It's been an odd one, 2025. In many ways it's been a year of catching up with groups of people who were important earlier on in my life. The vibe has been one of anniversaries. In the early part of the year I caught up with some friends from the UK Indie game design scene circa 2006. Then in the latter part of the year I caught up with the Multipack, the Midlands web design and development meetup I used to run the newsletter for (and occasionally spoke at events with). Stretching further back, I had a 30 years anniversary catchup with the folks from University. One of them survived a major heart attack this year. That was sobering.

Work has been a random mix of amazing successes and irksome frustrations, as work often is. We've improved the organisations processes, made web access to their services easier and more usable, saved substantial ammounts of money by inhousing some functions and made them more efficient. Large organisations are hard to do this in, so I'm proud of the teams I work with for achieving a lot.

Paired with this is that feeling of disconnect being the old gaurd in digital brings, something I've definitely been noticing more of late. A certain ennui maybe? Getting old means people who learnt things third-hand explaining things you pioneered back to you badly, miss the intent and then claim it as great wisdom. I'm glad agile and user centric design won out, I spent the early 2000s fighting that fight. However, I am a little saddened at the facile intepretation of both that seems to have taken over in the wider industry.

That's not even getting started on the casual incompetence that every AI shill is trying to sell as innovation. I'm counting down the days before some vibe-coded mess leaks personal data all over the web for an organisation that should have known better but couldn't resist the FOMO.

There are positive things. I permanently logged out of Twtter and Facebook some time ago, and feel much better for not seeing a constant stream of irrelevant and offensive shit being shovelled at me by the people who have gone out of their way to ruin the industry. I'm enjoying my move to the fediverse. It's not a perfect social media platform, but it is a lot better than the alternatives. It also seems to be actvely improving over time. A curated timeline I control, full of people who I chose to follow because they talk about interesting things feels so refreshing.

I used my 3D printer a fair bit in 2025, mostly for printing scenery for tabletop games, but also for printing useful elements for fixing things about the house. I should probably blog about this bit of kit more(a Bambu Lab A1 Mini). The technology is now both cheap and easy to use, a real turnaround from a decade ago. I worried initially it would increase plastic waste, but I think if used well it can help not buy big replacements when a single part will do.

Other fun thigns? I took my eldest along to a local animation meetup, where they had some of their work on the showreel. I'm a very proud of this. They are studying animation with a view to a career in that arena. It's funny how the same principles that I found useful 20 years ago in the web community can be equally applied here. In any career it's worth getting a peer group. Learning to talk to random folk at meetups who share an interest will exand your horizon and open doors.

I didn't travel much, but we did take the kids to Prague, which we'd last visited in the early 2000s. It remains a wonderful mix of art, history, wonderful food and cheap beer. There's a wonderful museum to the Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman, where you can be greenscreened into a Baron Munchausen film. We also managed to see some seals in Lincolnshire, which was a definite highlight for the offspring.

Speaking of which, I took my youngest offspring down to London to see The Offspring. Which if you happen to like 90s pop punk is a great show I would recommend.

By default this uses Netlify, but I wasn't interested in the 3rd party CMS bit, so opted for a simple GitHub action for deploying. There's an existing action available for plain Eleventy apps over here. However it doesn't include the sass build part of the Hylia setup that's part of its npm scripts.

A quick bit of hacking about with one of the standard node actions and I built the following action to deploy instead:

name: Hylia Build
on: [push]

jobs:
  build_deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-18.04
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@master
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: '10.x'
      - run: npm install
      - run: npm run production
      - name: Deploy
        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v1.1.0
        env:
          PUBLISH_DIR: dist
          PUBLISH_BRANCH: gh-pages
          GITHUB_TOKEN: $

Which hopefully is useful to somebody else.

Oh, and you'll need to add a passthrough copy of the CNAME file to the build if you are using a custom domain name. Add the following to your eleventy build:

  config.addPassthroughCopy('CNAME');

Add your domain's CNAME file to the main source. Otherwise every time you push it'll get removed from the GitHub pages config of the output.

Follow people not brands.

Occasionally some social media wanker guru will claim that Twitter or Facebook is for ENGAGING THE BRANDS TM, but really I much prefer people. People make the world go round. Even the best corporate accounts have that stilted, half-human, slightly precarious uncanny valley that makes them difficult to parse, filter and give tuppence about. Largely because they are ultimately run by somebody who is heavily restraining themselves in order to adhere to a corporate hymn sheet and not get the company in trouble. Even the nicer ones have that slightly sociopathic grimace of somebody pretending really hard to be something they're not.

So anyway, if I find a project or company I like I tend to follow somebody involved who works on the part of it I think is cool. The main bonus is they tend to talk in a more natural way and around a subject, about interesting tangents and lead you off other places. This is cool (possibly the coolest bit about social media). They act as a great filter, because if the project/company/organisation does do something genuinely interesting, they'll likely retweet it anyway - so you still find out the best bits of the corporate account without being subjected to on-brand waffle.

Oh sure, everybody on Twitter is putting on some kind of mask, how they want to be seen as much as how they are. That's another post entirely. But the point here is that real people are way better at filtering the corporate crud out of the web than any algorithm.

Of course for those who don't have money to burn on expensive certificates there was always a blocker to going https. The cost. Even cheaper certificates to secure your site cost about three times as much as the domain name. Plus the notoriously headachey setup steps for getting a secure certificate working on your site

All that changed last year, when Let's Encrypt announced their service. Free certificates and a simple client you could use to set them up. Pretty much the ideal solution if they could pull it off, and with board members from the likes of Cisco, E.F.F. and Mozilla. It's been in beta since the summer and at the start of December they went public beta.

So I decided to give it a whirl. I've always left SSL config to somebody else before, so this should be "fun".

Getting started

First off you need ssh/console access to your server and the ability to install software. I have a Centos server at Digital Ocean (who I recommend by the way) and can go in and switch to root to install stuff.

The instructions on the Let's Encrypt docs are pretty thorough. You'll probably need to install some dependencies with yum (or apt-get or whatever). You might need to do:

sudo yum install gcc libffi-devel python-devel openssl-devel

Though running ./letsencrypt-auto as root should sort these for you, but I found that my servers memory and CPU were a little low for some of the compiling steps, particularly the python cryptography package used. So I waited for a lull time before installing that manually with:

pip install cryptography

Also, my system had an older python install that grumbled about a few things and requires using the --debug flag to run the client.

Installing the certs

Although Let's encrypt supports sorting the server setup for some platforms and web servers, my combo of Centos and nginx wasn't, so I needed to just create a cert int he client and manually install. I needed my web root directory and domain, the command looked like this:

./letsencrypt-auto certonly --webroot -w <webroot> -d <example.com> --debug

This popped up a query for some info (email and so on), then quickly sorted the certs and told me where it put them. Simple.

Setting up nginx was a case of adding an appropriate virtual server and pointing it at the cert/key combo:

server {

    listen 443;

    server\_name <domain>;

    ssl on;

    ssl\_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/<domain>/fullchain.pem;

    ssl\_certificate\_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/<domain>/privkey.pem;

}

This required a restart of nginx. Went to https:/ and things seemed to work.

Post install massaging

So you've got your secure cert. What next? Well I decided to check the connection against the tool provided by Qualsys to be sure it was secure enough and up to scratch.

Oh dear, only grade C.  Seems there's some more work to do post install.

Fortunately the report gives some advice on what to fix. For me it was out of date protocols/ciphers still be available and an older form of

I set the protocols in nginx  config with:

ssl\_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;

then the ciphers with:

ssl\_ciphers 'ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES128-GCM-SHA256:kEDH+AESGCM:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-DSS-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES128-SHA256:AES256-SHA256:AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:AES:CAMELLIA:DES-CBC3-SHA:!aNULL:!eNULL:!EXPORT:!DES:!RC4:!MD5:!PSK:!aECDH:!EDH-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA:!EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:!KRB5-DES-CBC3-SHA';

ssl\_prefer\_server\_ciphers on;

That last bit came from the detail over here, which also recommended setting up a "strong DH group" by running:

openssl dhparam -out dhparams.pem 2048

and then pointing my server at the file with an update to nginx config:

 ssl\_dhparam /etc/nginx/dhparams.pem;

All that done and my server goes from C rating to A, and avoids lots of known exploits of older SSL technologies. After checking it all worked, I set up a http to https redirect in the old http server config:

    if ($scheme = http) {
        return 301 https://$server\_name$request\_uri;
    }

And that's it. If you can view this page, you can see it's working... You can see it right?

The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed. - William Gibson

The web moves fast. Faster every year, what with evergreen browsers across the board. It's certainly a far cry from the bad old days, when we went 5 years between Internet Explorer updates. It would be convenient to think that because we live in a world where people's browsers are regularly updating, that we live in a world where the web is in a reliable state.

Oh yes, a quick check of your web stats may show that IE8 is the new IE6, and even that is on its way out. We're nearly at a stage where there's a baseline of CSS 3 available, which for those of us who remember trying to get CSS working at all in Netscape 4 is a huge shift.

But the only constant is change. Yesterday's cutting edge is todays common baseline. The web moves on with new Browser APIs, new CSS and new HTML elements. HTML 5 becomes HTML 5.1, CSS gets its CSS 4 selectors and ECMAScript reaches version 7.

This stuff doesn't arrive all at once though.

It arrives in dribs and drabs, with different browser development teams focusing on differing priorities. Chrome and Firefox have Web RTC already, but it's still under development for IE, who knows when it'll hit Safari mobile. Want to use it for a project? Go visit iswebrtcreadyyet.com and you'll be hit by the most common conundrum in web development:

How do I make this work where I need it to?

This isn't new. This has been going on since there were multiple browsers. From the days of trying to make DHTML work with IE and Netscape's different layer models to the days of having Promises in some versions of Android on mobile, but not in Safari on iOS 7. The future is like the past, only there's more of it.

Which brings me to the point. The web is a continually moving target. It probably changed in the time it took me to write this. If you work with web stuff you need to embrace this fact. It will be the only constant in your career. When I'm old and grey and building hypermedia virtual experiences in HTML 10, it'll be no different, except for maybe some silver space-age jumpsuit and a dodgy prostate.

