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2010 Conferences

GeoffC — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:21:05 +0000

Last year, was the first year that I really got going with conferences, managing to attend FOWA London and EECI2009 in Holland. This was part of a very deliberate plan to get out there and meet and talk to people. I also managed to get away from my desk / iMac to meet up with a few people I’d only previously talked or worked with via Skype / Twitter / etc.

So, carrying on this year, these are the conferences / events I’m hoping to attend.

The CSS3 Online Confernce – Online (duh!) – Mar 22nd 2010
CSS3 is on my never ending list of “must learn more”. This looks a pretty interesting line up.

EECI 2010 – Leiden Holland – Sept/Oct 2010
Last years, first event was a fantastic one, and confirmed that the choice to adopt ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter as my core platform was a wise one!

FOWA 2010 London ?? 2010
Last years 2 day event wasn’t overly fantastic at speech/talk content, but was blooming awesome for networking.

So, any that I’ve missed or should attend? Which ones are you planning to attend?

New Host

GeoffC — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:02:34 +0000

Sorry for another tedious post!

I’ve finally gotten around to moving away from a small Slicehost VPS, to a much beefier one at VPS.net. So far seems to work well.. please let me know if the site slows down, or has any weird issues!

Thank you.. normal service can now resume.

Finally Updated WordPress

GeoffC — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 11:21:33 +0000

I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading WordPress and giving the site a new theme. Yet again the control panel has been flipped about, probably the main reason I tend not to offer WordPress for my clients. I’ve been bitten before! Train the client on the WP Control Panel, a few months later, install the security … Continue reading

Microsoft joining the W3C SVG Working Group

GeoffC — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 16:42:12 +0000

A couple of days ago on the IE Blog, it was announced that Mircrosoft would be joining the W3C SVG Working Group. So what? I hear you cry!

Why is this important?

SVG or “Scalable Vector Graphics” are, in a nutshell a way to describe scalable graphics using XML, or as the W3C dryly puts it:

SVG is a language for describing two-dimensional graphics and graphical applications in XML

Currently the “modern” browsers (Webkit, Firefox and mostly to give them credit Opera (the great browser nobody uses)) all have pretty decent levels of SVG support. As always the spawn of Satan IE, lags behind. Are you surprised? No I didn’t think so.

If in either a patched version of IE8, which compared to previous versions isn’t *that* bad, or in IE9 whenever it appears SVG support is decent, and built in then this means that web developers like me, can start using SVG a hell of a lot more. Mix this in with improved CSS3 support and we can start building accessible as well as interesting websites, without relying on (generally) non-accessible crap like Flash.

A whole wodge of very cool examples of SVG (often sprinkled in with some JavaScript magic) can be found here: http://www.carto.net/svg/samples/ (For best results use a modern browser!).

Project52

geoff — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 14:39:39 +0000

In an effort to give this poor neglected a blog a little kick, I’ve signed up to Project52. The aim is simple, to post at least one new entry a week for the year ahead.

Future subjects will mostly include ExpressionEngine, tech events, php, work, rants and pointless waffle.

Should be… interesting!