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I had a fantastic time at BarCampSheffield2, my first northern BarCamp.

It was great to return to Sheffield (where I did my electronic engineering degree) after an absence of more than 13 years. Far too long!

[Showroom Cafe/Bar/Cinema, the venue]

The venue was in a rather nice Art Deco cinema/cafe/conference centre called the Showroom, in the heart of the city. It worked well as a place to host the BarCamp, with most of the rooms we used very close to each other. And the food was excellent - right from Dinner on the Friday night through to lunch on Sunday.

The warmup party on Friday night was a lot of fun. We were encouraged to make thought bubbles with our tags/interests and contact details, as a bit of an ice breaker. I think we felt a little daft at first, but with the aid of a few beers, we generally got into the swing of things!

[Three loonies wearing thought bubbles: Jay, me, Alistair]

I really enjoyed some of the presentations and discussions which were run during the event. I got mine over with early on, A Newbies’ Guide to Geocaching, which you can download from Slideshare.

Next up was a discussion about Community, and what it meant to us, lead by Alistair MacDonald. Some interesting points were raised, and this also lead nicely into another discussion a couple of sessions later on Social Isolation, lead by Kian Ryan.

After lunch, I noticed the sun was out, so I skived out for half an hour to photograph some nearby sights with a bit of decent light. The sculpture Cutting Edge made it as picture of the day, but I also liked this [right] one of a little lad admiring the cascade fountain near the station:

Alistair & I also managed a geocaching session in the city centre, before it got too cold and dark! Then it was back to the venue to thaw out and watch a session on Self-Defence for Geeks run by Paul Stanton.

Before long it was time for dinner and moar beer and silliness. You can imagine what the evening ended up like. And you can imagine what state some folks were in the next morning. Thankfully, the reving properties of copious quantities of tea and bacon soon did the trick.

Some Sunday sessions which I enjoyed included Jay Cousins‘ talk on Language and how it can influence our perception of technology. He made up some pretty neat words too!

Emma Persky ran a discussion about the imbalance of women in positions of influence within the web, when there is more or less parity now with the ratio of male/females who use the web. Not sure that any concensus was reached, as we seemed to talk in circles for a bit!

Tom Scott ran an excellent quiz during the Sunday lunch slot - the team I was on won, so of course it was excellent! We also had an open discussion with the organisers about the way things had gone over the two days, chaired by Jag Gill. Certainly they did some things differently; some worked well, others not quite so well, but overall I think the team did an excellent job at organising their very first BarCamp! Bravo to Jag, Ibbo, Josie, Jay and all the others.

Jon Linklater-Johnson ran a session on 10 Top Tips To Stop You From Messing Up Your Website. There was also a session about Tea, which was quite appropriate since lots of geeks seem to be obsessed with the stuff. Later on, there was a special showing of Dr Horrible, something I’d heard much-Tweeted about. Quite funny in places, purely bonkers in others!

The after party saw a few hardy souls do more damage to their livers, play Semantopoly, do silly things with Alistair’s BathCamp duck, and then go out for a massive curry. Great way to wind up the event.

[Jay and his Pirate Duck]

But I really think the last word should go to Ruby & Perl, Gemma’s ferrets who made a guest appearance on Saturday. Now I’ve experienced a BarCamp with ferrets, things will never be the same again!

[Ferrets ahoy!]

So that’s it really. A great weekend of geeking out. Thanks to all the folks who organised, contributed and turned up. It was a pleasure to meet you all. You can see the rest of my photos from the weekend on Flickr.

Immediately after dConstruct was the latest BarCamp, held at the University of Sussex once more.

The usual suspects were in attendance, as were some new faces too. Good to see the BarCamp word spreading.

Here are some photos from some of the sillier bits:

[Tom and Leeky geeking out with their Macs]

[I'm sure this wasn't really on the Bayeaux Tapestry!]

And finally, just when you thought it was safe to leave the scissors lying around:

[An innocent BarCamper gets a crowd-sourced  haircut in Fish & Chips… courtesy of Fatty.

My second event of London Web Week was the Web Standard Group meeting on Findability.

The WSG meetings have been on hiatus for some time, but it was nice to see they are back on a (hopefully) more regular basis.

Concepts of Findability
Cyril Doussin

How to make something findable?

• Make sure the item is easy to discover or locate
• Have well organised system of navigation and retrieval

Hand-guided navigation can be helped with the aid of sensible sorting/ordering (eg of menus, alphabetical lists etc), and clear sign-posting.

