At last I have published my review of dConstruct in Brighton (been in draft for a while now)

If you are expecting insight into the talks this is purely opinion but there are some trails to follow or of course the dConstruct podcasts will be available

My Review

Sep 12, 2007 by

Shaun Hare

event

dConstruct 2007

★★★★★ Well another year another clearleft hosted dConstruct web conference.

This year centered around user experience design.
I felt this was a topic that I was really interested in but maybe something for the larger developer. How wrong I was !

The speaker line up was great and extremely though provoking (see notes below), the conference facilities were much better than last year (although the foyer/congregation area often felt a bit cramped).
The schwag was good, and the sponsers thought of some good promotional ideas.
I particularly liked the Nixon McInnes your status is… T-shirt and the Flickr books (didn’t get one thought dooh!!) .

The speakers were

Jarad Spool of UIE

who gave a good presentation very enthused, funny at times and on topic. A good start to the day, although I am a little unsure about his theory on the art of chicken sexing (having done it) and knowing how hard feather sexing is. For those interested there are a number of methods of sexing a day old chick (probability does come into it, but that is the be all and end all) but good use of external material to demonstrate the point. And he did magic and everything wow!!.

Peter Merholz of of Adaptive Path

For me this started of very similar to Jesse James Garrett’s talk at @media Europe 2007 but it did move on a bit.

Leisa Reichelt of disambiguity.com

Waterfall bad washing machine good was a really good talk. As I am trying to start implementing a methodologies based approach it gave me some ideas on what is best practice and how that can be implemented.

Cameron Moll of Authentic Boredom

Gave a great insight into turning good design into great design. Though provoking stuff like machine efficiency vs User efficiency and simple tips like stripping away the gloss to basic typography in black and white to see how the heirachy works fantastic. First time I had heard him talk.

George Oates and Denise Wilton (Flickr and Moo, B3ta etc etc..

They sat on the sofa and had a chat, somewhat scripting but refreshing, I learnt about the history of flickr and this site called B3ta which I never knew about but enjoyed ever since. They inspired some ideas I could, should put together using the flickr API . I enjoyed it.

Matt Webb of Shulze & Webb

Got to admit I was a bit confused about this and I know Matt has beat himself up about it, but the more I reflect I think the presence was justified and the blog post provides source material that more than makes up for it. Matt needs to take some tips from Other speaking experiences especially the point about live demos but using a wii remote - geekily great.

Tom Coates of Plastic Bag and of course Yahoo but I guess you know that url

FANTASTIC- Really made me think I have been thinking along the right lines. with my dallies into machine tags,bluetooth, location data, feeds, api’s, microformats etc I just see the web as a big data source ready for mining. Can’t wait to see fire eagle . I am also sure one of my clients will be happy when I unveil the results of more thoughts on their data distribution .

So all round a great day .. I am bookmarking/watching/marking next year on the calendar already

Well done Clearleft

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Technorati Tags: dconstruct2007, dConstruct, dconstruct07, web design conferences

Managed to bag a ticket to the Glastonbury for geeks!.Yes the clearleft production that is dConstruct sold out really fast but I was poised and waiting at work to get myself a ticket. Really looking forward to it. Seems like a good line up and some interesting topics. I would have really liked to have gone to one of the workshops but finances meant it was just not to be.

Anyway look forward to seeing other fellow geeks (no offence) especially the ones I have come across at other events.

dconstruct2007,web design,clearleft

Technorati Tags: dconstruct2007, web design, clearleft

Today is the start of Barcamp Sheffield Hurray for those (Plus.net Dean Sadler and Kelly Dorset ) bringing it up north

On my way… drive ahead

update: pretty cool so far
see pictures http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/barcampsheffield

update:

May 27, 2007

Barcamp Sheffield

★★★★☆ Went to the first day of Barcamp Sheffield.

Was very pleased to know that someone had bothered to organise it, and organise it well (well done plus net guys) even if Dean Sadler made out he did not know what to do.

Day 1 was presentations
Some interesting stuff, Ruby shone through as it always appears to with presentatiosn from George Palmer and Adam Bardsley.

Sue Jamison-Powell did a talk on her upcoming research into online psychology which sounds interesting although I was half listing to Dominic Hodgson who did a quick and dirty SEO for wordpress (I learn’t one thing at least - to see if it boosts my traffic)

All in all a good time and it also opened my eyes to bigger corporations and the way they work.

Barcamp Sheffield

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I was listening to Breakfast Tv this morning and they spoke about social network advertising on myspace etc, This post is not subsidised or covert advertising. It is just here to acknowledge the fact as a owner of a hitachi plasma currently in for repair and outside of warranty it is really pleasing to recieve a letter from hitachi telling me they will provide the required parts FOC.

I have received lots of feedback about a project that has recently gone live at work. As per usual it is a collaborative effort but due to pressures of time instead of the project management,programming (server and client side) being my work the design idea was in this case.

A larger image of the Clugston website is posted here and you can visit the live site and look for pubs for saleif your interested.

Originally uploaded by shaun_hare.
Of course my colleague and I created the XHTML/CSS and I did the programming. But it is really good to hear comments like it looks really good! from the client and a few others. I am usually having to pass this praise onto someone else. The effectiveness of the programming does get noticed in projects but rarely commented on so extensively.

Yesterday as a result of trying to show others my way of working made me realise that probably the biggest problem is being muddled.

muddled
adj : confused and vague; used especially of thinking;
“muddleheaded ideas”; “your addled little brain”;
“woolly thinking”; “woolly-headed ideas” [syn: addled,
befuddled, muzzy, woolly, wooly, woolly-headed,
wooly-minded]

So in my usual manner I look for resources on the Internet to solve my problem ..

Getting, and Staying, Focused
by Leslie Godwin, MFCC, Career & Life-Transition Coach
Seemed a good start.

Putting getting focus into google also brought up some programming tips !! — damn feel like I am not concentrating on the task again

Technorati Tags: vague, muddled, getting focus

I notice from my trawl of blogs a link to Britpack.org I have always found britpack links at Malarky’s excellent site
Malarky’s excellent site is it just me or is movement afoot?

Maybe it’s in anticipation of this years SXSW and the great British invasion …?

Technorati Tags: britpack, web design, sxsw

A little slow I know but the blog is now running WordPress 2.1 “Ella”.
This is really a test post to annouce this and checkout the functionality and plugin support.

Extremeley impressed with the ease of update.

This post also announces the start of this blogs design project ..
I feel it is not correct to rely on others code or design although this is a fantastic N-Design creation I should go it alone as it were so I have dedicated some time to kickstart the project. Look out for future updates.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, Ella, Blogging

Watching news this morning I discovered Milton Keynes calibrated it’s birthday today.

But did not see the important birthday celebration The Frisbee’s Birthday announced.

Technorati Tags: frisbee, this day in history

I have moved a customer onto the GRID some two month’s ago now. I listened to the hype that it is the next generation in platforms etc etc.

It would appear that this is wrong I have nothing but downtime, poor customer service and small but not insignificant issues. So I checked around. It would appear I am not the only one high ranking google sites that I assume get a lot of traffic have experienced problems and switched as have others .
I do still rank media temple and see other good feedback about them.
I see N.Design Studio (this great WordPress Theme creator) is on the Dedicated Server. I am seriously considering what to do. !! Do I upgrade or shift?

Technorati Tags: media temple, grid hosting, mediatemple.net, hosting providers