing-pages. Mark is a really helpful chap who was quite happy to give away a few secrets and real-world examples that you would never find on Sphinn.

More To Come...

I’ll be blogging about the afternoon’s talks later and attending the second day too. I can heartily recommend the BarCamp experience, so find one near you.

I’ve just registered for Barcamp Leeds and if you’re in the area, you should too. I’m told that places are going fast so don’t delay.

This is my first Barcamp so I’m unsure of what to expect, but I think it should be fun! I’m looking forward to some interesting presentations too.

I know Alex from EatingLeeds will be there, so you can ask her where to find the tastiest eats. Leave a comment if you plan to go or if you have any questions about the Leeds area - where to stay, how to get there etc. I’ll do my best to answer them.

Happy Flu is a fun little widget that will track how code and ideas spread around the web. I first saw this on the excellent Duke Listens blog by Paul Lamere and it looks like quite a few blogs have joined in.

If you have a blog and want to join in, click the “Spread It” button at the bottom left of the widget to get the code.

If you are reading this via RSS, you’ll need to click through to see the cool widget.

Google Reader is my RSS reader of choice, although sometimes is annoys me. I’ve collected a list of some features that are not immediately obvious to a casual reader.

Unsubscribe From An Entire Folder

When you go to the “Settings” page of Google Reader and select “Tags” you can choose to delete a tag, but that’s exactly what it does - delete the tag. The feeds that were in the folder just become uncategorised.

If you want to unsubscibe from all the feeds in a folder, you need the “Subscriptions” tab. Filter by the folder name, select all the results and then click the unsubscribe button. Much quicker than going through them one-by-one.

Thanks to Maki for this tip via Twitter.

Aggregate Feeds By Folder

You can create a shared feed out of all your items, your starred items or just a single folder at a time. You do need to go to the settings page and make your feeds public before they can be accessed by other tools (like Yahoo Pipes or even Google Spreadsheets) but that might not be an issue for you.

Google Reader’s feed aggregation is not a sophisticated as, say xFruits, but it’s really quick and easy.

Is There Really A Use For OPML?

OPML is an XML specification for sharing feeds. It has yet to take off in a big way, but it’s used by other feed readers and a host of sites that want to help you find relevant content or even build your own website around your feed subscriptions.

You can get an OPML file containing all your subscribed feeds by using the “Import/Export” tab on the settings menu.

OPML support is in its infancy and Ryan Tate has some great suggestions for the Google Reader team.

Have you got any other tips for Google Reader? Add a comment below.

Do you find yourself checking the same handful of blogs and websites everyday? I bet your list of must-read sites is growing quickly and you want to get a fast, unfussy flow of relevant information at a rate that you control...

That’s exactly what RSS does for you!

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication but that’s not important. What is important is just what it can do for you... and that is save your precious time!

When you visit one of your regular favourite websites, look for an orange RSS icon a bit like this (there’s a huge orange one at the top right of this page) which means that the site provides an RSS feed. Click on it and you will be prompted to choose your feed reader...

OMG!

“I don't have a feed reader! And I don’t know what one is! It’s all too hard and techie!”

Stop being a drama queen, this bit is easy.

Just like you have email software to read emails, there is software to read RSS feeds. Like email, the software can live on your computer (like Microsoft Outlook) or on a website (like Hotmail). Relax.

So what software should you use? I use Google Reader and I love it, well mostly, but there are lots of others. If you use Microsoft Outlook for your email, you can get a free plugin to read your feeds from it too.

There now, that was easy.

But What Does It Do For Me?

RSS allows you to deal with web pages just like you deal with email. You can:

• Only see brand new pages
• Sort feeds into folders
• Flag entries for followup
• Read on your mobile phone
• Share pages with friends

There are loads of other cool techie things you can do with RSS feeds, but let’s start with the simple things.

Happy RSS Day!

This article was posted for RSS Day, an event dedicated to increasing awareness of RSS and getting it into the mainstream. I hope you enjoyed it and don’t forget to spread the word.

Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed for other great tips.

If you have any questions about RSS, ask them below.

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Photo by KellyK