Relevance

• Precision: how well a system retrieves only relevant documents
• Recall: how well a system retrieves all relevant documents

These two can be defined in the following way:

Precision = no. relevant & retrieved / total no. retrieved
Recall = no. relevant & retrieved / total no. relevant

Content Organisation

• Taxonomy: organisation through labelling
• Ontology: taxonomy + inference rules
• Folksonomy: adds a social dimension

These will become increasingly important as the volume of information grows/is shared. Decent content organisation can be a very good basis for search engines.

Building Websites with Findability in mind
Stuart Colville

The search engine share in the US is apparently: 62% - Google, 18% - Yahoo, 10% - MSN/Windows Live and the rest are minor players. So obviously, search engine algorithms mean than you need as much content in your markup and as little fluff as possible. This means using unobtrusive JavaScript, for instance:

<ul>
<li><a href=””javascript:showPopup(’blueberry_muffins.html’);””>Blueberry Muffins</a></li>
<li><a onclick=”showPopup(’toffee_muffins.html’);” href=””#””>Toffee Muffins</a></li>
<li><a onclick=””showPopup(this.href);” href=””chocolate_muffins.html””> Chocolate Muffins </a></li>
</ul>

are all bad ways of doing it…

Instead, use non-bloated (and therefore search-engine relevent markup like this:

<ul id=”links”>
<li><a href=”blueberry_muffins.html”>Blueberry Muffins</a></li>
<li><a href=”toffee_muffins.html”>Toffee Muffins</a></li>
<li><a href=”chocolate_muffins.html”> Chocolate Muffins</a></li>
</ul>

along with this function:

function showPopup(url) {
window.open(url,”Poptastic”,”width=300,height=300″);
}
window.onload = function() {
document.getElementById(’links’).onclick = function(e) {
if (e.target && e.target.nodeName.toLowerCase() == ‘a’) {
showPopup(e.target.href);
}
return false;
}
}

[Sorry about the crappy formatting of the code block, WP doesn't let me do it any better for the moment]

Stuart also highlighted the importance (to search/findability) of URI permanence:

A Cool URI is one which does not change - Tim Berners Lee

Finding yourself with Fire Eagle
Steve Marshall

Steve gave us a run through of some of the cool stuff you can do with Fire Eagle, including how the system authenticates with other services and users. Fire Eagle is currently in closed Beta, but you can request an invite.

The last week of May was designated London Web Week, and I aimed to attend as many events as possible during the schedule. I took the sensible step of staying at a friend’s house in Peckham for a good chunk of the week, as to-ing and fro-ing from Chelmsford would have been pretty costly and inconvenient.

The first do I managed to get to was Tuesday’s Microformats vEvent, where we were treated to presentations from Tom Morris and Dan Brickley.

Putting microformats on the Semantic Web with GRDDL
Another good session from Tom, his slides are now available as a PDF dowload.

One Big Happy Family
Dan’s slides from his talk can be found on Slideshare.

Mid-March saw BarCamp Brighton 2, held at the University of Sussex just outside Brigthon. I didn’t take many notes at the event as it happened, but I did enjoy the presentations. These included:

Tom Morris telling it straight [see right] about his thoughts on the Social Graph. He also did another talk on RDF on the Sunday, which was informative, as usual.

Leeky’s session was about hacking your own PBX phone system, another great talk with plenty of demos and the usual animated hand-waving

There was an impromptu drumming jam session in the main auditorium, which let out a bit of pent-up energy, and showed the rhythmic ones amongst us what fun it was.

Some folks were hardware hacking with arduino boards - not sure what got made in the end, but there were a few burned fingers from those getting too close to soldering irons!

This time around, my talk wasn’t terribly well attended - I had one appreciative audience! Never mind, at least I participated (and got it out of the way on Day 1 so I could enjoy the rest of the show!). I must admit, I hadn’t prepared a great deal, but decided to do a slide show from some of my Project366 images which I had taken up to today’s date.

Neil “workingwithme” Crosby held a session about TwitterBots, again great info and interesting graphics! Not sure I’m up to hacking a TwitterBot together, but it was good to know the sorts of things that can be achieved.

There was the usual geekery taking place too, here are some more photos to prove it:

[Spot the difference: Alistair (right) pretends to be a Nabaztag bunny (left)]

[A view from on high, looking down from one of the conference rooms to the Common Room, where most of the inbetween geeking took place]

While I was in Brighton, I was also able to visit a couple of Flickr mates who are also doing the Photo-A-Day project. It was nice to finally put names to places. My photos from the weekend included A Fallen Star, Faded Grandeur, Enigma V and Verdant Shades. All in all, a most enjoyable trip to the south coast.