Yesterday evening I sat in a crowded pub in Moseley, an attendee of my first barcamp event. Well it didn’t strictly follow the barcamp format, but it had a collection of short presentations by local webnorati and social media types. It was good, and I’d do it again (photos here).

If you decide not to read all of this post, I urge you to read the final paragraph (but it’d be great if you did look at the rest too!).

One question that has been raised and discussed recently is that of the stability or existence of a ‘local web scene’. Matt bravely volunteered himself to poll the masses at the barcamp, and put the question to the floor, “Well, is there one?”

There was most certainly a mixed response, but the most noticeable thing is that is was nearly all positive. People seemed deeply passionate about the topic, and I thought I’d summarise the salient points.

Clearly some people already believe Birmingham has very much a thriving ‘web community’. A few people highlighted that there had recently been some extremely positive praise by communities in other regions, including specific examples from London and Spain, which came as a surprise to me, although it quickly became apparent that there are two different things we are talking about here.

Firstly is the idea of what the web community is. Someone from the floor pointed out that Birmingham does have a fantastic reputation for Social Media - and this might be considered a group of it’s own - web development and design is another, and perhaps this is why there is some disparity. Despite highlighting this difference (which quickly became apparent through the comments from the floor) this particular contributor suggested that there might be a difference now, but he personally believed that greater overlap of the two web communities would benefit everyone.

There also seemed to be a feeling that, to quote another contributor, Birmingham sometimes feels like “an echo chamber”, a place where a lot is talked about, but sometimes, not all that much materialises. Several people agreed with this point, and others mentioned that although there were pockets of vibrancy, it did seem to lack wide-scale co-operation and joined-up-ness.

Despite this, it was possible to intone that people were not keen on ‘branding’ Birmingham; something which I happen to agree with. Umbrella organisations wouldn’t benefit anyone here and with so many strong identities already here, this should provide the groundswell that lifts the city’s profile alone. Several people commented on the uniqueness of the community, and one person specifically said that they didn’t want to interfere with it’s natural development or an attempt to perhaps ‘commercialise’ the process. There had been suggestions during the evening that some central shared space might benefit the community and stimulating more collaboration.

This however leads onto the second thing I observed. There seems to be a marked difference between the internal and external perceptions of The City. From my very unscientific canvassing of @media attendees last week, it seemed the perceptions of folk involved in the web industry in other cities were not necessarily negative, but certainly nothing more than neutral - mostly responding “I don’t think anything happens there”. Nobody I asked seemed to be aware of anything that was going on up here, and there was general feedback that they didn’t believe the midlands had any web based networks at all- perhaps strange considering we may have more networks here than in many of the major northern cities.

This seemed in stark contrast to many local people who contributed opinions suggesting we have a very strong and feature-packed web scene.

As part of external perceptions, Stuart proposed that we might need to be careful about losing out to Manchester in becoming regarded as the Second Digital City, which seemed to rub some audience members the wrong way, who fairly questioned why we couldn’t be the First Digital City (in a way that seemed to suggest that some people believe we are already in pole position). Although it seemed not to have been received well, I think it actually proved that people are very passionate about this, and would go as far to say it seems people do want to give London and other potential digital destinations a run for their money. I think they were simply irked at being told that we might have no chance of achieving that.

Earlier, Stuart had suggested to me that we are potentially at a tipping point and I very much agree. In three years time, we may either be ‘the place to do digital business’, or we may miss our opportunity because we failed to promote our efforts externally more effectively. It’s a crown up for grabs, and I think it would be a great shame for a city like Manchester to add that string to it’s bow, especially if regionalisation does remain important (and I still believe it will, because great community seems to breed excellent output).

In my view, those who are heavily involved in projects locally (Social Media Cafe, Likemind, Social Media Surgeries, Multipack etc etc) do a great job of engaging local people who are seeking involvement, but struggle to attract wider audiences or change the wider perception that Birmingham doesn’t appear to have a great digital offering. I don’t doubt that groups of people who come to work here leave very impressed, but I don’t necessarily think that is enough to win widespread external regard - especially since Birmingham has a long standing image problem that is still dogged by stereotypical regional perceptions (something I have experienced on a number of occasions in the past few weeks).