On the web progressive enhancement is and will always be, the methodology of choice. It makes your site robust to the shifting sands of the web front end. You don't control your audience's choice of browser, operating system, connection speed, device, ability to interact with technology or understanding thereof. You don't control the flow of new features to those browsers, the priorities of their developers and organisations. You don't get to decide if a feature will be implemented well or buggily or partially.

All you can do is pick a good baseline, and enhance for those who have the shiny.

You do get to work on the most globally available, unpredictable, diversely interacted with communication platform in the world. Enjoy that.

Offline webapps are... Lets be honest, a great idea marred by a particularly bizarre implementation, poor documentation and more gotchas than I can count.  If you're looking for a solid intro to doing it right, see this great article series from the Financial Times . If you want to learn about some of the gotchas, then most have been nicely documented at AppcacheFacts and A List Apart. Hopefully near-future tech like Service Workers will make the process less of a pain, but they are a while off...

This blog post is mostly a grab bag of stuff I haven't seen documented elsewhere, and may help others beating the technology with a stick until it works.

Let's start with the fun of SSL. Imagine you want to build and test your app locally with a similarly secure connection as it does in the real world. To do this you create a self signed certificate.  Well for the love of all that is good make sure you properly install the SSL cert. Recent versions of Chrome and Firefox refuse to store an appcache from an invalid SSL cert. This includes certs that have expired or aren't trusted, or have mismatched domains, or basically anything that might trigger security warnings. And no , you can't just click that nice Proceed Anyway button on the SSL warning screen, that won't work. In Firefox it will die silently and not give you any debug info as to why the appcache download failed. Chrome and Safari will give you a little more info in dev console. You need to properly install the certificate, on a Mac install it to your keychain for Chrome and Safari anyway, Firefox wants to use its own store hidden away in the  nest of preferences panes.

Next, be careful of putting expires headers on, well, anything. You know how all the articles on cache manifest talk about you should never, ever cache the main manifest file or the whole offline version is permanently cached? Well, turns out you have to be a bit careful with Firefox, as if you add expires headers for right now or just in the past, then well the cache instantly expires and won't run the full initial update/download. But be careful of Chrome and Safari, as they do need expires headers or the manifest may get stuck. Yeah, I swallowed my pride and did some browser sniffing for that. Oh, and make sure none of the files referenced in your manifest have past or very short expiry as Firefox respects that and downloading the manifest can fail because of those files.

If you are using appcache, the best way is to have a separate webpage with the manifest and wrap it in an iframe. The main advantage of this is that it ringfences the cache. Normally, when you just add an appcache directly to a page every (matching) GET request you make via AJAX is added to the cache. Leave a one page app for a while and watch those GETs rack up and fill the cache. This means appcache has a built in DDOS mode, whereby when you expire a manifest every file in it gets re-downloaded right then. Using an iframe means you get more control of what gets cached.

That said, if you want IE10 on Win 7 to work with it, iframes might not be the way to go. That particular combo seems to have more trouble actually detecting going offline. IE11 seems to handle it fine.

One fun thing I haven't seen much mention of is the concept of foreign files in appcache. At one point in development we accidentally ended up with two manifest files in different iframes embedded on the same page (due to a mis-built bit of JS). This causes all kinds of fun as you try and work out which version of a file you have between two appcaches, and which cache is the one being used for the page you are viewing. So if you see a file flagged as foreign in Chrome debug, that's likely what's happening.

A note on dev tooling. Chrome and Safari tell you loads about what's going on with an appcache. What's downloaded, where it failed, and so on. It's dev tools also let you know if something's origin is the cache, not a real request. Plus also the url chrome://appcache-internals/ makes flushing bad or wrong ones easy. You'll need to do this lots, since once you add an appcache every http error will go to the fallback cache page, that's fun when debugging issues outside the front-end...

Firefox gives the most unusable debug tool for app cache,  hidden somewhere off in the depths of a sub-dev tools command line. Seriously, the Firefox tool's appcache validate gives really obtuse errors or just fails. It does allow you to quickly flush an appcache, which can be handy, but that's about all it's good for. I'm seriously hoping this gets improved before this stuff gets superseded by the new shiny service worker caches.

Anyway, enough negative, here's positive things: We have a live system using app cache for offline functionality, which is pretty nifty for a responsive back-office application often used where connectivity is unreliable. Lots of dev headache for a really useful thing to people doing a job on the floor.

Who says enterprise software can't do HTML5?

No, not only didn't it suck, this website has a wonderful user experience. Really. Not only that, but it came in without falling foul of the cost creep endemic in government digital projects. It replaced and rationalised content. It made things clearer and used plain English. It focused on what users wanted to find, not what government departments wanted to say. The team shared their code on github and accept pull requests. They set metrics for pages and continually revised and improved. They ran detailed user and accessibility tests.

Wow!

I can't quite remember when I first heard of the then alpha.gov.uk project. Possibly from one of the many folks on the web scene who seemed to get sucked into the project. This in itself was the first sign that those behind the new government website knew what they were doing, they got professionals with industry respect to work on the prototype. Over the last year or so I've watched it move from alpha to beta and slowly iterate and optimise. They've done this in public, often sharing their detailed research and testing experiences on their blog (with some interesting results, see their notes on auto-completing search). The web community in the UK has been cheering from the sidelines the whole way, because it's really made a nice change to be enthusiastic about a government website. It's weird when the hotest startup in the UK is a government website...

If you ever wanted a case study for a large scale user-centric redesign, this is it.

This is truly a watershed moment, and one whose lessons I hope will cascade down from central government to regional (please pay attention Birmingham City Council) and other public sector areas. The Government Digital Service is a model for how this kind of project should be delivered. They put the web it its own category and built something amazing.

Given I have pretty much hated the major policies of the current coalition, it seems very strange to be congratulating it, but for their support of this one project they really deserve it. They've given us a UK website to be proud of.

Fortunately having a Mac means the iPhone emulator is a mere 3GB download away in the iPhone SDK... And great, it picks up the systems /etc/hosts so all the nice modifications I've made for testing our app locally get picked up. Easy win.

Android proves more of a problem, so I thought I'd document it here as I had to hunt round developer docs, read a couple of blog posts and cobble together with string.

First get the Android SDK.  Switch into the SDK directory and run:

tools/android

to bring up the SDK and AVD (Emulator) manager. Oh, you should probably install the updates first.

Go to virtual devices and click new to create a new virtual device, call it TestDevice, pick a target version and use those defaults. OK this. You could run the emulator here, but not pass in a hosts file... Quit out. Then run:

tools/emulator -avd TestDevice -partition-size 256 &

This runs the emulator directly and gives it some space so you can actually modify the devices hosts file.

Now run:

./platform-tools/adb devices

To see what the emulator thinks it's called. Probably emulator-5554 or something memorable. So now run:

./platform-tools/adb -s  emulator-5554 remount

To remount the filesystem so its not read only and you'll be able to change the hosts file. Then run:

./platform-tools/adb -s  emulator-5554 pull /etc/hosts

This gets the current hosts file from the device. Edit it in whatever text editor, it's been pulled to the current working dir. Finally run:

./platform-tools/adb -s  emulator-5554 push hosts /etc/hosts

To push it back to the device with the changes.

Now test your webpage.

PS. For added fun, this isn't saved when you save the emulator state. Any ideas why?

Edited: Updated memory allocation based on comments below. I've wrapped this into a script and posted it on Forrst.

Finder is simple web app to help parents discover and catalogue local child-friendly businesses, something I've built from personal need. It currently residing at finder.newdadsite.com and is in need of some content/contributions love (you can sign in via Twitter!). It makes use of some funky browser geo-location to make it extra useful, with fallback to plain old search.

Finder is a simple enough little app, and it gave me a great opportunity to use Python in anger; Previously I'd only really played about with it. I arrived at using Pylons for a number of reasons. Like most people who want to do some Python web-appery, I'd initially looked at Django, which seems to be the most talked of framework. Something about Django didn't really mesh with me, it's got its own way of doing things, and that wasn't an exact fit somehow - personal taste maybe.

Pylons felt, well, much more toolboxy. You could pull stuff in from all over, pick the modules you liked best. Particularly I like the SqlAlchemy/FormAlchemy combo, I've always felt that it should be easy to build a form from an existing model if you've used sensible naming conventions. Stuff like this:

class LocationFieldSet(FieldSet):

  def \_\_init\_\_(self):

    FieldSet.\_\_init\_\_(self, Location, session=Session)

    self.configure(exclude=\[self.lat,self.long,self.added\])

is a really neat way to just  turn a model into a form for editing that model's data. Not part of Pylons, but I can chose to use it cos I like it (and I'm a fan of easy).

One thing I forgot to mention in my talk (well, I only had ten minutes!) was that Pylons in now merging with Repoze to become Pylons Project with a new framework called Pyramid... It'll be interesting to see what the future holds for it.

Especially the ranting parts.

I spent the first month of 2000 at the Birmingham Post and Mail's web department. Ironically, given its recent attempts at social media and hyperlocal web stuff, the owners at that point began the decade shutting down the department. No more making site's for Garages for me...

Things I learned there? Agencies will try and charge you a really ridiculous sum if they think you aren't clued up. For example, for modifying a prospective portal system from 600px wide to 800px wide. No really, it shouldn't be tricky if you coded it right, which means you're either trying to shaft us or it's crap.

I also learned the value of colleagues who share ideas and push you to do better. It was a team who had migrated from being print-ad designers, and while I may sometimes criticise print guys who make that transision badly, it's because I know it can be done very well indeed. My colleagues there brought with them their ability to rapidly produce great design work; Something I still wish I was better at.

Fortunately, as that department was shut down, I found a new job at Antiquesweb, a Solihull-based startup selling services to the antiques trade. Hey, it was 2000, the dotcom boom was still just about in full swing, startups offering share options seemed the way to go. Those were the heady days of working out how this web thing worked when you're on a budget and your next paycheck might not turn up if you don't get new business. So we learned the hard way that splash pages kill your traffic, that technology doesn't matter as much as people and their quirks and that you can analyse the effectiveness of your choices really easily on the web.

