BarCampLondon3 - Day 2

Sunday morning saw various folks rise from the dead and gather for breakfast - another mighty catering WIN from Google's chefs - Full English if you so wished, fruit and cereals for those of a more delicate constitution.

It took a while for the brain cells to get going (copious amounts of coffee and fresh orange juice helped), so the first session I sat in on was the second of the day.

What To Teach The Next Gen Web Devs - Dan Dixon
Dan is a lecturer teaching today's university-age students about the web. His round-table discussion focussed on what sort of curriculum they should be getting, from a working designer/industry expert opinion. The whiteboard proved useful in splitting up the syllabus into 4 stages and brainstorming the essentials of what should be covered:

Universals:

• Accessibility as best practice, not an afterthought
• Make them aware of an international web (localisation issues)
• Good communications skills - ability to present their projects and lead discussions
• Need good writing skills for email, reports, blog posts
• Give them business context for their skills
• Point them towards the developer community

Foundation:

• Not too much emphasis on specific tools - teach basics of HTML/CSS
• Fundamentals of design
• Typography
• HCI and UX design
• The ideas of the web - a bit of history about the technology?
• Empowerment
• What is the web for? - show them it's not just Facebook
• Different ways of working
• Tell them about realistic career paths
• Basics of how to program

Middle:

• Practice-based
• CSS, JavaScript
• PHP/Ruby
• Wireframes/IA/Sitemaps
• Do usability testing
• Make sure something they have worked on is torn apart (might sound harsh, but it's going to happen sooner or later!)
• Small groups/projects
• Understand project management skills

Internship:

• Need good HTML/CSS skills so they are immediately useful - don't want to end up just making the tea
• Need to work as part of a team
• Know about browser testing
• How to interact with clients - people skills
• Innovation
• Time estimation
• Should be able to choose a path - Front End or Design or Programming or UX/IA and be able to gain relevent experience in that

End:

• More on localisation
• Project Manage a 2nd-year team
• Start a project from scratch
• More about business and how it works

It was a very thought-provoking session, and a few of us continued in well into the break. Then coffee called, so I ended up missing another session! Oh well.

Self Publishing - Vicky Lamburn
Vicky has self-published several fiction books and gave us some tips on the tools she uses for writing and typesetting (Word on Window), Lyx (for Ubuntu). Then she gave us a quick tour round the Lulu self publishing site. It is possible to get a book with ISBN - or self-promote, distribute, sell via web etc. In general, covers need to be 300dpi TIFF while text is usually send as a PDF (fonts only embedded where licencing is not an issue).

Then it was time for lunch! Still more food...

BarCamp Rhine - Sebastian "CB" Grünwaldt
CB gave a great presentation on the proposals for BarCampRhine, which basically involves BarCamp on a ship sailing from Basel (Switzerland) to Rotterdam (Netherlands), with static BarCamps in cities along the way, such as Basel, Karlsrühe, Mannheim, Köln, Strasbourg, and Rotterdam. The idea was originally suggested by Frenchman Sacha Lemaire and has been presented at various BarCamps in Europe since then.

[CB explaining the BarCampRhine idea to those in the room and in the chatroom]

If it goes ahead, it sounds like it will be a brilliant fortnight - but it needs lots of work and enthusiasm to make it happen - so if you are interested, go and sign up at the Wiki and let the other folks know you want to help. CB's talk led on nicely to Ryan Alexander's which followed:

Future of BarCamps - Ryan Alexander
Ryan's session involved asking two recent BarCamp organisers up on stage and asking some important questions about how much work was involved with putting on a BarCamp. Ian Forrester (London) and Oliver Berger (German BarCamps) kindly shared their experiences with us:

[Question Time]

Q. How long have you spent working on BarCamp?
A. Ian - Backstage are a sponsor, some time can be claimed from work time - at least a week's time.

Q. How much personal risk did you need to take?
A. Ian - does not put himself at risk, sponsors take the can. Oliver, some risk.

Q. How many others helped out?
A. Oliver 12-15. Ian 2 Googles.

Q. How many others would think about organising an event
A. Most people in room. Alistair organising one in Tyneside. Previous experience to give it a go.

