@madpilot makes

Below are a list of some of the presentations that I have given.

Out of the way JSON!

If CSS can be un-obtrusive, so can JavaScript

I made this presentation at the Port80 Mini-talks. It is a quick overview of how to use un-obtrusive JavaScript (AKA Hijax) to cleanup your HTML markup, and make your JavaScript more re-usable. Presented 07 February 2007.

View the S5 slides and listen to the podcast.

Crazy Hijax!

Clean up your code with smatterings of AJAX

Presented at BarCamp Perth in 2007. An more in-depth look at un-obtrusive JavaScript. Presented 30 June 2007.View the S5 slides

Introduction to Ruby on Rails

A joint presentation with Matt Didcoe from BarCamp Perth 2007. We present an overview of Ruby on Rails. Presented 30 June 2007.

View the S5 slides and view the video.

Canvas Test Replacement

sIFR without flash!

This was my WebJam presentation I gave on 15/08/2007. Canvas Text Replacement uses a SVG to Canvas convertor to render fonts. This allows you to use arbitrary True Type Fonts in your web pages with out relying on images or flash. The code presented is proof of concept.

View the S5 Slides

A Web 2.0 business of your very own

I gave this presentation at the ICT Conference at Bentley in Western Australian on 13 October 2007. The slides don’t make much sense with out the video – I’ll be posting that very soon!

View the Slideshare slides

Web 2.OMG!!1!

This presentation was given to the PRIA Young Guns in a group of talks around PR2.0. I covered a more technical view, as well as including some actual definitions. The presentation was given on 16 July 2008.

View the Slideshare slides

Abusing JavaScript for fun and profit

This presentation was given at the GO3 Conference on August 2 2008. I outline some of the cool stuff that you can do with JavaScript, including building a old skool 2d side scrolling platform game!

View the Slideshare slides

OpenID, OAuth and Webservices – a Developer’s guide

Web Directions South is without doubt Australia’s biggest web conference, held in Sydney in the September each year, and I was privileged enough to speak in 2008.

View the Slideshare slides

Listen to the Podcast

Stuff they never taught you in web site school

My presentation from The Edge of the Web in Perth, 2009. It lists a couple of simple techniques for making good web sites better.

View the Slideshare slides

Code references

Creative Thinking

I did this presentation for the inaugural City of Perth Thinktank session. It’s mainly about our co-working space and AWIA. It uses HTML5 and CSS3, so for best results view in Safari or Chrome, Firefox at a pinch – IE users, don’t even bother.

Slides

Smart Phone Development using Web Technologies

I gave this presentation at Web Directions in 2010, just after I release my first iPad application using PhoneGap.

Slides

Building Mobile Web Apps

Off the back of the Sitepoint Book I wrote with Earle Castledine and Max Wheeler, about building mobile web apps, I gave this talk at the Edge of the Web in 2011.

Video

First of all, let me apologise for the hideous attempt at alliteration. For those of you who have been following this blog, you would have noticed a large number of events that have been hitting the shores of the west coast of Australia. This isn’t the half of it – there are many other similar groups such as SIGGRAPH, Byte Me!, Plug and Play, WAnimate, PIGMI and Perth Massive who put on regular events.

Let me state this now – it is AWESOME. Being the most isolated city in the world we (on many occasions) have missed out on big events/concerts/sporting events and so we are often forced to put on our own events. This does create a slight problem though – quite often there are event clashes as there isn’t really much communication between all the different organisations. For example, on the 15th of August Perth is hosting WebJam, which has meant that the Perth Bloggers meetup is probably going to be rescheduled (because of the audience overlap) whilst still clashing with “Digital Content Industry Audit” that is being put on by ScreenWest and DoIR.

Now I know that things such clashes are inevitable – there are only so many days in the calendar, but I think we as industry groups (I’ve got my AWIA events hat on now) really need to make a concerted effort to let each other know what it going on. A nice flow on effect from this is that more people will hear about these events which spreads the love.

A proposal (and thank you to Kat Black for debating with me already)

This is far from well hashed out, and I would really love to hear your feedback on how we can do this.

In an ideal world there would be one central place where all events in the know Perth universe would be posted. The reason this hasn’t worked in the past is because EVERYONE tries to set these up, each one of the above bodies probably has an event calendar, which doesn’t help our cause. For it to work effectively, the owner needs to be a neutral body, such as DoIR or Central TAFE or similar. It would need to be community driven, perhaps with a trusted representative from each organisation with write access to a calendar or blog allowing them to post events on behalf of said organisation.

Pros:

• It is open – anyone can read and consume the information via the web, RSS etc.
• There is no barrier for the event owner to post an event. If they had to email an already over-worked public servant to post this information this would quickly fall in a heap.
• It is neutral – there is no ownership issue if it is driven by a neutral party who has a vested interest in ALL the groups involved.
• Builds up a contact point for all the organisations in Perth. If you want to get in contact with an organisation, their details are right there.

Cons:

• There is still some administration from the point of view of the neutral body – they need to ensure the right people have write access and will still need to monitor for in-appropriate posting and such
• For it to work, there needs to be a long term commitment from the neutral body

So why haven’t I suggested other options such as a event co-ordinator mailing list (my original idea) or a Facebook group or an Upcoming account or similar? As Kat pointed out, we are all constantly inundated with email, so adding more noise might mean the message is lost. A blog or dedicated calendar system can still feed information out via RSS or email alerts – it is simply more flexible. I would also feel more comfortable if the system wasn’t a closed one such as Facebook or Upcoming – by all means we can feed this information into these sites (automatically most of the time) but they shouldn’t be driving it.

I am more than happy to get the ball rolling on this, but I need to know if this will be of use – it will only work if those people who are actively organising stuff are going to get behind it.

Please leave me with your thoughts.

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.

Even though I left Bam two weeks ago, we have been covertly finishing off one final client project together – Prezz E Place. Prezz E Place is an online gift shop for those people how are too busy or phsyically can’t get to a shop to buy that special gift. It features a “dreamboard” where users can place products they would like to receive as well as a built in anniversary reminder system.

Prezz E Place is built in Ruby on Rails and took just over 150 hours to complete. From a technical point of view it utilises the Ferret search plugin for all of the product search, un-obtrusive JavaScript, SEO friendly URLs, plus some of the regular plugins I use such as action_mailer_layouts, custom-err-msg and paginating_find.

Let me (or Bam) know what you think!

… 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