We learned how to play to our new medium's strengths by focusing on users needs and finding a way to monetise that. I miss those days, the meetings in the pub, the bounced paychecks... Ok, maybe not those.

Antiquesweb folded at the tail end of 2001, but in 2002 I started at glasshaus, where I was applying my real-world experience as a tech editor for their excellent range of web development books. I've written glasshaus before, so I'll spare the details.

Things I learned at glasshaus? Standards matter and user experience is king, certainly, but also how to market effectively online by building community and engaging alpha adopters (thanks Bruce). I learned that I knew more about the web than some experts - I had to to correct their work, after all - Amazing what a confidence boost that was. It honed my writing skills too and my ability to switch between technologies as well, ASP.NET one day then PHP the next.

As was popular with tech companies, glasshaus's parent company Wrox went bust... But not before I'd experienced my first web conference (Web Design World 02 in Boston) and had one of my designs complemented by Zeldman. Good times. I'm still immensely proud of Web Graphics for Non Designers, even if it wasn't as good a seller as Dreamweaver MX with PHP...

I spent a bit of time freelancing after that. Some development work, some editing of books for Sitepoint and Apress. I wrote a lot of content for DMXZone. Things I learned : I wasn't great at the business growing part of freelancing, I needed a good network and that wouldn't come 'til later. Looking back, I also made a mistake in not putting more of my articles on the open web. 2003/2004 was an exciting year for web standards, but most of my intro articles to CSS  and DOM scripting from that time are locked behind a paywall. Actually, maybe that's better, I'd probably be embarrassed by them now... 6 years is a long time in web terms, I was probably advising people to test in Mozilla Firebird or something.

I didn't solely freelance for long. After two redundancies due to collapsing companies I thought a bit of stability might be due. So, seeing a three-days-a-week job at the University of Central England (now Birmingham City Uni.) - I figured it would give a solid base on which to keep the freelancing going. As it happened I made my self useful, which got noticed, which allowed me to grow the role myself and I went full time a little while later.

Working for a University is an interesting experience... There's lots to recommend it, you get a lot of opportunity to be involved in really interesting projects, work with great people with a real passion for learning and help with fascinating research. I could write insightfully on why working on university websites can be frustrating, but fortunately I don't have to, just watch this from Paul Boag.

Things I learned working at a university? How to wring every ounce of performance from a webpage clientside, how to get things done in a labyrinthine organisation and how to SEO a page within an inch of its life, how to build a PHP framework from scratch and then move a 1500 page flat-file tables-spaghetti site to a new CMS without anybody noticing.

I also learned I'm pretty good at selling standards and user-centric design and teaching people accessibility. I actually had somebody on a training course say I changed their approach to web design, that's a pretty awesome thing.

It was also during my six years there that I got involved with the Multipack and started speaking at events and putting myself out in the community a bit more. I can't speak highly enough of my local peer group, a great support network and sounding board. Oh, and great events too, you should come along.

Finally, I spent the last month of the decade at Talis, a move I took because it's a company with a lot of big ideas and a lot of talented people. Too early to say what I've learned yet, though it's looking like being RDF, SPARQL and how to get up at 6.30 in order to do a nursery drop off and get to work on time...

The whole thing began back at the Multipack Presents event last year, Being Green, where Paul gave a presentation about his frustrations with waste in the web industry (particularly conferences like SXSW and their regularly-binned goodie bags). Paul envisioned a grassroots coalition of webby types working together to reduce our environmental impact.

After some brainstorming amongst interested parties the name a.green:focus stuck, yeah it's a CSS joke, but that's endearing right?

Tomorrow's event has taken a while to organise, but Hack the Planet is something I'm genuinely excited about. The concept is simple, run a Hack Day, where the objective is to build something to lessen our impact on the environment.  There's a lot of talented people descending on Brum to put our brains together and build ... something. The exciting part is we don't yet know what! Oh sure, there's ideas floating about like the virtual conference goodie bag, but somebody might suggest something awesome at 10am that gets everybody fired up and takes on a life of its own. That's the fun of it!

It's not just a local thing, which is nice, Cole has chipped in by designing the poster for the event and the nice foks at Campagn Monitor are sponsoring. It's got that nice feeling of an event where people pull together.

Final details are here, if you fancy coming and helping build something in a day.

One of the nice things about the whole experience has been that Twitter has worked as a great bridge into the new role. It's that whole ambient intimacy thing. Before I'd even set foot in the organisation as an employee, I had connections with people within it. More importantly, in a way, I felt connected to it.

Once I'd announced my acceptance of the new job, I had a raft of employees and well-wishers from the company's sphere of interest, all making me feel that I was already part of the place before I'd arrived; Helping me with my transport queries, sharing useful knowledge, making me feel part of the culture and so on.

That's a powerful thing. Feeling you're welcome, appreciated and valued, before you're even in the office.

The point here is that the untapped use for Twitter is bridging transition into new employment. Given that the tech industry is fairly notorious in its inability to retain talent from offer to actual arrival, that feeling of belonging to culture, which twitter can create, is a powerful tool in the recruitment arsenal.

Of course, I only applied for the role due to a tweet by Rob Styles, who I originally followed as another web person in Birmingham. So it's a double edged sword, what helps you integrate new employees might also allow your talented employees to be lured away...

So now Digg won't support it for certain activities and Youtube are suggesting heavily you upgrade. Last time round it was 37 Signals and Mobile Me. Same arguments turn up again.

I pretty much agree with Chris Heilmann's thoughts on the subject. Companies that are still using IE 6 aren't going to care about Digg or Youtube or hip new work-on-the-web stuff blocking them. They block that stuff anyway.

That last 10% will be painful and slow to get upgraded. With MS wasting money on adverts or Nickelback based promos (warning sound that plays automatically), the elephant in the room is that the majority of that 10% still on IE 6 are there because corporations, governments and SMEs are locked into it and have little intention of upgrading. Be that by IT policy, bloody minded-ness, complex dependencies or shoddy dotcom era, activeX-riddled web software that just won't work in anything else.

Back when it came out a friend predicted IE 6 would be the Netscape Navigator of its day. Seems he was right. It just refuses to disappear.

All this creates an interesting dynamic on the web. As other browsers move faster towards new and shiny HTML 5 worlds, we've got a 2nd class internet of corporately hamstrung web citizens. They can't access the better tools, or they run slowly on archaic javascript engines, they lack efficient tabbed browsing and generally take longer to do the same tasks...

With more and more commerce web dependent in some way this'll have more of an impact as time goes by. I'd love to see somebody do a corporate whitepaper analysing relative productivity of IE 6 vs IE8/Safari 4/Firefox 3.5/Opera 10. Sure it'll only cost you .5 seconds more rendering that Javascript intensive booking system, but over 100,000 employees, 365 days a year, 10 bookings an hour?

That hints at the real danger for the IE 6 laggards. A great opportunity for younger, more agile companies to run rings around them. In the end that'll be the threat that convinces them to upgrade... Eventually.

First, join Twitter. Make sure you mention you're a plumber and your location. Talk about your work and be generally personable; Being genuine is always a good start on the web. Include your website link so people can check your plumbing credentials, it's probably best to mention you're in Yellow Pages too, not everybody believes what they read on the web...

Second, go to twitter search and search for "burst pipe" or better "need plumber" or any of the other hundred complaints you might help with. Check it has lots of results. Go to advanced search, repeat, but with a geographic limit of 50 miles of your location. Say you're in London (Oh look somebody needs help).

Go to Yahoo Pipes. Create a pipe with all those queries merged together. You could limit them to the last 24 hours if you like, so you don't end up trying out of date info. Subscribe to the feed. Watch the feed for appropriate tweets. Respond when you see them by an @ reply or by following the tweeter and introducing yourself. Introducing yourself is important, hopefully shows you're not a bot. You might want to give a special rate for twitter referrals. Hopefully your serendipitous contact will be seen as a boon, especially if you don't behave in an autofollowy kind of way, get the job.

Do a damn good job. This part is important.

Hopefully your client will talk about the novel experience of being contacted via Twitter at just the right time. It'll be remarkable, after all. This might net you some interest from friends of friends who need work, or some press attention, all of which would be good.

Repeat until you have a network of satisfied customers who will always remember you as the twitter plumber.

Slides below:

A Guide To Blogging For The Uninitiated

View more Microsoft Word documents from Shuckle.

First off, the alert tests, where the content should be announced when it becomes visibile. Well, Voiceover failed to announce the alerts, not a good start.

The button test, shows some promise. The span with the role of button set, has its label read and and is described as a button. However, the group's description is not announced when you tab into the inputs within it. If you tweak the markup so that the fieldset has a tabindex, the description is announced when you tab into it, so I suspect something about groupings isn't being picked up.

The digit button tests are a bit all over the place. When you tab to the Create button, it's tooltip fires and then Voiceover starts reading its merry way through the entire page and not stopping. Tabbing to the edit menu and activating, gets you the menu, but each item in it is announced merely as "interactive". The colour picker announces a "group", but nothing else.

Checkbox example 2 is interesting. The checkboxes and their states are read when you tab into them, as is the hidden "not your average lettuce" describedby. However, the text for each checkbox element is not. Perhaps because there's no explicit aria-labelledby attribute? Also, Tristate checkboxes don't have their partially checked state announced.

Graphical Slider example. You can successfully tab to the slider, and voiceover announces the current value as a percentage. You might expect this for a value between 0-100, however, the valuetext attribute is set with a $ value, so in theory it should announce that. In addition, when you change the position of the slider, no announcement is made of the new value, you have to tab away and tab back to get it to announce the new, modified, value. Not exactly helpful, but workable.

With the Radiobuttons example, the fact that you'd tabbed to a radiobutton was announced, but the radiogroup label is not. Sadly the text of the radiobuttons wasn't mentioned so you have no idea what you've selected. Interestingly, altering the markup and adding aria-labelledby attributes to each li element, pointing at its own id, works. So, again maybe the example isn't quite right and assumes an implied label where there isn't one? Will have to dig in the spec to check this.

