Monday, March 17th, 2008
Five years ago glasshaus went the way of the dodo. I swear it seems like it was yesterday… I was working there as a technical editor at the time, a diversion from web development following a dot-com redundancy. I was hoping publishing would be more stable. Somewhat ironic, considering.
It was a great job. It’d flown me to the USA for Web Design World ‘02 and shoved me into the deep end with standards (hey, you can’t edit folks work without knowing the subject inside out). I was working with great folks like Chris, Bruce and Simon and helping edit great books.
To say it had an impact would be an understatement. It left me with an abiding passion for web standards and accessibility in particular. I was gutted when in came to an end.
Five years on standards and usability are more the norm than ever before. It’s easier to learn the right ways straight off. Looking at the state of web development today there’s a seam of glasshaus running through it. Hell, I remember a meeting where we decided to start using the term Web Professional for our audience, and that seems to have stuck.
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Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
This Tuesday I broke from my normal evening routine and headed to Harborne to the offices of PSL Connect. I went to investigate PHP West Midlands and to hear a talk on the Symfony Framework by Darren Beale of Siftware. He’d some along to Multipack on Saturday, so it seemed fair to return the favour and do some cross-group networking.
Overall I was very pleased with the excursion. Darren is an entertaining speaker. The talk was a solid broad-strokes introduction to Symfony, which left me with a flavour of the thing and enough insights to compare it with others (I’ve a passing familiarity with Cake, Codeigniter and PHP WAX). I do wonder if he shouldn’t have mentioned its reputation for being config-file-city early on, as that was one of the things that stuck with me watching the demo. That and a slight concern at its generating of Javascript. Needless to say I’ll be adding it to my list of things to experiment with… Right behind IE 8 and the iPhone SDK.
We finished off with a quick pint and general pub chat.
The PHPWM guys seem a friendly bunch (and provided pizza and crisps!) I narrowly avoided purchasing a cuddly elePHPant, which my wife is no doubt happy about, as we have enough tat already.
Posted in meetup, thoughts | 1 Comment so far on PHP West Midlands and Symfony
Sunday, January 13th, 2008
So, a new year, a chance to look forward to things to come and re-assess what’s gone before. With that in mind, a post about the future in several areas:
Yesterday’s Multipack meeting was good. The core members all turned out to discuss future developments. Attendance had been slightly off of late, understandable for any group a couple of years old, so we discussed a few options for re-invigorating things. Communication, we agreed, was the key thing. Mainly in promoting ourselves, our events and making sure new members turn up and old ones are aware of developments.
To this end I’m taking over as editor of the Newsletter, which had fallen by the wayside, and we all agreed is a useful tool for keeping folks interested and bringing them back. If you’re a Multipack member and are up to anything interesting, let me know by the Friday a week and a day before the monthly meeting (next meeting is 9th Feb , so deadline for next newsletter is Friday 1st Feb). We’re also moving forward on the website reboot begun last year and focusing meetings more by advertising a theme for discussion. Meetings are now definitely the 2nd Saturday of every month in the Old Joint Stock, Birmingham.
2008 looks like being an interesting year for web accessibility and web development in general. We’ve got the development of the Accessibility Interoperability Initiative, which promises amongst other things WAI ARIA support in Internet Explorer. This’ll hopefully help with making heavy Javascript web applications more accessible, for some at least. This, combined with the news from Microsoft that Internet Explorer 8 passes the ACID 2 test makes for some very interesting developments. Of course we’ll have to wait for it to be released, and people to adopt it…
On the Mozilla side, I’m currently using Firefox 3 Beta 2, which seems a lot more stable and less of a memory hog than version 2, and also passes ACID 2. Although that said it may just be that the lack of compatible extensions to slow things down keeps it fast… Similarly I’m using Safari 3 at home, which has a few nice improvements (support for Wordpress’ TinyMCE for a start), though it has crashed on me a few times and Wordpress appears to lose the linebreaks on posting.
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