Q. Norm - what would you do for a first step?
A. Get people to help - people who are passionate about it.

Q. How would you find those people?
A. Don't know (Norm). Ian - says its a lot easier to go it along to begin with. Oliver - don't need to look for passionate people - they will ask you if they can help.

Ryan's suggested BarCamp² - a BarCamp about organising a BarCamp. This seemed to go down well, and hopefully something concrete will begin to take shape soon.

[So meta, it hurts]

Anatomy of a Business Card - Ross Bruniges
Ross's lighthearted look at the power of a business card can be summarised as follows:

• Keep in touch with the people you meet up with.
• Once you have a name you can see where people are going - Flickr, etc
• Twitter - finding out what people are doing now.
• Upcoming - what's going to happen

He ended with a favourite photo of himself:

[Ross and his Pimp goblet]

Then we were all encouraged to exchange cards with folks in the room who didn't already have ours.

Rise & Inevitable Fall of Pub Standards - Dan Webb
In the beginning... Dan took us on a little historical tour on how PubStandards formed, why it's good and why you shoulnd't miss the next one:

[Who needs the conference?]

As the sessions came to a close, everyone reconvened in the main canteen for the farewell closing speeches. I think everyone agreed it was a spectacularly successful BarCamp, certainly the best I've been to.

The Highs? - brilliant wifi, food to die for, lots of geek toys to play with and plenty of friends old and new to hang out with, winning at Werewolf!

The lows? - not getting enough sleep, not wanting to leave! Roll on BarCampLondon4...

BarCampLondon3 - After Hours

If you're staying overnight (which is essential for the full BarCamp experience), then there isn't really an "after hours" - you just keep going for as long as there's a geek still standing.

After the first day's sessions came to a close, the socialising began in earnest. Here we see Mr Boozeniges living up to his name:

[First steps in drinking the mighty Google dry]

Inevitably, where geeks gather, there will be interminable rounds of Werewolf, for it is writ in Lore.

[Short break in a round of Werewolf. Cheer up! Anyone would think someone just died... oh wait!]

I think I must have played at least half a dozen games during the evening. But the most satisfying has to be the one that wrapped up around 5am - final round me [Werewolf] versus Tom Hughes-Croucher and Sebastian "CB" Grünwaldt [villagers] and Tom decides to nominate CB - mwahhaha! I win! Yum yum, tasty villagers.

Talking of tasty, as if the mountains of food served for dinner weren't enough, Google laid on a midnight feast for the geeks - freshly cooked waffles, pancakes and a chocolate fountain. Man, you could get soooo fat working here...

[The chocolate fountain - just had to be tried, didn't it?]

There were loads of games to play (Wii sports, tabletennis, fussball) and even a Segway to fool around with. However, Jan and CB, two of the crazy German LondonBubble guys decided they could go one better than the Segway with their two-seater "find":

[Ticket To Ride - CB drives with Jan on the back, looking justifyably worried]

But the weirdest trick of the evning must go to Oliver Uuberholz (another LondonBubble boy) who decided the empty beer fridges were going to waste and his Mac was getting too warm:
[Macs in the fridge]

Enough craziness, and being about dead on my feet by 5:30am, I went to find a quiet bit of floor to collapse on for 3 hours.

BarCampLondon3 - Day 1

The time for another BarCampLondon3 has rolled around, and I was lucky enough to get a ticket. We all turned up at Google's swanky offices in Victoria knowing we would have a good time, but not quite realising what a great time we were in for.

The organisation went very smoothly, the wifi was rock solid, there was more food, beer and snacks than even a BarCamp-load of geeks could consume (well, apart from the beer - it's the first time Google's fridges have been emptied, oops!)

As usual with an unconference, it was all about the sessions folks decided to give, and we were treated to some really thought-provoking and fun discussions. It was a shame that out of the 100 attendees, about 30 chose not to present. So the schedule was a little light at times, but that's not always a bad thing - nice to catch your breath every now and then! Jeremy marked up the timetable for us all to refer to easily.