Finally, a quick check of the Liveregions demo (and several other liveregion examples) shows that no updates are announced from liveregions.

So, basically ARIA support in Safari/Voiceover is not quite there yet. But considering I'd heard they'd only worked on the tabindex extensions so far, it's further along than expected. Main takeaway seems to be the combinations' need for explicit aria-labelledby attributes.

Wai Aria - An Intro

View more presentations from Shuckle. (tags: accessibility aria)

Thanks to my fellow presenters Bruce and Stuart for entertaining talks on HTML 5 and Javascript! And to Campaign Monitor for the sponsorship (great pizza)!

Auto-focusing on the first form element on a page. If it's a select menu, when people mouse-scroll to move down the page, they alter that option instead; fairly important if that option is also the course category... Basic usability testing would have picked this up, but it remains unfixed to my knowledge. Think of the number of hours wasted with staff "losing" courses and admins having to reinstate them.

That's just the easiest to describe in terms of consequence, but it's far from the only one. If you're used to using anything by say, 37Signals, then VLEs look positively antiquated.

For a while, I thought it was just that particular eLearning environment. But talking to colleagues from other universities, and watching them use their systems, showed basic usability and interaction design problems are endemic. Not minor problems either, "Oh, I can't change that here, I have to go out, back, find it again in admin view and then click edit". If this was a shopping basket on an ecommerce site, you'd be losing sales by now.

And this isn't even getting into the quality of visual design. If you want to see atrocious typography, lack of visual hierarchy, mixed visual cues, poor affordances and confusing wording, then check out an eLearning platform. The markup isn't much better. Bad cases of divitis, tables for form layout, mid-90s style inline Javascript... It's like Designing with Web Standards never happened. But I digress...

How did this situation come about?

Part of the problem is that those making procurement decisions often don't have a critical framework for assessing the quality of web systems. No code auditing, no interface guidelines, no formal usability testing methodology pre adoption and no meaningful success metrics post adoption. Occasional surveys asking if people "like" a system and measuring "hits" just don't cut it when five minutes doing a cognitive walkthrough would reveal a raft of serious issues.

It's particularly odd when you consider the amount of peer review and critique an academic paper has to receive: why isn't a similar level of rigour applied to web learning systems? It's not as if the tools haven't been out there for at least 10 years (longer if you look at generic HCI, rather than web specific). But a few key buzzwords about facilitating pedagogy and people seem to ignore the fact that these systems don't facilitate use.

Universities have a very limited time slot to solve these issues. The current crop of students are used to the user experience design provided by modern commercial web applications. They're far less patient with inadequate systems. Some staff are already moving their teaching to external tools because they provide better experiences. With these newer staff building awareness of what's out there, existing staff are realising they didn't have problems with technology, just certain pieces of it.

So what can be done?

Universities need to start taking usability and user experience more seriously, and quantify more clearly how much bad design is costing them and their students. In a way we need an HE equivalent of the $300 Million Button to get people's attention. There's a great opportunity for a piece of research there, if funding is available. Investing in this area will have long term benefits for the institutions willing to do so.

Ultimately, more Usability, Interaction Design and HCI professionals are needed in HE, and with the ability to influence those providing and choosing the systems. That's no small thing when such issues can lack advocates in management. Getting action on improvement is easier for the open source solutions like Moodle, than closed systems like Blackboard/WebCT, but relying on the producers of systems to fix things hasn't worked so far.

Existing user-centric designers also need to be more vocal about these systems' shortcomings, or everybody will continue ignoring the elephant in the room. Once people are willing to raise these issues then it's easier to fix them. It doesn't take much effort; as Jakob Nielsen says, most usability issues can be found with five study participants. But you need to admit there's a problem in the first place.

There're also some great opportunities here. With a recession on the way, a savvy web agency could earn a tidy sum by building a more user-centric VLE. You could build an eLearning system from scratch in Django in less time than it would take to fix most of the problems with the commercial systems. Build in import from a common VLE or SCORM format and you could laugh all the way to the bank.

Along with Bruce and Stuart, I'll be talking about emerging standards. In my case it'll be WAI ARIA, emerging techniques for improving the accessibility of Javascript-based Rich Internet Applications.

10:15 - Ruth on Facebook for induction, social cohesion 10: 22 - Perceived Benefits - meeting people before it started. Managing expectations.

"Talking to people makes it more real..."

10:25 - Know the students before they arrive, they're not brand new. Additional level of contact. 10:26 - "I don't like facebook", not everybody wants to join. Not an academic space. How much intervention? 10:28 - Served a very specific purpose. Use stopped after induction. (Task focused? - MM) 10:29 - More next time. Multimedia competition. More detail, understanding student unfamiliarity.

10:30 - Charlotte Carey on Twitter and Delicious. 10:21 - The great migration. 10:32 - What are you doing? Had only met Jon via Twitter, now they're writing a paper. 10:34 - Following small business network. Giving students access to role models. Getting them into social circles. 10:37 - Student to Alumni to Professional. Feeding in.

Chris Ringrose on blogging in children's literature course.

10:45 - Blog space on Blackboard (not sterling interface design - MM). Students are talking about their reading and research. 10:48 - Using audio feedback. (Very interesting idea - MM) 10:49 - Prompts, exercises. (Seeding the conversation, very wise - MM) 10:50 - Assessed blogs. Engaging with material over course. Writing and feedback on how they write. Time consuming to mark. Needs assessment as stick to make students do it. 10:53 - Word limit? Blog overload? Not scholarly?

Matt Gee on Webcorp's new annotation wiki. Derek Littlewood on Using it.

10:59 - Used in Irish writing module. Annotating interesting language use, highlighting elements. 11:03 - Pink tags for questions. (Accessibility issue? Wonder what fallbacks? - MM) 11:05 - Linking to audio.

Sonya Andermahr - Blogging

11:10 - Prompts. Choose which they use. 6 tasks to get students writing. (Avoiding the tyranny of the blank page - MM) 11:13 - Design to develop a particular skill. (Very good, task-focused interaction design approach, work back from the aim to the tasks you create. - MM) 11:14 - Again, work intensive marking as a downside. 40 students x 6 blogs, can be work. editing tool not ideal (Again, institutional choices of VLE can be a big interaction problem - MM) 11:15 - Issues. Level of formality. Academic writing difficult in blogs? (Maybe move to Wiki and get others to edit posts with regard to academic style? - MM) . Word pasting problems. Missed deadlines. 11:17 - Source + Referencing improvements.

Ruby Renning- Second Life. 11:18 - MSc eLearning. Second life "It's the one most people know about". 11:20 - Virtual Campus. Bringing staff together. 11:22 - Avatars and chat. Savable. Authenticity. 11:26 - Chat room... 11:27 - Identity. Potential of Roleplay to address. (Should show them the Steal Away Jordan Storygame if they're interested in this - MM) 11:30 - Interlopers. Being polite.

select * from flickr.photos.interestingness(10)

Gets you 10 interesting photos from Flickr. Nice and simple if you know SQL, and many web developers do.

I've done some playing with the various APIs Yahoo's products make available, but hunting through varying bits of documentation was a pain, and they all worked slightly differently, so this is a really helpful single point of contact.

But that's just the surface layer, it gets more interesting digging in a bit. YQL also allows you to query external data like any RSS feeds, CSV files, JSON and so on. It's like Yahoo Pipes in this way, only less visual. One of the data options is to pull other people's (X)HTML and run XPATH on it. So I could get all the anchors within H2s on this page with:

select * from html where url="http://eclecticdreams.com" and xpath='//h2/a'

So it acts as a nice middleman for data from pages with half-decent semantics. You could grab Microformat rich material, for example, and then mix them in with other data. Which means again, a lot more data in one place, with one interface, where I can hack it together using a language I'm already half familiar with.

That makes mashing things up a lot less headachey.

Blogging Slides

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: blog intro)

This all came about as part of an ongoing project to redesign the old business school site. We'd talked about how to get staff involved and onboard, and a blog was suggested as a way of bringing in fresh, relevant content that showed what the School was all about. People wanted to know the hows, whys and whatfors.

So we organised a small seminar... and things spiralled. People took interest. We ended up with close to thirty academics and support staff, all in a room, setting up their own blogs, discussing issues and techniques, ideas and opportunities. Great stuff.

We did some presenting too. I talked about this very blog, and its highs and lows, the link economy and building your audience. Kathleen Dixon Donnelly talked about her blog and how she'd turned her posts into self-published books. John Colby talked about maths, pass grades and pictures of dogs, and which one helped him dine out for a year. Andy Hollyhead talked about how he'd used blogs in teaching for reflective practice, and key things like students not necessarily calling what they do online blogging. Ruth Page talked about how she's used Digital Narratives to enhance her work and research. Charlotte Carey talked about why she blogs and what she gains (see her blog post for more). She also showed people twitter.

All in all a very positive experience, that I hope to see a few blogs appear from. Also great for reminding people there is a web team and we don't bite!

11:49 :  Apparently there are big questions about digital media and business.

11:52  : Joanna from Birmingham Post. Moving digital. Talking about mobile site launch. How she was shocked at how backward print was, and how they have grasped digital recently. (Interestingly, I was a temp at the post when the web began, before they closed that original dept).

11:54 : Richard Allen, Cisco . Looking at video quality for HD streaming. Following  the money. How internet ad revenue is moving greater than TV.

11:57 : Mary Matthews : Indie Videogames Developer. Export lots. Casual games. Ad games. Serious games like LOL... Always digital, interesting point about convergence around IP. Challenge reaching audiences who consume in a different way. 'Net not ready for cinematic play... Can they do it in real time? (I think so, see Flash 10 and recent developments in HW acceleration, links to follow).

Purposeful play. Playing with a reason. Wo__nder if she knows about the concept of Creative Agenda.

12:03 : Re-evaluation of business models. Considered giving away tech.

12:04 : Digital Public. Government and public sector. T__oo much offering, fragmentation (definitely agree there). All about improving impact. 2 things they see key: communities of practice, taking social networks applying to organisations to share best practice. Peer communities. Move from big monoliths, avoiding the "build it they will come" problem (comparable with HE there). How to reach people?

