@madpilot makes

There is something obtusely magnificent about locking away geeks for long periods of time, giving them a laptop and a kick-arse framework and leaving them up to their own devices – which is what Jordan Brock, Matt Didcoe and myself did last weekend for Rails Rumble ’07.

The idea is simple – You have 48 hours to create an entire website in the ever so beautiful Ruby on Rails framework. Because the competition was run out of the US and because we have real jobs/school to go to, we only ended up with 36 hours, but we didn’t let that deter us. The result? Sandwich – a recipe sharing site. During that time, we managed to product a site with friending, tagging, bookmarking and recipe parsing which is no mean feat – I dare anyone to do it in another language in that time frame.

Part of the competition is the community judging, so help a brother out and head over to our voting page and throw us a few votes – you can make a difference in the lives of three hapless codies. Go on. I’ll wait… While you are there, go check out some of the other great entries, but don’t vote for them, because you are voting for u, remember? :)

It was a really fun weekend – it was great to kick out some great code with great peeps over a stupidly short time frame. We must do it again sometime.

This weekend Jordan, Matt and myself will be participating in w. Rails Rumble is an international geekfest where you have 48 hours to develop a Ruby on Rails application. We are at a bit of a disadvantage because of the timezone issues mean that we really only have 36 hours (We have to do some real work on Monday you know!).

We will be building a top secret social network, so watch this space as we post updates of our progress!

Whilst we are on the topic of memes, I’ve just posted my “This is me, I work on the Web” meme post on Flickr. If you work on the web, I would do the same – just remember to tag it with I work on the web.

Miles Burke decided that we all need to prove that we were at Web Directions last year by finding photos of us on Flickr. Mo problem! Here are pictures of me looking rather disheveled.

Ok, to pass on the meme: I wanna see photos from Tim Lucas and Lachlan Hardy.

Thanks to greenguy you too can watch me make a fool of myself in front of a live studio audience! Slides and demo are here.

Well more correctly, across the Nullibor Plane – We just received confirmation for the PodCamp Australia guys that Perth has won the right to host the first PodCamp! Not only did we win, we won pretty convincingly, with 152 votes. Syndey came second place with only got 82!

The event in October should feed all of the locals’ hunger for local events. Check out http://www.podcamp.info for more details as they come to hand.

After over 8 months of organsing and meetings, the WA Web Awards for 2007 have been and gone – and once again, the WA web industry hasn’t disappointed. 154 entries, whittled down to 36 finalists over 12 categories – 182 attendees at a black tie event, and as I’m sure you can imagine, the wine and food flowed through out the night. As did the crazy dancing at the Amplifier afterwards. As such, I’m sure there was more than a few sore heads on Saturday!

Congratulations to all the winners, the official announcement will be made on the WAWA website in the next few days, but for the impatient, you can go through the WAWA twitter feed to find out who got up on the night.

I would personally like to thank the rest of the committee – Kay Smoljak and Helen Burgess for their hard work, it might have been a smaller committee this year, but they worked just as hard to make the night as successful as it was. Thankyou to Jan and Rebecca at Red Horizon Events – it would have been absolutely impossible without their tireless work – there was a reason Kay, Helen and myself were so calm during the course of the day – Jan and Beck had everything well and truly under control. And thank you to Ken Drake for his brilliant work behind the camera – the photos should be up on Flickr soon.

Another big thank you to the judges – judging such an event is no mean feat, especially when you are volunteering your services. To Matt Voerman, Maxine Sherrin, Donna Maurer, Tim Lucas, Duncan Riley, James Bull and James Beaird – you did I brilliant job and I hope those of you that attended the night enjoyed yourselves. I will also thank Megyn Carpenter for the amazing job she did as the Judging Co-ordinator. Because the committee is still able to enter the awards night, we have always had a neutral chair that manages the judges on our behalf. Megyn is stepping down from the roll for 2008 and she will be sorely missed. Thank you Megs for you help!

And finally a big thank you to the sponsors – Fasthit.net, ECU, the Broth, Microsoft, Central TAFE, New Lease, Crumpler and PerthNow, for with out them we could not have put on such a huge night!

Well I think that is more than enough thank yous for one day – there are a few photos linked below (thanks Simone!), so you can have a brief look at how it all un-furled.

I’m still a little blurry-eyed from last night (as are most of the beachhouse) – but I can safely say, that WebJam Perth cranked. Estimates of the number of attendees are varied, but there was definitely between 80 and 100 people there was awesome. There was also 15 presenters, and the quality was top-notch!

After picking up the WebJam crew from the airport, and hanging out with them for the day, we prepped the Velvet Lounge and the crowd started flowing in. There was a lot of new faces there too, which is an indicator of how crazy the industry is going at the moment.

Gary Barber presented a rather tongue-in-cheek look at Web3.0 whilst managing to demonstrate some pretty cool drag-and-drop functionality. This got him third place. Nick Cowie launched a scathing attack on a number of locals for producing websites that don’t work on mobiles – which got him second prize. Richard and Simon did a kick-arse visualisation system for Scouta which can only be described, well, visually – luckily there is a video already online. Unsurprisingly, this got them first place and the grand prize of Adobe CS3.

Unfortunately, my presentation Canvas Text Replacement, which is a alternative to sIFR didn’t make the top three, but with the quality of the top three, I don’t mind one little bit.

All in all, it went off – big ups to the WebJam crew: Lachlan, Lisa and Tim, for flying over from Sydney – they have been fantastic.

So one half of WA Web Week is done, roll on the WAWAs tomorrow! For those of you that can’t attend, you can view the live twitter feed on the website.

As the more attentive of you out there knows, podcamp.info have been running a competition-turned-slinging match between the states of this fair country to see who should get the rights to host the first Australian PodCamp. Perhaps when they thought of this marketing plan, they were betting on Sydney and Melbourne (as usual) providing the bulk of the votes. Well unfortunately for them, they didn’t count of Perth’s very own BarCamp being but days before.

Ever since, a crack team of web commandos, accused of a crime they did not commit have been hawking Perth to anyone who would listen, and as a result, up until a few days ago we were in the lead. Now we only have to wait until the end of the week to find out where were stand – the create a further aire of suspense the organisers have removed the leaderboard so it will be a surprise on Friday. Just to make sure that we get PodCamp – we implore you to got to http://www.podcamp.info and vote #1 Perth.

Bronwen and I have even made a video begging for your support. See below.

Is it August already? Our crazy, self-proclaimed WA Web Week starts next week, which means there isn’t much time to sort our your WebJam presentation and to get your frocks ready for the WA Web Awards.

Even though you can just turn up to WebJam, which will be at the Velvet Lounge in Mt Lawley on Wednesday 15 August we would love to get an estimate of how many people we will see on the night. Head over to the WebJam website and register. Want to do a presentation? They are only 3 minutes, so it won’t take much prepare for it – you just need to tell us what you are up to and why it is cool.

And of course the biggest event in the WA Web Industry calendar – the WA Web Awards are on two days later at the Duxton hotel. The WA Web Industry is absolutely pumping at the moment, and the Web Awards are our chance to acknowledge the amazing work that our industry does. The last two have been brilliant nights, and this one is going to be even better!

So go and support your industry – the more you support us, they more cool stuff we can put on!