@madpilot makes

This is a quick reminder that the Australian Web Industry Association Annual General Meeting is on Wednesday 1st August at 6pm at the Velvet Lounge in Mt Lawley.

If you are an AWIA financial member, please come along so you can hear our reports for the last 12 months, as well as vote for the new committee member positions. Their are 5 vacant positions, and the nominees are:

1. Adrian Lynch *
2. Ben May
3. Bronwen Clune
4. Gary Barber *
5. Harriet Wakelam
6. Jamie Lyford
7. Jordan Brock *
8. Kay Smoljak *
9. Piotr Dancewicz *

• Indicate a current committee member.

If you want to play an active role in the AWIA, you must come along and cast your vote. If you can’t make it, you can download the proxy voting form from the AWIA website.

I have been wearing my Australian Web Industry Association event manager hat recently and have been in secret talks with some friendly people over in Sydney. Those people just so happen to be Lachlan Hardy, Lisa Herrod, Tim Lucas and Anson Parker, AKA The WebJam Team!

So with out further ado, I am proud to announce WebJam Perth!

Where: The Velvet Lounge, Mt Lawley (Where we have the Port80 meetups)

When: 15 August 2007 at 6pm

A WebJam is where the presenters have three minutes to power through a presentation – the presentations are voted on and the winner get fame and awesome prizes. You can see a video of the last WebJam here. They look like they are heaps of fun – so head over to http://www.webjam.com.au read more and more importantly register.

Let’s show the world what Perth can do!

EDIT: Fixed date

Many thanks to Stuart Greenhill for uploading the videos that he took of the day to Vidler. They are all available from the Port80 BarCamp Wiki. For those of you interested in the talk that Matt Didcoe and I did on Ruby on rails, you can watch it for yourself here. I can’t believe I was still coherent after the number of Red Bulls I had had (Both before and during the talk!)

The WA Web Awards finalists for 2007 have just been announced and both 88 Miles and Bloggy Hell made the grade! 88 Miles is nominated for the “Best online application” category and [Bloggy Hell][2] is nominated for “Best personal or blog site”. The quality of the sites this year was awesome, so it is a great privilege to included in the group of finalists.

Go and [check out the list][3] for all of the finalists.

[2]: “Bloggy Hell” [3]: http://wawebawards.com.au/previous-winners/wawa-2007-finalists/

Ok, I might be a bit of a Rails zealot now, but I still have a sweet spot for PHP. For many years it was my language of choice, and even today, server hosting or legacy applications still means that I have to throw around the < ?php ?> tag.

I just read on the official PHP website, that as of the end of this year, PHP 4 will no longer be updated, bar crucial security patches. This is a big thing, as many web hosting companies still only support PHP 4 as it isn’t possible to run PHP 5 on the same apache server with out resorting to CGI or proxy work-arounds. This basically means that you have 5 months to make sure that your webiste runs on PHP 5.

The PHP website has a guide to migration, and luckily, most of the time things are fairly smooth. Were you might get in to trouble is the new object model. PHP 5 has a brand new, closer-to-real OOP model that isn’t always completely backwards compatible with it’s older sibling. For example, the __construct() method is called as a constructor, rather than function with the same same as the class as per PHP 4. PHP 5 also supports private, protected and public accessors and methods, as well as native XML and SOAP support.

At this point if, you may want to try running all of your websites as CGI scripts via the PHP5 interpreter to make sure that they can run ok, and if they do, start moving everything over to ensure a smooth transition.

… well according to Mashable it is. It made the Top 12 twitter apps for your mobile phone. I suppose that means I should do some more work on it soon ;)

One of my good friends, Matt Brown has managed to keep his boutique online gift store, Moose running for a year, which is no mean feat considering who his [dodgy web developer is][2] ;)

Seriously though, Moose has some really amazing pieces of artwork that would make the perfect gift for that friend or family member who has an art-bent  – not only that, but he supports local artists.

[][5]

To celebrate the first birthday, Matt has organised a 15% discount across the ENTIRE range of gifts – just enter the discount code moose1 at the checkout and help celebrate the milestone!

[2]: “That would be me, fools!” [3]: http://www.shopmoose.com.au/pieces/view/519/-decaf-print [4]: http://www.shopmoose.com.au/pieces/view/572/little-birdy-brooch [5]: http://www.shopmoose.com.au/pieces/view/562/the-love-terrorist

‘Twas the night be for BarCamp

and all through the house

not a creature was stirring

not even my scroll-wheel mouse

See all of you Perth geeks tomorrow

• Apologies to Clement Clarke Moore

Do you know someone that would want to sponsor the WA Web Awards? We still have all one gold level, of the silver sponsorship levels available as well as six category sponsorships that we would like to see filled.

The WAWA sub-committee has had some success in securing a number of sponsors but we have exhausted our networks trying to fill the final positions, so now it is your turn.

We need your help to make this happen!

As a little extra incentive, if it is your lead that puts pen to paper, we will pay you a finders fee depending on the level you can get us:

Gold: $250

Silver: $100

Categrory: $20

Note: that it has to be a decent lead – I don’t want people listing companies where they don’t have a good contact. At the least, we need a name and a direct phone. If you can give them the heads up even better. If you can convince them to contact us, we will love you forever!

I have copies of the sponsorship proposal available if you want to get hold of it. Email me: myles@wawebawards.com.au if you think you can help out.

Your finders fee will be payed if we secure a sponsor from the lead you provide us.

Offer end the end of this month or until all positions are filled – which ever comes first.

Just when you thought the announcement of the Perth BarCamp was too much to handle, the WA Web Awards sub-committee has just announced that entries are now open and tickets are now on sale!

Tickets can be purchased from the Website for $80 (Student AWIA members), $110 (AWIA members) or $130 (non AWIA members) – the last two have been great, and this one is promising to be even better.

Entries can also be submitted via the web site for $30 for AWIA members and $40 for non-members.

Not an AWIA member? Then sign up.

More details on the WA Web Awards website.

Edit: When I first posted this story, I had entries listed as $25 – they are actually $30. Sorry about that!