12:09 RPGs. How people play exaggerated versions of self... Do avatars have rights?

12:10 : Too much digital? Opportunities to syndicate? NHS Direct distributing content apparently... (I__nteresting they are doing this, their site aisn't very modern otherwise, see internationalisation issues in their non-english language). Crime mapping in London.

12:13 : Cumulative innovation. Trying to replicate that in public services. Giving people tools to innovate. Show us a better way. How easy is it now? Aim on making Birmingham a case study. Wisdom of crowd vs insanity of mob. How to teach people to filter? Difficulty of getting decision makers onboard. Economic cases. Admitting there are more intelligent outside your org.

12:18 : David Harte from Digital Birmingham. Influence of Created in Birmingham.

12:20 : Andrew Dubber. Push vs pull.

12:22 : It's about addressing needs first. Citizens vs consumers. Joanna: Link between Birmingham Post and local blog scene. Not audience but community/network. Difficulty of starting conversations elsewhere, lack of culture of collaboration in business/government. Journalists not used to the criticism...

12:25 : Conversation is harder. Complex interaction. Functionally much better, but harder transactions. Appropriate conversation tone, and teaching people to interact in a human tone. (Very similar to my experience with marketing people, business and academics, the problem of defaulting to talking at people rather than too them).

12:29 : Finding/defining communities of practice. Not being put off by the "rude things" in Spore.

12:30 : Open questions.

Lucy from BBC : Usefulness of platform to learn how to talk differently. Guidelines on how to talk bloggerly (see me coin neologisms). Practicing tone internally. Are people invited into communities? Teaching people how to interact online. Response about framing conversations appropriately.

David Furmage : Access being blocked to web technologies. How to solve these blocks? Response: Example of how Flash is disabled on many government PCs, a problem when you want to use Flash video to disseminate info. Trusting users.

Question: Small businesses lacking impact? How to get it? Response: Opportunities for intervention. Awareness of what you can do for free. Follow-on: How do we use the energies on the ground level. Response: Tolerance of failure. Fund projects that may fail. Note on utilising classic media, not ignoring it. Plug for Pete Ashton. Plug for Crossover.

William Perrin : Harnessing volunteers to clean up communities.

12:50 : And convergence is done. Link amends and cleaning up of grammar and spelling to follow.

14:30 : "A cannon will be fired in this presentation!"

14:33 : Intro to Flickr, started in 2003. 5 people.

14:36 : Purchase by Yahoo. Scale of growth. And so on. Homeage, maybe some feedback?

14:37: Now. 3 billion pageviews / month. 5000 new photos a minute! London bombings traffic spike. Evac pictures uploaded. Big moments, human, authentic, personal view of the world. The supportive community.

14:40 : Community management. Shift from marketing to community as job title. Like being a Pinata. They beat you with sticks, but you still have to give them candy.

14:41 : "Soft pleasing tone of voice". Transatlantic voice. Human friendly, includive, witty, transparent, honest, clear.

14:43 : Methods of contact. "Community know more than we do". Bubble up the good. (definitely a case of positive reenforcement and building good reward cycles)

14:44 : Communciate expectations. Human readable, not written by lawyer, dos as well as don'ts. Reports, blocks and abuse.

14:46 : Communication is key!   Blog on separate server so it's there when site not working. Owning it! Be clear and responsible. Marketing's urge to whitewash things. Don't wait. If you change experience, announce, give six weeks, then make action. User generated discontent! Don't abuse what people give you. (Excellent point).

14:49 : Make lemonade. Turn negatives into positives, it really works! When down, do competition that occupies on core interest, 2500 entries. (must use this as an example when getting management on board)

14:51 : Change is hard. 48 hours is the reaction. 2 Weeks is the feedback.

14:53 : Embrace the chaos. Real world actions bring in non-community people. Flickr and its crimefighting escapades. Stolen laptops. Flickr uploads. Hilarity ensues. "dropping porn into the pacific". Defacement by geotagging ("look at greenland").

(We're hiring notice, community management).

And then on to questions.

What do you need to be a community manager? "You can't go to school for community management." No courses. No obvious CV points. Difficulties. "It's about character", "unflappable".

Friending experiences? "Many different communities". Handling this. Handling multiple relationships, tens of thousands of contacts may break things.

How does interaction change over time?  Uploading it all at the start, then going back and deleting. Hitting a crest, then slowing down.

Tempting people back? 24 hours of flickr. 3rd of group membership contributed, 7000 people.

Privacy and rights? Do I need to worry? Educating people about the internet and how people use content. "I found it on the internet and its free, so I am within my rights to upload" !!! Transparent overlay download protection... Abuse of DMCA.

Split of CC vs Copyright? Largest CC photo archive, over 10 million. Personality rights in the UK different?

Social aspects? Amazing where it is.

Maintaining voice internationally?  "Don't be that guy." Feedback on this "don't be sexist"... Dangers of moderation stratification, keep things broad and interpretive. Difficulty with vendors of internationalisation services.

Frustrations with community feedback? Only with people who make it personal and offensive.

13:09 Nigel Gainer: LSC Intro. Planning and funding. Review of education and training in creative sector. Was what was being funded worth it? 60k people in west mids. High 90% self employed. High BME. Lots of growth. Purpose of review, bring employers to table. What do they want to buy?

13:!3 General overview. Lack of readiness. Lack of clarity of progression. Very little work-based learning. Lack of understanding of progression. Misconceptions.

Hmm. Suffering from death by powerpoint. Think I'll leave this.

Over the last few weeks I started getting them more regularly turn up in my pocket change, and it really is great to see them. The old coins look positively shabby by comparison!

Now comet is something I've been following since Alex Russell coined the term and my interest was re-ignited by Simon Willison's, Time for Comet presentation. Essentially comet is a way of using Javascript to stream data to the browser. It takes advantage of the fact that you can keep an http connection open and periodically pump some javascript down it, this gets parsed as soon as it loads so you can send periodic update messages. You can read more at Comet Daily.

The theory behind comet is easy enough, but in practice once you get load, normal HTTP servers (which tend to be designed to respond quickly and get things pushed out and done with) don't work too well. So off I went in search of a comet capable server. I could write something, but I want to focus energy on the actual project (have I been spoiled by mature Frameworks and Libraries? Maybe). So began by trawl through the various options available.

I had fairly basic needs, as far as I can tell. Playing nicely with jQuery (or some other library) via JSON was first key, being stable and not hogging the limited memory on my VPS second and having decent documentation was the third. Points two and three are actually the sticky ones, it turns out.

I first of all I had a look at Liberator. Its free version is still quite robust. Pros are definitely easy installation. Documentation is, however, very skewed towards financial services and Java developer-ese. English it ain't. Hunting around for how to plug other data didn't elicit much of use, so I moved on.

Next up was Orbited, which needs Python and Twisted. Some time upgrading later, via the wonders of Yum, my server has Python 2.5 and Twisted running. Mostly my fault for not upgrading earlier, but still irksome time spent. Orbited runs pretty quickly with a low memory footprint, but seems focused on providing an interface to other protocols. Probably great for hooking up to IRC, not ideal for my project. Again, documentation not great or at least very brief.

Since I'm playing with Python now, I go and look at the cometd python option. This should integrate with Dojo and use the JSON-based Bayeux protocol. Sadly, documentation appears not to exist yet. Installation requires more Python wrangling, and ends up giving internal server errors on handshake requests. Not good. Other people have this problem too, and their emails to the developer's list haven't seen much response. Scratch that option then, still too beta.

So then it's Jetty, a Java-based option. I'd avoided Java for bloat issues, and the fact that it's a langauge I have only passing familiarity with. Turns out Jetty's an easy install, but seems to be a bit of a memory hog on my VPS. Likely because it's a fully-featured server not just a comet black-box. However I can connect to demos and it handles Bayeux well enough. I imagine a bit of digging in documentation will turn up tuning information to stop it eating resources, but by this point I'm more than a little jaded with the whole escapade.

So what did I learn from this? It may be time for comet, but you'll need to do a fair bit of hunting around in mailing lists, documentation and irc even to get things working. Implementing something in top of it is another story...

I arrived in time to meet up with Chris, Bruce (and new acquaintance Jake) for some food, and the on to the pre-party. I chatted to a load of random folk, but I ended up shouting myself somewhat horse trying to talk over the music. We decamped with PPK and some guys from Finland to a quieter pub. I failed to snag a Chi.mp Tshirt.

The actual conference started, in a somewhat hungover way, with The Urban Web from Steven Johnson. This was partly about Cholera and partly about the hyperlocal web. An odd combination that somehow worked, as it took in information design and utilising local connections. It was an engaging talk which took in some of the fascinating work at Outside.in, where they're working on some complex algorithms to associate blog materials with locations without having to resort to geocoding. Nothing UK-based, which is a shame, but I'll be following it with interest. I the left the talk  with a startup idea, which is always a good sign.

Moving on, Aleks Krotoski talked about computer games design and what web folk might learn from them. The basic argument that games designers have less formal interaction design, but produce great "sticky" content, seems somewhat to ignore the fact that their miss rate is high and originality low. It also avoids the vast amount of games design theory out there, from Nokia's work cataloguing techniques to the vast swathes of boardgame and traditional RPG work on interaction.

Still, the talk was fun and Aleks is a presenter full of enthusiasm for her subject that is infectious. Plus, any talk with retro-gamer in-jokes is worth a look. Maybe it would have been better if done after mashing some games developers and interaction designers together for a week and looking at the results?

Joshua Porter then talked about Cognitive Bias, those rules of thumb we all instinctively follow in spite of ourselves. This was the stand-out talk of the day to me. Not just full of useful theory, but then taking that on to give practical examples of application. Joshua focussed in on several Cognitive Biases, particularly how you can apply loss aversion to assist in getting signups. Or how it, combined with software creator's over-estimation of their own product's value, dramatically decreases the likelihood that people will adopt a new solution. Excellent really, in every way, I'll be checking out his book.