The first session I went to was Tom Morris - Scraping Sucks - where he was giving us more usable alternatives to scraping HTML, namely doing clever stuff with GRDDL. He says it's much easier that way. As usual, I nodded sagely at the time, and then a couple of hours later, wondered what it was all about. Tom is a great geek, but he's several steps ahead of me when it comes to brain-wracking abilities :-) He's put up a page of GRDDL Profiles here - which lets you look at (X)HTML and with an XSLT transform, spits out XML/RDF which can be used as you want.
[Tom gets stuck in to his presentation]

Norm's Law
This was an excellent presentation from Mark Norman Francis. He gave us some very good reasons for doing code his way - especially for fostering interoperability betweeen different members of the team, or yourself coming back to code at a later date. Some points included:

• Use spaces not tabs
• Code goes no further than col 77
• No-one ever died from using too much whitespace
• Separate operators and braces - more of a cognitive burden to parse squashed up code
• Always indent by 4 spaces ONLY
• Line up assignments of variables (equals sign in the same place etc)
• Line up data tables too (arrays or whatever)
• Space keys out from brackets $vote[ $value }++; etc
• Space keywords out not functions
• Vertical rhythm - break bits up with comments for each sub part - make a story out of it
• Respect left-to-right comprehension
• K&R bracketing - opening brace should be tied to RHS end of line, closing brace should be on a new line - aligned with the starting coment
• Don't cuddle and else!
• One statement per line - you can easily miss the ";" in the middle of the line separating the two commands
• Break lines before operators - EXCEPT in JavaScript or it won't work
• Ignore operator precidence - use brackets to make it more "English readable"
• Use single quotes where possible - ' in PHP will just be stuffed in, " will make PHP parse the contents looking for variables
• Factor out long expressions and use intermediate variables (with english-sensible names) to break up
• Always use x on regexpressions
• Don't use camelCase! unless you're in JavaScript
• Systems Hungarian is harmful, Apps Hungarian is too
• All short variable names are harmful
• Use grammatical variable names and function calls
• Optimise for humans first! Machines - throw more hardware at it - but you can't refactor comprehension
• HTML indents use 2 spaces not 4
• Write the whole document FIRST before you do any CSS etc
• Insert Microformat classes
• Always use single quotes in attributes
• Inline CSS means you've done it wrong
• If it only works in JS don't
• VALIDATE
• Start with base stylesheets - reset, fonts, layout
• Use Uppercase tags in HTML
• Keep z-index below 50

[Norm - I can haz 4 skreenz]

Next up was a session about new developments from the BBC's web team:

BBC APIs First Look
PIPs is the system to list all broadcasted stuff - telly and radio

• bbc.co.uk/programmes
• Gives a list of all current programmes - by genre or alphabetically
• Nice URLs which can have .yaml or .json can be added for the feed in that format
• bbc.co.uk/programmes/formats
• Pid is the 8-character id for each episode - taken from user experience tests and will always be constant (never change)
• JSON and YAML are the two formats currently supported - XML coming? - RDF ontology has been produced
• RSS feed is coming so you could subscribe to know when "every episode of Doctor Who" is on
• Data model - "programme" can be brand, series or episode - an episode can have multiple versions (signed, extended etc) which then have broadcast (tv) or ondemand (iPlayer) times
• Historical data back to May 2006
• Can filter out to network (tv or radio) eg Radio4
• Next release (API stuff) in New Year
• http://catalogue.bbc.co.uk/ - is historical data - grand plan is to have them merged

DIY User Research - Leisa Reichelt
Leisa gave us lots of good advice on how to carry out some DIY user research - her premise being that it doesn't have to take days and days and cost big bucks - and often talking to more than half a dozen victims volunteers gives you diminishing returns. Leisa's slides are already available at the Slideshare BarCampLondon3 group.

Building Lifestream with Yahoo! Pipes - Cristiano Betta
I didn't take many notes as I was listening as I was actually playing with a real Yahoo pipe of my own and trying to follow along with what Cristiano had to say. I've been meaning to use Pipes to create my own Lifestream for some time, but had a quick go before and things weren't coming out as I wanted. Cristiano has done a series of excellent blog posts to get you going, or you can watch Tom Morris' video of Cristiano's presentation. Or view Cristiano's own Lifestream.

