(photo thanks to Halans on flickr)

After a whirlwind four days, I’m returning from Sydney (with added lightning visit to Canberra) after attending Web Directions South. I was looking forward to this as I missed out on attending last year. This was my second WDS, and an equally inspiring one. John and Maxine put together an amazing show as usual and the speakers were great.

The sessions attended:

1. Active web devel­opment with Divya Manian
2. Building a better web with HTML5 with Ben Schwarz
3. Enriching large data sets with Paul Hagon
4. Even faster web sites with Steve Souders
5. JavaScript Sprachraum with Patrick Lee
6. HTML Ready for prime time? with HTML5 Panel
7. Browser Caching and You (A Love Story) with Mark Nottingham
8. Flogging design — best practices in online shop design with Matt Balara

Something really important happened at the end of the HTML5 talk (with Ben Schwarz) active web development talk (thanks for the correction, Divya!). Mike Smith stood up and dispelled the media myth about the W3C reportedly recommending the dev community not use HTML5 yet, in answer to Julio Cesar Ody‘s question. However it became apparent in the HTML5 panel discussion (with Ben Schwarz, John Allsopp, Divya Manian and Daniel Davis) that the specification still had a long way to go. It’s almost becoming a developer bun fight with everyone having a slightly different idea of how the spec should be written/what features are necessary and how to go about implementing. John Allsopp in particular was pretty passionate and I agree with some of his points on the new syntax, particularly concerning new tags. His preferred ‘role’ and attribute driven suggestions seemed like a much more flexible approach to mark up code in.

I think that the stand out for me were the technical talks, which wasn’t a huge surprise. I’m naturally drawn to them, and know I’ll always learn something new in them. My favourites were the browser caching and faster websites talks. Looking more closely at page load waterfalls was so very insightful and made it very clear it’s not just about six file downloads at a time. The caching session was interesting because I’m not exactly very well informed on this topic, and a few bulletproof solutions were offered to fix some common caching issues that can happen.

All in all an intensive learning experience!

I am so glad that these finally arrived! A box full of little recycled cardboard packaging boxes, to house Owl Posse jewellery pieces. I love the colour, and the stickers (hand placed by me) look really nice on them:

Sad to report this shipment took a lot longer than I expected, but they are in time for the next product run, which is exciting. Just a little taster of things to come!

Since I put up my Superted costume tutorial on this blog, it’s been the most popular post on here every month. I take that as a good sign that people are still living their childhood days!

A fellow named John B emailed me recently with a photo of his costume after following my tute. Looking at his WIP photos I saw that he hand-stitched the whole thing together! HAND STITCHED PEOPLE. That’s amazingly dedicated and the end result came out so well I felt I had to share it here:

You can check out his ‘behind the scenes’ photos of making the costume, as well as his other photographic adventures here: http://photo.net/photos/FlyBoyChing

Thanks again for sharing, John!

Rapid prototyping is a joy when you need to test, and test again. The Arduino micro processor certainly allows you to do this, via its simple processing based language. However there is a new software kid in town called Modkit aiming to make this process more tactile and fast. Modkit runs in a web browser and creates a drag and drop interface for your programming blocks. These drag and drop blocks are then compiled to code and uploaded via a custom version of the standard Arduino software. The idea is reminiscent of Scratch which I thought was such a great idea when it came out. Applying this to the Arduino is really exciting.

It is early days yet and invites are limited, so if you’re keen to have a play consider pledging for Modkit via their website and you’ll earn an invite that way. Can’t wait for its full release, and to see which other processing boards it’s going to support!

Just a quick note to say thank you to those who purchased items from the Manifest sale. The shop is now closed and will reopen with the completed Owl Posse collection soon. To be informed as soon as this happens, please subscribe for updates here.

Thanks again for the lovely responses from people xx