For lunch we decamped for excellent Japanese food.

Daniel Burka talked about social design and Digg and Pownce. A good talk, but more of an overview of the issues than concrete material on solutions. Digg is the great example of interaction design on this scale though, so small insights are valuable.

Tantek then talked about the theory of social network portability. I think I've seen too many theoretical Microformat presentations, because it seemed like it needed a conclusion or a more practical angle. Not bad, just nothing new. Plus there's only so any times you can hear rel=me in a sentence before you want to shout "Bingo!"

Matt Jones and Matt Biddulph followed up with the storming Designing for the Coral Reef. A great tag-team talk that switched between design and development issues, with an ever entertaining backdrop of quick-cut photos. My favourite part was about designing those little moments of delight that keep a user coming back and entertained, including the neat "how fast you're travelling in terms of an animal" markers in Dopplr.

Jeremy Keith finished things off with a wonderful talk, which is kind of  hard to do justice to merely by describing. It circled round its concepts, slowly building connections together by layering on references from fiction and history, until it got more and more concrete and about building modern social web apps. You can tell Jeremy is an old hand at this talking malarkey, he managed to keep the audience interested through their "WTF?" moments and really hit the payoff. A very satisfying ending to the day.

I returned to my hotel room to find Holiday Inn Brighton decided to remove my stuff from it. I know the idea that work paid for one night and I the next is tricky, but it can't be that rare surely?

Yahoo and the BBC sponsored the afterparty, which I arrived early for in the company of Paul Lloyd and Jon Roobottom. Unfortunately the venue was too small and after a while a few brave souls were forced outside. Brighton was experiencing a small typhoon at the time, which made this far from ideal. We decamped to the Old Ship Inn.

All in all, a great conference. The talks will apparently show up in podcast form, with transcripts courtesy of Opera, on the dConstruct site and are well worth checking out.

Target shall ensure [...] that blind guests using screen-reader software may acquire the same information and engage in the same transactions as are available to sighted guests with substantially equivalent ease of use.

As Bruce points out, it's visual-impairment specific, so it's not a win for all kinds of accessibility. Though it does mention Jim Thatcher doing yearly assessments of their accessibility as well, and as far as I can see that looks more general. Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how this shakes things up stateside and if it has a wider impact (Target's e-commerce is provided by some outfit called Amazon).

In other news, it looks like JAWS 10 will support WAI ARIA Live Regions. Which is a step forward in accessibility for Javascript-based web apps and virtual-buffer issues. Of course it's the bleeding edge, so it'll take a while to trickle down to common usage... Another one to keep an eye on though. You can download the public beta and try it out (JAWS 9 license required).

On the front end it's essential to understand markup semantics, accessibility issues, DOM scripting, CSS and the multitude of cross-browser bugs. Then you need a basic understanding of interaction design, how interfaces work and how to structure a site. Plus, a sprinkling of design savvy is handy too, knowing your line-height from your ligature will keep you in good graces of designers. Then, if you venture to back-end code you might need to use PHP and Apache one day, ASP.NET the next and Django on Friday. If you're feeling optimistic you might want to take in search engine optimisation while you're there.

It can all seem a bit daunting if you're new to all this.

One of the most useful things I learned, fortunately early on, is that sometimes it's best to hold information lightly, but hold your information sources tight. You don't have to know every PHP function when the manual is online 24/7. Hunting a browser bug is easier if you have quirksmode, position is everything, the Sitepoint Reference and Firebug on hand, and with the web you do. Learning how to navigate MSDNs labyrinthine architecture is an artform all its own, of course, but the information is there if you can understand the mindset... Even if you can't there are great conferences, helpful forums and local networks to point you in the right direction.

Knowing everything isn't necessary. Knowing where to find what you need. That's essential.

The logic is as follow: lots of my friends in web development-land have projects they're working on. They almost always post something to the effect of "has finished unit testing", "has finished design number two" or "only 2 more bugs til code lockdown". What if, like using @ for replies or hashtags you posted project updates in a standard form. That way you could poll the API for what everybody in your team had done, and how close they were to complete.

Idly I posted ~20% of experiment done to my feed. This is of course is all you need for this kind of rudimentary tracking. A marker ~, a percentage, and the name of a project. Then all you need is a way to get it all.

So I had a bit of a tinker around in the lab. Currently my go to tool for quick tinkering is Jquery (which is a useful Javascript framework that gives you good tools and fixes, while not letting you feel you're abandoning coding entirely). Jquery rather handily has JSON support, which essentially allows you to pull in offsite data in the form of a Javascript object. Ideal for pointing at the Twitter API, which can boot out JSON data for your own or the combined-with-friend's feed. This makes bashing together some code for this in Javascript pretty easy:

$.getJSON('http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/'+username+'.json?callback=?', function(data){

$('#project').append('<table><tr><th scope="col">Name</th><th scope="col">Project</th><th scope="col">Completed</th></tr></table><p>Updates from: <strong></strong></p>');

$.each(data, function(index, item){

if (item.text.match(/^\~\d?\d% of /)) {

$('#project table').append('<tr><th scope="col"><img src="'+ item.user.profile_image_url + '" alt="" >' + item.user.name + '</th><td>' + item.text.substring(8, item.text.lastIndexOf('done'))+ "</td><td>"+ item.text.substr(1, 2) +"%</td></tr>");

$('#project p strong').append(item.user.name+', ');

}

});

});

I'm not showing all the code here for space, but most of it is there. It assumes you're getting the username variable from somewhere, elsewhere in the script or a form field. The body of the script essentially grabs a feed and on successfully getting it does some parsing. It looks for ~xx% of with a crude regular expression and pulls all the appropriate tweets out into a table in the #project element (with some appropriate formatting like cutting them off at done). A quick way for showing what everybody posted about their projects in the last 24 hours on a webpage. You could, of course, do something clever with Adobe's AIR and turn it into a desktop app too.

Obviously this isn't full app, but it encapsulates one of the reasons why Twitter is so popular: it's the command line of the web. It's very easy to think of a concept that takes some regularly updated text content and implement it on top of twitter with minimal effort. It's also equally easy to push said idea out to other people if you want, as by its nature people will notice the change in how you use Twitter.

Course now it occurs to me that this kind of thing might be a fun tool to test out some WAI ARIA stuff with.

The event, last run in 2006, is a two part affair. In the afternoon there's a picnic and general social, bring tea, cake, sandwiches, jam and your family. The evening is a talk on professional web design and development topics. Last time, Bruce and Patrick talked about Pragmatic Accessibility. This year, well, I know who's been contacted, but it's not confirmed so I'm keeping stum.

What is good is that it also does CSS and HTML validation as you type, creating closing tags as you open them and generally looks after markup in a sensible way. Its fairly intelligent code completion also includes support for Javascript, and with a free plugin, PHP. It plays quite nicely with libraries like Jquery too, allowing for quick insertion into new projects. It also does Ruby on Rails if that's your framework of choice.

You can flip to embedded browser previews from code view, which is nice. Then there's how it integrates with Firebug, which is quite a handy thing for doing any AJAX/JS work. Given that the project I've been working on with it uses a lot of Javascript and PHP, it seems to be quite suited to that. Actually its JSON features might have been handy too, but are only in the pro version. Similarly you're limited to plain old FTP (as opposed to SFTP) with the community version.

Aptana Studio's not as visually slick as something like Dreamweaver, and I think this is probably its biggest flaw. It certainly isn't as designer friendly, and I found the interface a bit clunky and unpolished in places. Sometimes you're just not sure what an icon is supposed to mean, something compounded by slow tooltips. Another example, its file browsing window is often slow to refresh if you drag a file into a folder outside the app itself. It also seems a bit slow in OSX, especially at starting up.

So, not quite the development environment for me, but worth a look if you need an open source space for coding webpages.

Ah, wait... Hold on a sec, the stabiliser's gone. Damn valves!

*sounds of banging*

That's better. Those PNG lads require a bit of wrangling. Had to solder some bits on behind, and re-route to a different parallel for those Internet Explorer 6 chaps (61.85.13 for those who understand such things). Can't have them thinking things are broken, just because they insist on living in the last century!

*Sounds of dangerous creaking.*

Ahem! Where was I? Oh, yes, this is my new-look place on this here ether-web. It goes by the name of Neo-Victorian Glass, a theme somewhat steampunk, somewhat victoriana, somewhat something else... It may well be held together by sheer bloody-mindedness. Do let me know if you spot any gaps, eh?

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.

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.

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.

Starting with some nice general overview from Brian Kelly, covering intro and general issues.

Next, Stephen Clarke, University of Birmingham. Managed blogging environments. Looking at risks. IT department risk aversion. Some blog comparisons: a poor institutional blog, erasmus blog and facebook abuse. Conclusions: good blog: safe, secure, reliable, controlled, acceptable use. Claims universities best places to hold these... Not something I'm convinced of, assumed university has technical quality, knowhow to provide quality web facility and that they have a right to control the student's content. Why use a managed blog I cannot control, when I can join wordpress and have control? Plus copyright issues, who owns my content on a university blog? Overall negative view and lack of engagement with community.

Following on, Melissa Highton, University of Leeds. Using Elgg. Leeds University Values and how they marry up with Web 2. Wonderful Facebook community concept of "Lecturers should have their own entrance music". Engagement with user groups. User research on management of information! "I know who knows". Networking is already present, communities of practice, strong feeling of delineated zones, "student's know the difference". Feeling part of something an important aspect of the work. No promotion of the "better" content as promotional tool.

Alison Wildish, Edge Hill University. Aim to establish reputation online and off by word of mouth. No publicity is bad publicity? People will always talk, better you know what they're saying... Blurring boundaries. Making it easy to contribute to social tools. "Use the tools that will compliment your teaching", open approach. Wordpress blogs, support environment, managing expectations, use for publicity, assistance. Use of external blogs, linked in to central site. Facebook integration of VLE and applications. Seen as just another channel. Appropriate use of technology. Not all good. Problems with false allegations made on Facebook. Used reporting tools. Quick response. Educate students! (and staff!) on managing an internet identity. Positive feedback: "bring back maturity ... break down barriers between staff and students" Adopt use of APIs/aggregation, use tools to spread word. Netvibes-like university portal, though they do use lots of AJAX, which obviously will have implications for accessibility. Overall a very positive sounding approach with strong engagement with the real stakeholders.