10 Things You Should Do In Project Management But Probably Don't - Gareth Rushgrove
Gareth's top ten tips:

1. Use Source Control software
2. Validate markup - XML, RSS, Atom and JSON
3. CSS validation
4. Broken Links! check them thoroughly - W3C Link checker
5. Performance - do you have metrics for measuring the performance - YSlow is a Firebug enhancement, httperf - use uptime checker too such as Pingdom
6. Maintainable Javascript - JSLint gives you good tips
7. Carry out Unit Testing
8. Carry out Functional tests
9. Asset Compilation
10. Building Scripts
    

More at morethanseven.net

Learning jQuery - Simon Willison
Simon gave us a lightining half hour tour of the jQuery Javascript library with great examples and succinct slides - you can get them from Slideshare. I've been meaning to beef up my JavaScript skills, and getting to grips with jQuery sounds like a good place to start.

[Simon talks about jQuery's Ajax capabilities]

Ask Them Anything
For the final sessions of day one, Norm and friends held an Ask Us Anything panel - just a bit of silliness to round off the proceedings before dinner. The guys from the Londonbubble did a live stream of the session to their mogulus chatroom, and it all got a bit recursive when this was put up on the main screen behind the guys:

[Behind you!]

The chatroom folks even got to ask a question or two - and Ross got a marriage proposal from a lady named Picki which he had to graciously decline!

[Ross, Norm and Ryan answer the online questions]

And so to dinner... but that's for another post.

BarCamp Day 2 - Morning & Afternoon

Simon Willison on OpenID
Simon talked about systems for single sign-on across multiple sites. You don't give away your user name to the site, but do it via a third party signon, such as Yahoo!. MyOpenID https://www.myopenid.com

Attribute Exchange
Registering personas. You can set up personas which lets you act as different people on each site, with perhaps a different circle of friends or interests..

A bit prone to phishing - an evil site could redirect you to a phishing site which could catch your ID and password (if you are signing into openID via any old site (rather than at the mothership). AOL have turned OpenID on for 68 million accounts now.

idproxy.net is a site which Simon has written, which acts as a middle man for yahoo signin/openID.

[Simon demos openID signon for Magnolia]

What happens if your provider goes away? You can use your own url as a delegation by inserting a couple of lines of HTML in the code of your site.

If you log into a blog to comment, you can populate a white list of trusted friends' openIDs which would then bypass comment spam moderation.

http://jyte.com is a way to enhance your reputation as a distributed profile. Other users vote yes or no to say if they agree with your opinion. Jyte has a group for BarCamp (effectively a white list) which could be exported to another social network, lock, stock and barrell.

Janette Girod on Optimising The Everyday: Finding Flow
Janette's presentation was all about the art of training your attention. You get out what you put in - pay attention and you'll get more benefit. Also need to set up circumstances to allow you to pay full attention to what you're doing. This can be helped by:

• Defining clear goals
  Focus one one small thing to achieve per session.
• Heighten concentration
  Can be increased by practice. Make it easier on yourself by removing apps you're not using, ban im, email, twitter!! Don't sabotage yourself.
• Loss of self-consciousness
  Become absorbed in what you're doing.
• Distorted sense of time
  Specifically allot a period of time to concentrate - it can take 15-20 minutes to zone-in. 48 minutes on, 12 minutes off. Fun to race against the clock. At the end, it gives you break - get up, make tea, check email: this break means your next session of 48 minutes is more productive.
• Direct & immediate feedback
  Test all the time, immediate reward for your work, seeing when something works
• Balance between ability level and challenge
  T oo hard, you freak out, too easy, you switch off. If you have a really hard task, break it down into smaller chunks and get those out of the way one by one
• Sense of personal control of activity
  Master your tools, then you will feel in control of what you are doing
• Intrinsically rewarding action
  If you have a choice, do something you want to do, rather than something you have to
• Focus of awareness narrowed down to concentrate
  Be strict with yourself if you find your attention wandering off track. If you keep practising this, you will need to do it less often.

[Janette, in full FLOW]

As a soon-to-be freelancer, I found her ideas and suggestions most welcome, as self-motivation will be a big factor in my success!