Someone made an astute point that perhaps continually asking others might be part of the problem and suggested we might be better acting as amplifiers for the successes of regions existing communities. Perhaps we should be actively talking to people in purely positive terms about the existing scene here. I think as West Midlanders, we tend to be a fairly modest people and I worry that we do indeed miss a trick when representing ourselves to key parties. As the guys from Created in Birmingham interestingly pointed out, we do enjoy being the underdog and I do wonder if it is perhaps a reason why external views on the city are almost inexistent - we simply are not wired to better our lot. 

OK, so I think I’ll sum up my views on this. Clearly ‘scene’ is important and we’re still in the formative stages. In some sectors we are well regarded already, in other sectors more work is needed. Work is needed to promote Birmingham’s digital merits externally to competitive cities and regions, but also we need to engage people within this area who still are not aware of the cauldron of activity that apparently is present in The City. The tools are appearing to do this, and with the launch of Josh’s digitalbrum.co.uk (and the various partner sites) it’s becoming easier to tackle some of these issues.

But no matter your opinions, I would suggest one thing to help grow the outwards facing image of Birmingham and the Midlands as a digital centre. The next time you engage someone from outside the region in discussion, refrain from the negative, refrain from indifference and proclaim some of the great stuff going on here, whether you know the details or not. Reference it, use it, make examples of it. I think a shift in the way we talk about ourselves might just improve the impression we maybe conveying already - whether we realise it or not.

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I think I need to establish early on here that attending a web conference was a new experience for me entirely - well not entirely - I once attended a bee-keeping conference. Yes, you did read that right, and no, it didn’t have many similarities.

For me, @media is pretty synonymous (if not the definition) of ‘a UK web conference’. I was the first I ever knew of, and pretty much has therefore remained top dog in my mind ever since.

A major reason why I never made it to @media previously was cost. As start-up self-employed, it can be hard to budget the hundreds of pounds for tickets (and the rest) which other larger organisations spend without so much as a moment of hesitation. But when I saw this year’s lineup, and combined with a change in the circumstances of the business in the last two years (e.g. the limited status) it made it far easier to finally say yes. And so I went.

I don’t think I’m alone in saying that there is a general agreement that 2005 was a ‘buzz’ year, and since then the industry has perhaps has slowed down a little (not loads, but a little). One of the problems I’ve found when contemplating my attendance previously has been the potential problem of paying to attend talks on subjects you felt had been discussed to death and just wouldn’t be worth the investment of your own time.

And so it’s with pleasure I can say I wasn’t disappointed that I waited. From amongst the well-weathered attendees that I spoke to, the consensus seemed to be that this year has been one of the best to date.

I don’t want to sound utterly gushing in praise, but over the two days, I met some fantastic people and enjoyed every talks I sat through. Admittedly some were more useful to me than others, but absolutely nothing disinterested me.

Day One took a strong design perspective, and the speaker lineup comprised of Malarkey, Jon Hicks, Dan Rubin, Colly, Mark Boulton and Jason Santa-Maria. Of all these, I’ve only ever seen Jon talk before, and I was pleased to see that although he was talking icons, it was a significantly different and improved version of the very enjoyable talk he did at Geek In The Park 2008.

Andy’s piece really was beneficial to the understanding of his most recently aired views on IE6, process and CSS envelope-pushing. I had a wide variety of half-formed views on this bucket of ideas already, and I came out with a greater sense of clarity.

Simon provided some really nice insights into working practices at Erskine and I scribbled quite a few notes here. I wasn’t sure I’d call it a toolbox like he did, but there were loads of really useful pointers on things like content auditing, audience grouping and then some genuine physical tools for getting the job done.

If there was one real gem in Dan Rubin’s enjoyable presentation (and there were a few others), it was the demonstration of the Offset Filter in Photoshop. However I lived without it before I don’t know - it automates the worst part of image tile-making and so I am eternally grateful.