Tom Milburn, The Student View. Behavior on Facebook is "leaving it on in the background". 1400 freshers of 2000 in a Facebook group before at the University. Peer support, manage worries about appearing stupid to staff. 24hr, direct, informal contact, mentoring schemes. Usage for gaining survey responses for final year research. Problems with closed communication channels "not related to university", difficult to deal with consequences of online actions. Used Facebook flyers to promote advice on security and identity management. 7000 flyers 160 clicks... Blogs less important, harder to find, lack of updates, harder "recruitment".

Unsurprisingly, put in effort, get results. Don't barge into other people's social spaces.

Dr Stuart D Lee, Oxford University. Facebook for IT staff gathering. Gartner as the Bible... Disruptive technology. Interact where we have to as "advisors and guardians of IT". Competitive, if it's free, why are we paying internally? Burden on services. 1/7th of email from Facebook. Changing user expectations. Question of "Why are we paying IT?" Thema (master students usage survey). Possession of networks issues "Facebook and IM, it's our network". Use existing rules. Rate my professor. If you bring up issues, students are generally fine about it. Interesting problem: people using university id and password for 3rd party apps, high security risk. "Snooping on students" with facebook, fines, education on privacy in public way. The social/formal clash. Corporate identity with Web 2 issues, second life "waste of money", misinformation, "who gave you the right to..." Who is accountable? Explore provision. Use the tools! Good point, if you don't use them, how can you know how to manage them?

David Harrison, University of Cardiff. Disclaimer-tastic! User-centric vs organisation-centric, transcending boundaries. Users who want new things vs central services who want to control/support/secure. Primacy of the Acceptable Use Policy... Learning to relinquish sole responsibility. Practising safe IT, advice on usage. Safe IT event at student's union. Identity control, lack of training in how to behave. IBM guidelines for blogging and so on. Roo Reynolds. Realms, a good breakdown of types and approaches to using blogs: Personal (but not corporate). Personal or group (work related). Group internet Presence (external collaboration in independent space). People are good at adapting to situation. Be supportive, not preventative. If you get in the way, you lose employees. Embracing work-life balance.

So far we've mainlined coffee. It's too early to be thinking on a Saturday.

All done. Tag import from Ultimate Tag Warrior seems to have worked.

Basically it was an attempt to show a non-techie audience how - with some existing building blocks (in this case PHP, Simplepie RSS and Amazon Web Services) - you can quickly build something engaging, once you have a solid concept of what problem you're solving.

The example started from the question: how to use the web to get people into libraries? The basic logic then follows these lines: people write blogs about interests, people tag blogs with topics and people want books about their interests. So build a tool to recommend books based on blogs and point people in the direction of somewhere to get them.

The recommend-atron takes a blog, goes though its syndication feed, pulls the top three tags and categories, then feeds them into a query to the Amazon's API, pulling back any relevant books. Amazon is used because they have the right hooks in place and I could get access. I'm sure you can get the same data from a library management system of any cop too.

Not particularly complex, and in the real world I'd use more than a simple query, but it shows how to go from idea to implementation in an evening and build something fun.

However, next week they're running a conference on Web 2.0, Libraries and Teenagers called Inspiring the iGeneration. I'll be speaking about the perils and possibilities of modern web applications, which'll be a bit about my own experiences with online communities and a bit about web best practices. Ideally it'll show that you can't just slap a gradient on something, call it a blog or wiki and expect people to engage, or at least that's the plan. I'll let you know when I finish the slides... Hopefully it won't involve too much buzzword bingo.

So anyway, as I plan my slides, it occured to me to ask you folks out in blog land what you consider to be the archetypal perils and pitfalls in the modern web world? Not so much in a development way, but in a process and social dynamics way. I have my own ideas from a few years of supporting staff in e-learning and how we encourage freshers to use that system, but I'd be interested to hear other tales.

So, if you were going to give people a map of web 2.0, which areas would you mark with "Danger!"

Based just down from the Custard Factory at Progress Works, the setting is pleasant (although always further from New Street than I remember). I got a great group of trainees who were all at pretty much the exact level to appreciate the workshop. So I covered markup, web content accessibility guidelines (various versions and errata), techniques, dysabilities of all kinds and the important thing: it's about people.

It's good to run this kind of course, as you get to understand that, yeah, there are people out there who want to learn about best practices, but don't know where to start. As I said on the day, there's no shame in that, the web is young and we're all kinda making this up as we go along...

Overall I was pleased with how it went, and the verbal feedback was great! However there were I few things I've learned and areas I could improve:

I spent too long getting day one's slides right, and so day two's weren't as polished. Still useful, but less elegant. Fortunately the exercises for day two were also better. Which brings me to:

I'm good at exercises. My favourite was "Hello! To! Semantics!", which involved getting the group to pick random pages from Hello Magazine (yes, I bought a copy specially; No, it isn't my standard read). It's a really great exercise for getting people to think about semantics in a practical way. In fact, I recommend it to any web developer as an exercise... Celebrity gossip optional.

1. But it's an intranet, we know who uses it - First off, employees change and their circumstances change too. If you break your hand tomorrow, you'll be very glad of the keyboard navigation. If you lose your glasses, suddenly those tiny fontsizes are a pain. More to the point, did you bother to ask your users? You might be surprised to discover that Bob in accounts is colourblind, or that Joanne never bothers with the intranet because she can't read the very light text at her age, or that the marketing department suffer from mild Dyscalculia.
2. Blind people don't use X (where X is whatever service being provided) - All wrapped up in this one is the misconception that accessibility is just about one usergroup and the mistaken belief that people with disabilities don't need access to services online. Look, even if a person with a particular disability doesn't need your service personally, they might want to use it for others. I've seen more than one complaint from, for example, a blind user who wanted to buy a skateboard for their nephew but couldn't due to a poorly implemented site.
3. It costs too much and will take extra time, we'll add it later - Generally missing the fact that you were updating on a regular cycle anyway, so it would have been easy to build it in over time. Plus any initial burst of effort will save you time in the long run (say when your branding gets changed and you only have to alter one stylesheet). Besides, on a very basic level, accessibility is something you have to actively remove through design decisions. This excuse is often heard when a supplier is trying to not be made accountable for their lack of knowledge, or wants to charge for additional services.
4. Accessible sites are ugly - No. Poor design is ugly. Accessibility is just a set of guidelines to work within. You can create sites of great beauty that are wonderfully accessible. There are plenty of great designers who can do it for you if your own aren't up to snuff.
5. Nobody's complained - No, it's true. They all went elsewhere instead, as is people's standard reaction when something on the internet doesn't work. This may account for your failure to turn page views into conversions.

So, those are my pet hates. Which excuses for not doing accessible design do you particularly dislike?

If you are, then you can find out! It'll cost you though. I'm running a little fundraiser over at Fundable, wherein I'll get my hair cut if folks donate £400 quid to charity. You can find out more at the Cut Matt's Hair group action.

Fundable is a nice idea, by the way. I know a fair few creative types are using it to gauge interest in their projects before completion, so they know a small printrun book can be profitable for example. I can see it being useful for volunteer web projects too. Or like me you can just use it for sponsorship activities.

On the design side, I really enjoyed Jon Hick's Creative Sponge talk, which was a great summary of pulling together diverse inspirational elements and a nice insight on his creative process. Jason Santa Maria's Devilish Details talk was a great look at core design principles. Mark Boulton's Typography presentation was a look at type through a martial arts lense.

Over in the development world Dan Webb's Javascript talk included a few nice details (including one very tasty testing and debugging tool) and Nate Koechley did a sterling job on high performance sites.

I got to catch up with a few folks. Special shoutout to Simon Mackie, one of my old colleagues from glasshaus who was over here representing Sitepoint (and who provided me with an elegant orange T-Shirt).

One of the lecturers in English, Jackie Gay, is aiming to be on the Paralympic Sailing Team for Great Britain. So I put together a site in Wordpress for her. I'm quite pleased with the results, though I've just noticed there's still a problem with the CSS in Safari. Sigh. Will have to fix that tomorrow.

Given that it's for a paralympic bid is has to look nice to attract sponsors and be accessible. It's pretty much a heavily modified (hat tip to Bruce's nice summary) Wordpress install.

Interesting side note. I was just testing if the tab order and the hidden skip nav in Safari. How annoying is it that you have to enable tabbing through page elements in Safari's preferences before it'll work.

Similarly, the School of Property, Construction and Planning is celebrating 50 years of teaching planning in Birmingham. As part of those celebrations, we've put together a fun archive site with all kinds of nostalgia, photos and archives.

Called, unsurprisingly, Planning is 50. Mainly interesting if you're into Planning education, but some of the historic pictures of Birmingham's postwar reconstruction are worth a look for local interest.

So, as you may have noticed, I have a new site design. Woo! Yay!

I blame the design entirely on watching too much Life on Mars, which, if you haven't watched, is a throughly ace homage to 70s cop shows / not quite timetravel / social commentary TV show.

As I'm a bit rushed, it probably breaks in a dozen things I haven't got quick access to. So if you spot any obvious horrors, drop me a comment below.

Del.icio.us and its kin have made discovering things much easier. Subscribe to a few tags you find interesting, watch a couple of your friends' bookmarks and you can keep track of the latest cool stuff really easily. Want something from a broader arena? Wander to the homepage, see what folks are finding interesting at the moment. Watch content proliferate in real time.

Delicious has made my old habit of swapping links with friends by email, forum or blog much more efficient. In fact it's nearly totaly replaced those habits. A link has to be really interesting or worthy of discussion, rather than just digestion, for me to blog about it. Delicious builds my awareness of stuff I am interested in with much less trawling, but it does reduce my posting regularity. Given that I use it like this, you can see why Internet marketers are turning to social bookmarking sites for promotional purposes.