Erin Staniland on Web Sites For Photographers
Erin demonstrated With Associates' Flash-based galleries for photographers, with a cms. The customer gets their own domain name, a unique design on a small budget, they manage pictures themselves. Some examples of the system:

http://justice.withassociates.com/
http://www.jameshatt.com/
http://www.175pairslater.com/

The CMS is Ajax on Rails, which creates an XML file which can be manipulated with Flash.

Minibooks - cheap, quick and dirty website for quickly showing work to potential clients. These have standard templates, slight customisations.

Ben Ward on ASP.NET Active Standards Pages
Ben concurred that ASP1.1 not designed with standards in mind. Therefore it was crap at it, at times. Visual studio tends to insert nastyinline JavaScript in certain circumstances, eg Image Buttons, form validation, hyper link pagination on datagrids.

Some controls need to be nested inside forms. Gridview (.NET2) MUST be inside a form. <label> is a pain. The code will generate unique codes for each element - it can screw up css id selections. Page doesn't validate under some circumstances - viewstate can cause problems.

.NET2.0 Master Page templates are better now to set header, nav, footer and define content area into which we can drop the form controls etc. Easy to pass unique page ID for body class switching. Other useful stuff in the header - such as setting the RSS feed link for auto discovery of feeds.

Wrapping Up
After such an action-packed couple of days, there were a few dropouts by the end, but the vast majority made it to the final session. Thanks were given all round, especially to everyone who helped out or organised. There was a discussion about the format of the whole event, and it was general concensus that sleepover was an integral part of the event, and a one-day format wouldn't be the same (besides, when would we play Werewolf?!).

As a first-time BarCamper, would I go again? Most definitely! It was fantastic to meet such great people - going to PubStandards with some of them regularly is one thing, but this is a chance to "jam" in a completely different way. There was laughter in the air virtually all the while during social times, and you could almost see the ideas sparking off each other during the speaking sessions.

So, we departed until next time, full of inspiration and in need of some sleep!

[All wrapped up, and the photos are posted on Flickr already.

BarCamp Day 1 - Evening Sessions

Mark Norman Francis on Don't Be Scared of Code Reviews

Norm explained that the purpose of a code review is not to criticise other people's code. The findings are not escalated, there is no formal output - just for folks involved. Except Security problems, which are tracked in Bugzilla. So why bother?

• Verification - adhere to internal standards.
• Training - informal education of expectations of new hires
• Collective wisdom - [you will be assimilated!] Experts pass on their knowledge.

They are looking for, in HTML - valid, semantic, accessible.
CSS - valid (hacks separated out), modular (hung off ONE id - means you can reuse code on another part of site without relying on cascade), cross-browser (graded browser support)
Javascript - unobtrusive (pull it out into separate files, still get to the content with JS off), optimised, cross-browser.

Don't care too much about programmed page weight - ads multiply page weight hugely anyway. Page weight is not very relevent to each user but is to Yahoo!, since so many hits could mean server overload.

Perl/PHP must be documented (in the code, externally), understandable, standardised

[Olé Norm!]

How do they work? Time taken doing them is minimised. Quiet time is set aside beforehand for people doing the reviewing, away from email, IM etc.
During review, items are explained by reviewer, while the coder keeps quiet. A mooderator takes notes for them both, which are tabled for later. Then follow-up - the lead developer confirms that the problems identified have been rectified before code goes live.

Me on Taking Better Pictures
I'll post the main contents of my presentation in later posts, but it seemed to be fairly well received, with about a dozen folks coming to listen.

Andy Mitchell & James McCarthy on "Free Schmee"
Andy and James were talking about APIs and using them in a modular fashion - why invent the wheel again when you could reuse another API to do certain tasks, such as user verification. They freely admitted they'd been penning their presentation hastily when they'd rather have been attending mine. But never mind, it was still an interesting few minutes!

[James and Andy argue about who's going to work the slides...]

Next was dinner: geeks + pizza + beer = culinary carnage. At least there was no washing up!

[Colin Schlüter surveys the carnage]

I stayed chat with Andy Mitchell and John Wilson for quite a while after dinner, but made it to the main auditorium , back end of Ask Us Anything panel. Someone rashly asked to see the panel dance!