Mark delivered insights into typography on the web, and although I felt the climbing analogy was a bit tenuous, the demonstration of typographical imbalance and an explanation of potential pit falls over the coming months was good food for thought before people rush out and just start implementing every font under the sun into their websites.

Rounding off the talks for the day, Jason delivered a beautifully designed presentation as you might well expect from the man with the wonderful blog posts. It left me creatively yearning, and with an urge to just get going on something of my own. Genuinely inspiring.

If day one encouraged you to break down walls and start implementing all this stuff, day two could have been a list of reasons why you couldn’t implement any of it yet. Despite my cynicism, it turned out that was not the case.

Douglas Crockford opened with his witty observations on the work methods of developers. It could have been dry, but I really enjoyed the humour and it set a good tone for the rest of the day.

Molly (and sidekick Bruce), replete with arseless chaps and cowboy hat) answered some really useful questions about HTML 5 and where we’re at with it now. I was surprised to see how far some of the implementations actually go already and would recommend that you keep an eye out for the HTML5 doctor project launching in the next week or so. The whole event did feel like we’d all accidently turned up to a Opera away day though :)

You could tell that Chris Wilson from Microsoft was being eyed with a degree of suspicion before his talk, and although of course there were the inevitable clashes of doctrine, he came bearing apologies (which were more for amusement than genuine recourse, but which were accepted well) and a very useful perspective on to the state of IE now and going forward.

Andy Budd’s guerilla usability testing proved very useful and really filled a gap in my practical knowledge of these things. I’m now feeling geared up to start directly applying some of the methodology he suggested and might seek out one or two of the book recommendations too.

Robin’s discussion of accessibility in today’s web was an eye opener. I’ve never seen a first hand demonstration of JAWs, and came away with what I felt were some really useful insights and bringing me a bit closer to the realities of access on the web in 2009. I’m really pleased there was some decent accessibility stuff provided to supplement everything else that had gone so far.

And then Jeremy Keith’s hot topics, which was a good amalgam of all the things that had already been discussed so far, but interspersed with beautifully dry contempt of the whole internet by Douglas and a fantastic piece of facial hair modelled for the full hour and a bit by Jon Hicks.

I couldn’t complete this without mentioning the other major aspect of a conference like this, but I really did meet some great people, and spent much time chatting and discussing things with really interesting folks including Natalie and Paul from ClearLeft, Chris Mills, José, James Smith, David from Beggars, Remy, Marco and Andy from RNIB, Aussie Sheila and everybody else who I ended up chatting too. There’s a stack of business cards here which need filing.

Naturally I also spent much time with Owen and Paul doing our utmost to present the acceptable side of the Multipack too, and between us all, I would think many of the restaurants and bars can remain confident of their own futures based on their performance over the past couple of days alone. And what brilliant sunny days they were too.

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A few months ago I was introduced to two guys through a mutual friend of ours. They have devoted a significant amount of their time while at and after university to the development of products which assist those with the most common forms of colour blindness.

The two Lukes (as they are known) generated algorithms to simulate the effects of dichromatic colour blindness, and they have just launched an iPhone application, Huetility, which allows you to effectively simulate how nearly 1-in-12 men, and a smaller proportion of women see the world.

The app is being promoted as an educational aid for parents, teachers and opticians to demonstrate and understand the effects of colour blindness, however there is no reason why this should not be part of every designer’s toolkit. All too often overlooked - badly thought out design decisions can prove difficult to those with an inability to perceive colour - and although not every design is colour critical, a quick check using this tool can help to eliminate these problems.

At £1.79, I think it’s a snip. You can find out more about Huetility here, or you can download the application from the App Store today.

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If you’ve ever created a PDF using OSX you’ll know that it’s very simple. Macs come with out-of-the-box PDF support which means you don’t need a program like Adobe Acrobat Reader (or anything more heavyweight) to open or save your files as such.

However, you’ll also know that emailing the files it creates takes much longer than it should - the created files are massive in relative terms.

I’ve created one-page invoices using PDFs for a long time, and thankfully, due to this great little PDF compression plugin, they are crunched down to a sensible size from the outset. However, I recently switched to let Billings handle my invoicing and it uses the default OSX PDF creation tool to generate it’s PDFs - big files ahoy.

