Get a First Life!

It’s back! BarCamp London 2 will be hosted by BT on February 17th – 18th. Check out the BarCamp site (above) for signup details.

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WebDD is a web design and development conference to be held at the Microsoft Campus in Reading, UK this coming 3 February (a Saturday). There is, naturally, a certain emphasis on Microsoft technologies, but not exclusively. Actually, although there are several presentations involving MS technologies, I was wrong to think that Microsoft were somehow involved in organising WebDD: they are providing sponsorship and hosting the event, but it is indeed a community-organised conference. Thanks must go to Phil Winstanley and Dave Sussman for organising this. With sessions covering Accessibility, CSS, Microformats and much more it promises to be an interesting event. Best of all, it’s “free as in beer”! Registration is opening Real Soon Now now full; my badge arrived in the post a few days ago.

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I thought this particular urban legend had died a death some years ago, but it surfaced again down the pub last night. So, as a Public Service Announcement, let me make it clear that:

Bob Holness did not play saxophone on Gerry Rafferty‘s song Baker Street.

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After a tense 24 hours or so, I got bumped up from the waiting list to become the bottom of the list of attendees at BarCamp London next month. I’m not sure what I’ll be offering in the way of a presentation yet, but there’s a good chance it’ll have something to do with XSLT and/or DOM Scripting.
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If you’re working with (X)HTML and CSS you’ll be aware – or you need to be aware – that browsers render pages differently depending on whether they are in Strict or Quirks mode. (There are explanations of what these terms mean from Microsoft and Mozilla.) It can be useful to have a way of making certain which mode you’re in when tracking down inconsistencies in browser behaviour.
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Northlight Images photographer Keith Cooper is currently travelling through Colorado with his trusty Canon 1Ds, and is posting regular updates on his travels with some brilliant photographs. There’s no commenting so it’s not strictly a blog, but it offers an enjoyable look at a leading landscape photographer at work.

If only my work involved driving wherever the spirit took me, through the Rocky Mountains in the springtime – including a visit to the real South Park.

Being a coder, I naturally intended to create my own content management system, implement a design which would look awful but be all my own work, and launch in a blaze of glory and obscure details of XSLT techniques. But, as with so many projects too closely related to what I do at work all day, nothing happened. I was tempted to modify the stylesheet to put a cobweb across the corner of the page; that would have been the most exciting update to the site in ages.

So I’ve bitten the bullet, installed WordPress (which seems like an excellent piece of kit) and will actually start saying stuff, instead of dithering over details until finally giving up and going down the pub.

I will gradually work out and implement a redesign, and will ultimately replace the WordPress code with my own, reinventing wheels being (as with all coders) virtually an obsession of mine. But in the meantime, I’ll even stick with the default “Hello world” that came with this; on with the motley!