What's also interesting from a user experience perspective, is that my initial reason for using the service: 'have access to my bookmarks in more than one place' has pretty much faded into the background. As I gradually got used to the other options, what I saw as the products key features changed. You've got to respect a solution that changes you and keeps you interested like that.

Over at Yahoo Developer Network Theatre, they've put up a variety of video lectures on everything Javascripty. Obviously there's a distinct bias to the YUI library, but some of the talks are rather good. I'd recommend them to anybody who's got an interest in taking JS beyond the basics and isn't sure where to start. The talks by Douglas Crockford (The JavaScript Programming Langauge, Advanced Javascript and The Dom: An inconvenient API) are well worth the watch, they contain one of the clearest explanations of the concept of Closure in JS I've yet seen, as well as discussion of various techniques and tricks of utility in larger JS-based apps.

Way back at the tail end of August a group of web design folks gathered in a park in Leamington. In the evening Bruce Lawson and Patrick Lauke gave a rather fun, rambling, talk on the pragmatic side of accessibility.

There's a rather spiffy transcript of the talk available.

On a standards front it'll produce pretty decent pages out of the box (if you don't mind XHTML served at text/html), and it's navigation generation functions all produce semantic unordered lists. You can customise the templates quite extensively without many issues, there are a couple of places where I found frustration in lack of hooks or choices I thought were odd, but not many. It does @import all the CSS (including its own defaults), so you'll have to do a bit of re-writing for linked stylesheets.

The admin site does use some Javascript to show and hide interface elements, but it degrades if JS isn't present. I've yet to try it in JAWS, I suspect showing/hiding elements might be an issue when tabbing back and forth.

My only slight reservation is that the content creation screens pile quite a few options on the user, and hunting down the ones they need is sometimes a difficult or slow matter. I'd have prefered something a bit more stripped down. That said, you can customise the interface to some degree, so this is less of an issue than it might be.

Fair warning, I worked for glasshaus (publishers of the first version) and know several of the authors of this book, make of that what you will.

The first thing to notice about this book is its size (and I'm not just talking about the title). You get a lot of paper for your money. A quick look at the table of contents will let you know just how much is covered (everything from the legal issues to Flash). Given this, it would be quite an intimidating book to hand to a newcomer, and this may be its biggest downfall: Information overload. Fortunately it is a book you can dip into if you're looking for a specific subject.

Accessibility can be a dry subject, and one of the issues with the earlier edition was its prose. The new book is improved in this regard, particularly the earlier sections. Bruce Lawson's introduction and Shawn Lawton Henry's Understanding Web Accessibility are succinct, well written and entertaining. Later chapters do occasionally lapse into long windedness though.

The book is great for providing information you can use ot make the case for accessibility in your organisation. There's a neat set of statistics for Legal and General's website that are well worth appropriating to show to any manager (just mention the 90% increase in online sales following the accessible redesign).

So what else does the book cover? Well, there's a lot of information on techniques. The hows and the whys of modern web accessibility make up the majority of the book. It covers content, navigation, data input and presentation, in plain old HTML and other technologies like Flash or PDF. The methods here are as up to date as you'll find in print (and more up to date than a few websites you could find). There's a lot of detail here, as well as solid explanations of the reasons for particular techniques. For example, there's advice on when to use alternative text and when it's superfluous based on context.

Most of the information concerns how to interpret the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Version 1 in modern times. There's a chapter with an overview of information on the upcoming version 2, and how that might change approaches, but it's mainly focused in the here and now. There's plenty of notes on how browser support has changed since the initial guidelines, and how some old advice is now outdated. There's also guide to testing your site's current accessibility, along with examples of automated testing - with the appropriate caveats about using human judgement.

To show that it's not a book for people who only talk theory, Patrick Lauke provides an account of his work to increase Salford University's web accessibility. A case study is a welcome addition to a book that could easily be purely theory and techniques with no context. This is a definite advantage over the previous edition. However, it's worth noting that since this case study the site has changed, so the examples aren't viewable in their original form.

Another notable change is that Javascript is covered in more detail than the old edition. Christian Heilmen gives a healthy dose of info on the issues, including modern approaches like unobtrusive scripting and what to avoid from old style DHTML coding.

Legal information is an area this book covers in depth, which you'd expect from a book with "regulatory compliance" in its title. You can find out exactly what laws you need to adhere to, with details of the US, EU, UK and beyond. There's example cases given and what they could mean for you. However, a lot of this information falls into the category of "this may be an interesting development", so don't expect definitive answers, there's simply not enough experience in this area to give concrete answers.

Overall - Web Accessibility : Web standards and regulatory compliance is a burst of data to update older skillsets. If you're new to web design, then this book is a great text if you want to learn good techniques. If you have kept up with industry goings on it's probably not for you. If you have the original, but need an update of your skills, this version is bigger, clearer and more up to date.

Buy this book on Amazon.co.uk

I returned from London enthused and a month of so later a box of books turned up. Conspiring with the rest of the Multipack, we conceived the idea of "Pimp my HTML". You take some drab (but heavily Microformatted) HTML and bling it up with CSS and Javascript! The coolest concepts win some prizes, so long as you can turn up to the one year Multipack anniversary meet in sunny Walsall.

Extra bonus, Jeremy Keith is helping to judge the entries.

Geek in the Park 2006 The time: 27th August 2006 The Place: Royal Leamington Spa,Warwickshire The Picnic: Bring food, drink, people and so on. The Discussion: The Excellent Patrick Lauke and Bruce Lawson will be providing evening discussion on 'Where the rubber meets the road: Web Accessibility and Pragmatism.' at the Jug and Jester pub.

There's also some very nice web design books on offer as prizes from Friends of Ed

I'll be there, and you should be too!

It's a proof of concept idea, whereby you take advantage of the Flash plugin's ability to detect screenreaders (more accurately whether a user is using assistive technology) and use that to substitute for the browser's inability to do similar. It's one of those elegant ideas you wish you'd thought of yourself. By detecting it automatically, you avoid the panic button approach's reliance on the user.

While not a perfect solution, it's another tool that can help make your spangly new AJAXified site available to more people, which can only be a good thing. It does beg the question though - if you're relying on the Flash / Javascript integration, why not just build it as an accessible Flash application?

Can AJAX be made accessible?

The basic issue is that, as things currently stand, there's no easy way to let a assitive technology (screenreader or other) user know when the page has been changed via some cunning DOM Javascript shenanigans.

This causes a few problems when using the latest raft of web apps. You can't just say "well it works with JS turned off!" since modern screenreaders have it turned on. However if they've read past the point of change they won't know what's going on.

Various folks have done work on this already, James Edwards wrote an excellent summary of AJAX and Screenreaders at Sitepoint.

I'd been thinking about this too, since I do work in higher education, and we need our sites to be as accessible as possible. It would seem to rule out AJAX and its ilk...

However a simple solution occured to me, based on a turn off-and-onable dropdown menu I made a while ago. First off, build your web application using best practices like progressive enhancement so it sits on top of good old HTML that works(Jeremy Keith calls this HIJAX)...

Then create an option that allows the user to revert to the non-funkified version of your application if they encounter problems (when dicussing this with James at @media we called it the panic button). Store this choice in a cookie and then whenever the script loads and starts enhacing, branch off and leave the HTML as is.

Obviously this has one primary problem, it relies on the user. So you have to be careful where the option is in your page flow (so it's easy to find) and how it's phrased (which is tricky). Borrowing from software development we could use a preferences page, but if you phrase the option too negatively "turn off javascript enhancements" you'll probably get less usage then "turn on screenreader compatibility".

Any thoughts?

Day two kicked kicked off with Dan Cederholm's talk on Bulletproof web design. To be honest it's was all stuff you should be doing anyway if you consider yourself a pro, but it was engagingly presented.

The Javascript panel was a look at differing opinions on the various libraries that have been popping up all over the place, like Dojo or Prototype. I've tried a few of them, but never really found anything that didn't overcomplicate things. I tend to agree with PPK, that a good solid set of helper functions are more useful, but the panelists made good cases for when you might want to use 'em.

Molly Holzschlag presented an excellent talk on Internationalisation. It's one of those areas that I've not really looked into much, but been aware it was something I should know more about. Molly made an great case for doing that pretty quickly.

The strategic CSS management panel was full of questions, but not many definitive answers. Comment your code, organise sensibly and find a method that works for you were the main take-aways. It was fascinating to see the alternative approaches though.

Tantek Celik's talk on Microformats was the most enlightening of the presentations for me. I'd not really touched on them and the explanation of the logic behind them seems to be one of those things that works much better in person. It's telling that one of my recent thoughts at work was, "gosh I could make those events pages all microformat events."

The Wednesday night meetup was in a pub just round from Scotland Yard. I met up with the Multipack, Mr Mills and Mr Lawson, and was introduced to Mr Lemon and Mr Lauke. We stayed just late enough to realise that Westminster doesn't seem to have any later licensed pubs. I ended up chatting with some of the accessibility folks at their hotel.

Thursday began bright and early with Eric Meyer's keynote. A brief history of CSS that brought back all those painful memories of IE 3... It also left me confident that we have nearly won the war to convert people to CSS-layout.

We split into two tracks, and I chose the Good Design vs Great Design panel. Not revolutionary, but certainly interesting with a few idea sparks. After a break it was Chris Wilson's talk on the future of Internet Explorer. Chris can certainly present well, especially considering the hostile crowd. I'd already seen IE7, but was happy of the extra insight. I am cautiously optimistic.

2pm saw the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 panel. Less controversial than expected, given the recent discussion on the web. It was a well handled and balanced panel. I think it genuinely helped many people's understanding.

Jeffrey Veen wound up day one with his talk on the next generation of web applications. Entertaining, if content light.

Everybody disappeared off to watch the football. I ended up in a pub that did excellent Thai food with Bruce, Chris, James Smith, Gez Lemon and Laura Zucchetti. Mills took Photos.

It's a tricky schedule, as both session tracks have some great looking presentations in them. I shall be erring on the side of topics I haven't much explorered (Microformats being the main one in that regard).

I've booked a surprisingly cheap hotel towards Vauxhall... Fingers crossed it'll match up to its photos.