[Norm! shakes his booty, watched by Simon, Steve, James and Aral]

Of course, it wasn't long before someone asked "when can we play Werewolf!" So, most reconvened to the restaurant area and three groups started. Not sure how many games were played altogether, but I think it was at least nine, with various permutations of people flitting from one circle to anther.

[a wolf in gnome's clothing, perhaps? Tom Coates ponders who he's going to bite next; James Wheare (Wolf??) and Cristiano Betta don't seem worried by his proximity!]

And so to bed, perchance to sleep, at 4am... fat chance - wished the floor wasn't so hard. Got up again 4 hours later to find most still comatose:

[geek dorm, aka conference room]

BarCamp Day 1 - Afternoon Sessions

Tom Scott on Open Source Incremental Backups For Windows
Tom's presentation was useful for those who want to manage incremental backups for Windows in a sensible way. His full presentation is available here: http://www.thomasscott.net/barcamp2/

I backup my system less often than I probably should (photographs aside, which get saved in at least 3 places regularly - I'm paranoid!). So perhaps I should take the time to have a go at this myself.

Meri Williams on Project Management For Busy Geeks
Meri's talk started with the Basic lifecycle of a project. Few projects go through the whole lifecycle properly. The Big Secret is that, for smaller projects, PM is all about Initiating, Planning & Closing (and not worrying too much about execution and control). Planning should NOT be about planning a step by step guide - but something that helps you understand what you're doing. And communicating this to stakeholders. She also mentioned that lots of projects are not closed properly - haven't we all been plagued by customers that just won't go away but pester by saying "can you just do this bit extra?".

[Meri's running order]

Leisa Reichelt on Design Consequences
Leisa's was a hands-on session where she demonstrated her techniques for initial brainstorming of site layouts and designs. We all had to break out the pen and paper (and post-its!), and "mock up" a screen to show the BarCamp Schedule (the real thing was done the low-tech way as you can see):

[Day 1 Schedule - done the low-tech way - but it works very well]

Then we talked about what we'd done and why. It was nice to get away from the computers for a bit, and everyone had fun explaining how they had implemented their solution to their neighbour.

[Andy and Nat listen intently to one BarCamper's version of the schedule solution]

Robert Lee-Cann on Over-Engineering Is Fun!
Leeky's presentation was a light-hearted and thoroughly enjoyable look at solutions to problems which have been hugely over-engineered, and he wondered if this was a typical trait of geeks in general?

[right, Leeky having a geeky- brained moment]

Problem: Is the coffee machine full?
Easy Solution: get off your butt and go and look
Geek Solution: we all know where a bit of over-thinking can get us: webcam trained on the coffee maker

[below: The man needs coffee!]

Problem: Who's going to make the tea round?
Easy Solution: Press-gang someone into doing it
Geek Solution: Web-based ordering of drinks, LED display in the kitchen showing the round required, online voting afterwards to see how well it was made!

Confessions:
Having described the above solution which is in use at his work (!), he asked us all if we would like to confess our most ludicrous over-engineered solutions. Some of the best were as follows:

• Meri - private IRC channel to decide the flavour of your pizza before ordering it - used by people living in the same house
• John - set up a telly, Freeview box and video transmitter in one room and a reciever in the other room - when they could have run a cable through the wall!
• Brave Geek: had written 112K JavaScript file to write a whole web page on the fly, built in the days of Netscape 3 and IE3! He got a round of applause for that one!

Pitch An Idea
The final part was for the audience to come up with a solution to the perennial problem of putting the loo seat up or down in the bathroom. Many outrageous examples were put forward, which ranged from having a finger-print recognition pad on the loo door, so the loo "knew" who was about to sit down, to weight/position sensitive pads just in front of the loo, so it knew if gents were standing or sitting down! All great fun.

Andy Budd on The User Experience
Andy started by talking about the early desktop interface, when abstracting the interface made it easier for "non-tech" users. At the time, it was revolutionary. Similarly, Joe Bloggs doesn't want to learn Unix to use their iPods. People DON'T read the manual. No wonder we say RTFM so often.

We learn by experience - programming DVD recorder is very similar to programming the video. So the building blocks are there and users learn the metaphores. It makes it important not to break common interaction habits.

