Mashup Camp 3 wrapped up a couple hours ago, and as far as I’m concerned, it was a gigantic success. I’ve had more fun at this “unconference” than at any conference since SxSW. Everyone was really into what they were doing, and there was a minimum of people there purely hawking their own stuff and not participating (which was my main problem with the last one in Mountain View). There were great sessions, and I was so geeked about everything, I ended up spending all of Tuesday building a mashup so I could share it at Speed Geeking. I ended up building a mashup of a feed reader and your buddy list that I unfortunately called Buddy Stalker, even though there’s very little “stalking” involved. It’s just a way to get a feed reader filled with things you’re likely to care about (the content your buddies create) without the initial setup cost of finding feeds, adding them, pruning them, etc. I ended up in the bunch of third place winners, which was great, when I consider that I did it in one day and that it was the first thing I’ve ever launched using Ruby on Rails.\
I met some great people, and had some great discussions. Here are just some of my favorite people from this week: John Gerken from IBM, David Janes, the Herrens, Nate Ritter and Chris Radcliff from Eventful, Kaliya, Raj Bala, Frank (if you’re out there, I never got your last name… we’ll find you a Ruby Users Group in Little Rock, I promise) and Shimmy from Angelwish, just to name a few.\
I think I ended up overdoing it a little… I ended up proposing and/or running four sessions, doing one presentation at Mashup University, and speed geeking for two days. My poor throat is shot – between talking too much and the cold dry air, it’s a raw mess. But, it was totally worth it. I got to talk about microformats, standards, the semantic web (both lower and uppercase), and in the last session, ruby on rails. It’s been a full week to say the least.\
There are pictures to go look at, and lots and lots of stuff to think about and work on going forward. There are several more posts in me to discuss all the stuff we talked about this week, but they’ll have to wait. I need to pack and get some sleep.
Done!
The kids are fed, bathed, and in bed; the living room is clean; the dishes are done; and the trash has been taken out. I AM DONE! Goodnight!
I don’t like Twitter.\
Yea, I said it.\
Whatchu gonna do ’bout it?
Hellooo, Mashers!
I gave my Microformats + DOM / AJAX = Mashup Nirvana today at Mashup University. I thought it went pretty well, but if you were there, I’d love to hear your feedback. You can either post your comment on this entry, or e-mail me at kevin at lawver.net. It’s been a few months since I’ve given a presentaton, and I feel like I’m out of practice, but I’d love to hear what you thought of the presentation.\
If I do this one again, I’ll try to film it and put it up somewhere. Of the presentations I’ve given at conferences, this is one of my favorites (of couse, my all time favorite is How to Convince Your Company to Embrace Web Standards from SxSW last year). It’s fun for me because I get to talk about microformats, and I get to talk about what I think is useful and important – and where I think they’re headed.\
I’m here the rest of the week, and will probable spend a good part of tomorrow working on a WIM mashup for Speed Geeking on Wednesday. I started it last night… and I got it started, but I got stuck at about 11:30 (go figure), and gave up. Today’s been eaten up with speaking, so I have tomorrow. If I get it working, I’ll put it up somewhere here so you can check it out.
Me=Dumb
Explain to me why I have no problem going to sleep at 7 pm sometimes when Kevin is home, but can’t force myself to go to bed before midnight when he isn’t?\
ETA- My attempt at sleeping in this morning failed spectacularly. Booooo.
My Week
Kevin is out of town, so expect a lot of random posts from me. These are my plans for this week:\
Monday, (Max doesn’t have school) take the kids to McD’s to play in the indoor play area and use Grandma’s naughty McD’s gift certificates.\
Tuesday, Brian and Jen to Costco to get all the things we didn’t last week when Brian had a meltdown in the store.\
Wednesday, Brian and Jen to BB&B or Walmart for floor lamp and red pillows and cushion.\
Thursday, quick, everybody clean up because Daddy comes home tomorrow!\
Exciting week, huh?
Oy! and Awwww!
I am going to start keeping a running tally of how many times Brian asks about Kevin this week. So far, 5 times in the 5 hours since we dropped him off at the airport (and he took a 2 hour nap in there). Brian had a really hard time dealing with Kevin going back to work after his massive time off. Every hour he would ask for Daddy and cry. Oy! It got a little better as the days went on. But since the weekend, Brian is back to how he was right after vacation ended.\
Seriously, Brian asked about Kevin 3 times just while I was writing up this post.
Digging in With Rails
It’s the end of our first full week of development on our big Rails experiment, and I couldn’t be happier with how things are going. We have 90% of the admin interface done (user management, static page stuff, moderation, etc), have user logins working using a really cool upcoming AOL open API (should be able to talk more about it later this week, but it’s one of the best web services I’ve ever used and I’m not saying that because I work there), and users can edit their own content now in a limited manner.\
Rails makes things so easy. It takes all the obnoxious bits out of building web apps: the plumbing. I no longer have to write hundreds of lines of code before I can actually do anything important.\
This is also my first experience with Subversion, and I’m loving that too. We’ve been using svnX, and I’m loving that too. It took a minute to get used to, but I love smart mode. It tells me what I’ve changed so I don’t have to go digging for it to make sure I’ve checked everything in (so Jason can keep his stuff in sync and mostly working).\
We’re still planning on launching before SxSW. wish us luck.
A Non-Technical Microformat Definition
I was asked by someone at work to come up with a non-technical definition of microformats for some glossary of web terms they’re putting together. Here’s what I came up with:\
bq. Using standards that exist today, microformats take the HTML used to build the web and turn it into powerful, semantic, machine-readable, web-service ready data – without changing the specification or changing how HTML is written or delivered.\
And here’s what the amazing Paul Downey came up with on Twitter\
bq. Microformats for non-techies: colours on a Web page for things such as “date” and “telephone number” which only computers can see\
I like Paul’s better. Oh, and you should check out Paul’s presentation on Web API’s. The man creates the best slides in the business.
Bad Mommy #561
Brian is so spoiled! Ahhhh.\
Kevin doodled around with the site, so I haven’t been able to blog in over a week. I have a bunch of stuff stored up! Look for it, coming soon!