Only a couple of days before Spring officially begins, but I have been busy doing some Spring cleaning on my own website. After a week of development and still work in progress, here is the new look.
I can now enjoy a week of sunshine (according to the met office) and look forward to the Big M and openMIC at this week’s Bath Digital Festival. Follow @BathDigital
The holidays are officially over, the children are back to school and we’re left with great memories from our lovely holidays in Cornwall – one of my favourite places in England.
Back at my desk with loads of work to look forward to. Plenty of WordPress development for a couple of clients, which I will share as soon as I can, and some new exciting mobile web ideas to implement in the next few months.
I feel overwhelmed by the amount of information that I still need to read and catch up with. I’m still trying to figure out what is the most efficient way to do so. I definitely need to keep my notes a little tidier to be able to share them more regularly here.
In the meantime, I’ll keep that blue sky as my screensaver until the Autumn officially arrives.
Technology moves fast and this week I’ve been madly busy, but here are some of the tidbits that piqued my interest recently…
I’ve been sifting through what’s been happening in the mobile web world in the past few days. Here are some highlights I picked out:
Google I/O took place on May 10th- 12th; the Mobile Web 2011 presentation is a must see.
The Mobilisim conference took place in Amsterdam on 12/13th May 2011. LukeW shared his notes on the Mobile Web.
A look towards the The Future of the Mobile Web presented by @ppk
Tweetdeck made the announcement that we will be able to access the application on the mobile web:
“We looked at a lot of options and after much deliberation decided the best way forward was to build an amazing version of TweetDeck to run on mobile web browsers.”
HTML5 is one of the ingredients of the Mobile Web, and at Google I/O 2011 they made sure it was on the agenda. GWT + HTML5: A web developers dream!
I attended The Big M mobile event on 21st and 22nd March in the beautiful city of Bath. It was refreshing to see an event of this kind outside London. @bookmeister and @m1ke_ellis put together a terrific line up of speakers.
The highlight for me was @aral‘s talk on Beyond Usability on Mobile. Aral’s passion for designing usable experiences goes deep into his soul and his ability to transmit this to his audience made it a joy to experience. Aral is also known for his Feathers App.
@raamthakrar spelt out the importance of App Distribution and Monetisation and how developers’ hard work should earn better financial rewards (but not like the bankers!).
@Ew4n caused some controversy and debate among the audience with his State of the Union Mobile Address! At one point he sounded like a toddler, “I want an App and I want it NOW”! I’m glad I wasn’t the only one thinking it. Look at the evidence.
Still slightly jetlaged from SXSW, @brucel mainly told us about HTML5, the One Web and mobile best practices.
@pgolding told us about Future Mobile Innovations.
@wordbeard created some fantastic sketches that summarise The BigM Day
As always, it was great to catch up with familiar faces and meet new ones. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
After a cracking mobile web event in November, DevCSI followed this up with a couple of Linked Data hackdays at the ILRT in Bristol last week.
As a novice in Linked Data, it was great to learn something from the experts in this field. I leant the basics to SPARQL from Andy Seaborne, and Graham Klyne showed us how to set up a Fuseki server – and how to run Fuseki from the command line. Thanks, guys for your time and your help.
We worked with datasets published on the wiki by other team members. The wiki has more information on the workshop teams and development ideas.
We also discussed tools and frameworks. Christopher Gutteridge has written a great tool called Grinder which converts CVS and XLS files to RDF (Resource Description Framework). Grinder is of great value to anyone who wishes to get data into RDF ready in a matter of minutes. I got a demo and a copy of Grider up and running too. I hope that Christopher manages to find the time to publish the ins and outs of this great tool.
Team members also suggested Google refine, which is a tool that enables data transformation and can help to get you started on getting data RDF ready. More tools are highlighted on the wiki.
We also heard about notube.tv from Libby Miller – the linked data research project that aims to connect TV content and the Web through Linked Open Data.
Hugh Glaser created the valuable <sameAs> service which helps you to find co-references between different data sets. Hugh’s Consuming Linked Data services lighting talk.
This is only a snapshot of an intense but enjoyable two days with a bunch of geeks that love to share and collaborate.
Special thanks to Mahendra Mahey and Nikki Rogers.
Huge kudos to @juliancheal who pulled together this year’s Bathcamp. It was a terrific gathering of like-minded individuals in the wonderful city of Bath.
We drank lots of Vitamin Water and the topics under discussion ranged widely from databases to guessing the meaning of Japanese calligraphy!
Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for the ‘family fortunes’ bit but I was pleased to discover later that my new friend @rosiestones‘ team ended as the victors.
Will I go next year? Definitely.
On the 27th October I attended a one day workshop organised by MyMobileBristol and DevCSI. It was a great opportunity to learn something about these two great projects. Good to learn that they have both now received confirmation of funding for another year.
MyMobileBristol has developed a mobile web app which provides students with time and location-based data. I actually got an opportunity to use the Live Bus Departures app on the day of the event. Continue reading
Lately, I have been developing blogs and web sites using the WordPress open source platform. My clients love the easy to use back end admin interface where they can make any updates they wish without having to rely on a technical person to help them.
Most of the projects I have worked on have been carefully customised, and for any clients new to WordPress, I offer a couple of hours training where they can get comfortable with uploading their own graphics, videos, audio and other content.
The Mobile web is still in its infancy but we are already seeing a huge explosion of mobile web sites taking advantage of the latest HTML5 and CSS3 technologies. The challenge is to to provide the target audience an enjoyable mobile web experience and not a desktop website on a small scale.
If you are wondering whether to have a mobile app or a mobile web application, please get in touch.