Users learn new technology by exploring - you switch it on and start clicking buttons to see what happens! So make buttons look like buttons. And make sure it's not fragile so that inexperienced users can't break the system with one click.

Modern life constantly demands our attention. How easy is it to send a text while crossing the road? Rarely do people give your application 100% of their attention. Design it to make things easy, as people are adept at multitasking.

Make error reports blindingly obvious. It's a great place to make the user experience a good one - as soon as something breaks, you want immediate service or fix, or at very least, a human-readable error message. Don't make users feel stupid when they do something wrong.

[I'm no dunce]

Usability is all about making technology easier to use. Plan user experiences carefully. Create wireframe storyboards - think how filming is never done without paper mockups. Then test it on REAL users. Can be as simple as chatting to coffee shop customers - feed them donuts and buy them a coffee and get their feedback on your site - one day user testing, low budget - anything is better than nothing.

UCD is sometimes confused with Business Centred Design or Marketing Centred Design. You should not have to deal with politics. But we all know how hard that can be. Designing with a focus on business unit function is also horribly bad. Technology Centred Design - designing around our own technical ability - we do it that way because we can - is also a no-no.

Get out and talk to the users - find out what they're trying to do with your site. Users don't just want to know what the weather is going to do for the sake of interest, they are more likely to need to know if whether to take an umbrella with them today!

Build up Personas for each broad type of user. Design with these in mind. Very easy isn't always best - maintain a balance. Sites or games companies know about flow - you lose time when you are interested in something.

Starbucks are masters of the "coffee experience" - which is why we are willing to shell out 3 quid for a cup coffee!

Lastly, he made the point that the iPod would probably fail user testing. People buy into the brand. You might struggle through learning the interface, but you're willing to learn it because your friends tell you it's a cool gagdet. So for the right brand, people are willing to take the time to learn new ways of working.

BarCamp Day 1 - Morning Sessions

Introductions
We met in the plush surroundings of BT's offices in St. Paul's. They have some fantastic facilities and it was great to be able to make use of them for the weekend.

[hi-tech ramp down to the main auditorium]

The Three Musketeers - Ian, Nat and Jason - set the ball rolling with a few words and generally explained what was going on, and how the format of the weekend would run. Then we were all encouraged to say a few brief words about ourselves as an icebreaker, by passing the mic round the auditorium. I thought this was a great idea as you could note down someone's name if you had similar interests, and seek them out later.

[the fun begins with the Three Museketeers introducing themselves]

Ian Forrester on Pipelines
Ian was explaining what Pipelines were about, basically inputting a stream of data (can be rss but also other formats), transforming via XSLT to give an output such as HTML. Several online applications currently let you do these sorts of mashups, eg BlogWaves 1.0 is a GUI application with which you can do transforms. Also, pipes.yahoo.com does a similar thing. Ian was disappointed that none of them seem to allow you to include information from your own desktop in the aggregation, which might also be useful.

http://www.touchstonelive.com - is a "glorified rss reader" plus extras. Allows you to set alerts as popup for desktop, or as an rss feed (via pebbles). Preloadr passes pictures through Flickr and out to Moo. All have APIs and so the pipeline can be automated right through, end to end, without the user having to intervene manually. Here's Ian strutting his stuff:

[Ian talks about pipelines in the main auditorium]

Tom Morris on The Semantic Web
Tom's talk was a tad too technical for a bear of very little brain like me. He started by saying that tagging data isn't a very scaleable thing to do. RDF is a more complex way of tagging stuff. It can have the same design model as relational databases. And gives us a way to represent something like the relationship: Pants = Trousers - users of both terms are now able to understand each other. [It's helped now I've looked up the definition of ontology!]

eRDF is embeddable - ids, titles, attributes etc. It can be parsed with XSLT if your page is XHTML. RDFa is the next thing coming along with XHTML2.0

GRDDL (griddle), Protégé, SparQL are tools to help you do this stuff easily. SparQL lets you bypass APIs which would otherwise require all methods to have been published as an API.

[Tom talks triples]

After all that brain-bending stuff, it was lunchtime! Thank goodness.