To give you an idea of the difference in file size between a compressed one page document - Billings chucks out a 1.4Mb file, whereas my compressed versions of the same documents are about 19Kb. Not ideal when you quickly want to output an invoice, attach and send it.

So how do you solve it? Well there are some nifty features in OSX that you may not be aware of (or at least not use), namely Folder Actions. Essentially folder actions allow you to run a script every time a file is placed in or removed from a folder on your Mac.

This creates a great little hook on which we can run a script to compress the files in a specific directory then move them to a ‘Compressed’ folder once done.

Step-by-Step: How to Do It

1. Download and Install Compression Plugin

Download and install the PDF compression plugin. It’s a Quartz filter workflow that uses well-chosen settings to reduce your file size down. You will also now benefit from the use of it everytime you encounter a save dialogue from now on.

2. Create an Automator Workflow

Automator is a free program bundled in every OS X Mac (have a look in your Applications folder). It allows you to run series of tasks automatically in a single process. You simply need to create a workflow consisting of:

1. Get Specified Finder Items (once added to the workflow, click Add to select the directory which will contain files to be compressed.
2. Get Folder Contents
3. Apply Quartz Filter to PDF Documents (Select ‘Compress PDF’ from the drop-down - this will only appear if you have installed the plugin as above)
4. Move Finder Items (change the location to a place where the final, compressed files will be automatically moved)

3. Test The Workflow

Place a test PDF in your ‘Compressor directory’ (specified in step 1 of the workflow) then run it. It should compress this PDF, then move it to the ‘Compressed directory’ you specified in step 4, leaving the ‘Compressor directory’ empty.

Once you’ve got that working, you can automate the process, so this executes every time a PDF is saved or moved into the folder. Click save, and Save as Application (as opposed to Save as Workflow, otherwise every time you run it, the Automator program will want to load up fully instead of run in the background).

4. Create A Script

You now need to create little AppleScript which can run this workflow application.

Go to /Libaray/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/

Duplicate one of the existing scripts, and rename it to something sensible like PDF - compressor.script

Open it and paste the following. You must manually alter the path to your Automator application as appropriate.

The code below is wrapping because of my thin blog layout. Best idea is to copy and paste directly, or View Source of this page to determine where the line breaks actually are if you are not sure.


on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
try
tell me
do shell script “open -a /Users/Andy/Documents/My\\ Mac/Compress\\ PDFs.app”
end tell
end try
end adding folder items to


Note! All spaces in the path must be double backslashed as above. To test if your typing is correct, paste the bit between the quote marks (e.g. open -a /Users/Andy/Documents/My\\ Mac/Compress\\ PDFs.app) into Terminial and run. If it runs the Automator application you created, your script will work. If it doesn’t, check the path you have typed.

Save it and close the Script Editor.

5. Set It Up

Find your ‘Compressor directory’ (specified in step 1 of the workflow) and right-click on it. From the menu that appears, select More > Configure Folder Actions…

Tick the ‘Enable Folder Actions’ box, then press the Add icon (+) to add the ‘Compressor directory’ as a trigger folder. Select it, and make sure the ‘On’ tickbox it ticked.

Next, click the Add icon (+) for the right hand pane to add a script. You should be able to find and select the AppleScript you have just created (something like PDF - compressor.script).

6. Done!

Close the window and you’re done. Every time somebody pastes or saves into the ‘Compressor directory’, the folder action will kick in, launch the AppleScript and that in turn will execute the Automator compression tool and move the compressed version of the PDF into the ‘Compressed directory’. Sorted.

Of course, there is lots more scope with this. Automator means you don’t need to know much AppleScript to get this going, but you can really push the boundaries if you are willing to experiment. This setup suits me, but it’s likely you’ll need to experiment to get it to the way you need it.

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It’s been a long annoyance of mine that Wordpress insists on writing paths directly into the database, so when switching from staging or production to live you have to alter these paths.

However, if you also find this an irritation, a quick way to solve it is to define a couple of constants in the wp-config.php file. You simply define the url and home addresses as below, and as long as you are running a server that supports the server variable HTTP_HOST (e.g. Apache) the switch should be automatic and override the settings in the control panel.


