Geeknight #1: collect the whole series!

Thursday, February 8, 2007 - 19:40

Further to my earlier post, the first Oxford Geeknight was splendid. It all ran very smoothly, and though Simon Willison, Tom Dyson and I each had a small hand in setting up the tech, really all the praise has to rain down on the head of Natbat, who organised everything down to the minutest detail, but left us all with plenty of time to natter and mingle.

I’ve never known the first in (hopefully) a series of events go so well. Clearly from the reaction of the crowd this night fills a hole in the Oxford geek community’s calendar. I can’t comment on my own talk, of course, but there was some interesting stuff there: without doubt the two keynotes from Simon W (OpenID) and Olly Willans (Photoshop CS3), but also Tom’s peastat, James Wheare’s scraping of bus timetables LiveBus.org, and the Drupal and Mapnik introductions.

My talk went as well I could expect: I hope to put some slides and screenshots up here shortly. Unfortunately it touches on work that I’m trying to make live by the end of this week—the new version of my short story site—so I’m snowed under with that right now. Gosh, it’s all go, isn’t it?

(Note: I work with, for, by or under several people mentioned in this post. Take it as fawning sycophancy if you like.)

Comments

Damian Cugley (not verified)

Fri, 09/02/2007 - 16:15

I enjoyed your APP mini-talk. Joe Gregorio did a similar thing but with JSON+REST rather than XML+REST, with the client in JavaScript and the back-end in Python. What with content-negotiation and all it should be OK for your resource to be exposed both as Atom XML and as JSON (using some simple-minded mapping between Atom concepts and JSON).

jps (not verified)

Mon, 12/02/2007 - 13:07

Thanks very much! Your turn to do a talk the next time round, I reckon.

Once I actually have the front-end of this particular project live and out of the way I hope to actually rebuild the XSL/Javascript over the top of an out-of-the-box APP-compliant system. As it stood I bailed part-way through making the Atom XML-compliant system fully APP-compliant, because of the problems I mentioned and time constraints.

I'll stick up my slides and some screenshots asap (the existing system is password-protected because it's so tied in with the underlying site). It'll be good to compare notes with what Joe did, as he seems to have basically implemented the principles Atom PP with JSON feeds.