// WordPress address on settings page
define(’WP_SITEURL’, $_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’]);
// Blog address on settings page
define(’WP_HOME’, $_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’]);


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I once had an urge to write. It was probably born out of a frustration that (at the time) everything creative I was involved with either was being hand drawn and product shaped, or laid out using a computer.

It’s been exactly four years since I wrote my first post on this blog, and not much has changed except I’ve lost my almost insatiable desire to write. It’s not that I don’t have ideas and thoughts, but everything these days appears to be summed up in 140 characters and I rarely think of a topic that I want to elaborate on, at least in a written form at least.

I know this won’t last forever. Twitter will come and go like everything else on the web. When I think back over the past seven years I have actively used the internet and consider all those things I used to visit/were so important to me at on time or other: DeviantArt, amused.com, Rojo, Friends Reunited, My Yahoo!, my Angelfire and FreeYellow websites, BoltBlue, Facebook - you realise things can only last a finite (and apparently increasingly short) period of time.

I also know I will get back my desire to write again one day. I tend to get these bursts of energy which have to be captured in words, but I think since I started running the business as a full-time occupation, that energy has been channelled via other routes.

I really have thought long and hard about the future of this blog. I’m not sure I want it all to remain online, especially in it’s current form. Malarkey did something a few years ago which was to archive anything interesting for anyone who really wanted to find it, but otherwise stopped it being immediately obvious. That appeals more and more.

Realistically, I don’t have to do anything about this site. It’s not doing much harm to anyone, except to me. Every time I visit it, it looks so forlorn and badly kept that I feel bad I don’t make many contributions to it anymore. But then again, for the two years that it truly shone I was in a state of overdrive and made commitments to write near daily - no matter how poorly - so comparisons to ‘the good old days’ are simply unrealistic.

I suppose also that in a way I feel like we (the ‘interneteers’) have created a bit of a primordial swamp over the past few years. Our general creativity, outpourings, projects that never went anywhere, willingness to ditch one web-based product for another at a moments notice and slimy trail of media (videos, podcasts, blog entries) can now be viewed with some hindsight. We’ve really worked hard since we got our hands on the controls, however now behind us we’ve left a soup of semi-useful stuff and we’re finally venturing out a little from it’s murky waters. Well, perhaps we’re not even that advanced. Maybe we’re just developing fins or something. A lot of effort has gone into getting us to this point, including a significant number of my own hours that went into this chronicle that I’m now seriously considering wrapping up on.

I wonder what the value of all of this will be in years to come.

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F1Calendar.com is a little something Si and myself have been working on recently.

Very much in the tradition of Si’s previous ‘KickOff’ productions (Six Nations Kickoff, Euro Kickoff and World Cup Kickoff), F1 Calendar is a quick way to check Formula One race times and dates for the entire season, or retrieve of the same details in a file that can be loaded into your copy of iCal or Outlook (or other desktop calendaring software).

You can download a standard .ics file, or subscribe to the updating ‘webcal’ version which will update throughout the season to reflect any changes that occur to the planned event dates over the coming months.

F1 Calendar supports every world time zone, and remembers the last one you viewed so you can always return to view the most relevant schedule, instantly.

We’ve also allowed a level of customisation for the downloadable content; we imagine not everyone wants all the practice and qualifying sessions recorded in their calendars, so before you download you are asked to pick which ones (if any) you want to include. We’ve got dates and times for all Grands Prix, qualifying sessions and practice sessions.

The design and architecture has been kept straightforward - there is only one page to speak of, but there are quick urls for all time zones if you need to send them as links. Also we’ve decided that IE6 will get a reduced visual experience (and a reduced visual experience only), and this is the first site either Si or myself have been involved in which we opted to use a Bring Down IE6 inspired philosophy - really on the basis that people who understand how to download calendar files and subscriptions will also understand how to download a browser and how it would benefit them.

If you like it, please Tweet it, pass it on or bookmark it - we’re on twitter at @f1cal.

Building it was pretty enjoyable.

Formula One Race Times & Dates

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