This is good news.

This morning I received a parcel that I’ve been waiting on for around a week. When I say a week, what I really mean is two years, but lets not get too technical.

I’ve been meaning to get a proper printed copy of my dissertation since I wrote it back in 2006. After the uni kept the one copy that I hand-bound myself, I hadn’t got anything tangible left, and considering it’s one of my favourite bits of work that I produced during my studies (for a variety of reasons, not in the least that it was on a topic that none of the staff in my department had a clue about), I really wanted a hard copy for myself.

The original was bound in a wrap around cover and held together with some brass binding screws, but I couldn’t be hassled with going through the rigmarole of pillar drilling and lining up of all the bits and pieces involved again, so about a year ago I decided I’d get it professionally done with short-run online printers, Lulu.

Well, in total I probably spent two weekends worth of time wrangling with the document, trying to convert my highly formatted text into a size that could be printed on, but failed repeatedly times before finally producing a copy that was passable. And so it went to press.

So this morning when I peeled back the layers of bubble wrap I was really pleased to find one case bound copy of my dissertation. Maybe the cover could have been a little less glossy (by I can’t remember having that option to choose a satin finish), but aside from that I’m really pleased I’ve got closure and a decent copy of the work.

My advice if you ever consider using Lulu; always design to their templates from the word go; never try to work it the other way around, especially if you have in the region of 80 pages with illustrations, custom margins and things that inevitably will fall apart the minute you have to resize anything. Otherwise, the process was straight forward enough, and the end product looks top notch.

About this time two years ago I encountered my best practices epiphany, when in a whirl of blog posts, articles and university modules I managed to haul myself onto the table-free markup bandwagon.

At the time there was a frenzy of community based activity, and even if a lot of other people had made the conversion to high-quality code before me, I’m sure there were also a lot more who followed after.

I loved the engagement, the semantic pedantry, the arguments, the twists and turns through the intricacies of the markup, which by all accounts had turned out to be a much larger tapestry than I might have previously believed. This empowered movement has been one of the web industry’s greatest achievements to date, and it’s effect seems to have manifested itself into the lifeblood of most web professionals today.

However (and there is always a however), I came to realise soon enough that this was a phase and not an era. This level of frenzied output would eventually be stifled by a number of factors. Ever-increasing, ever-more critical audiences meant that the pace of discovery and analysis quickly reached a boiling point and saturation occurred. We ended up running out of useful things to say on the topics of HTML and CSS. Whereas a small group of people had championed and educated the masses previously, the masses were now looking for their own slice of web pie, and the advent of Web 2.0 was the real world consequence of our new found knowledge and confidence with our technologies. It was like Ug had been making sparks for years, but had only just discovered how to arrange kindling.

The effect was a revolution that was probably the most bloodless in history. Ever.

I don’t know anyone who has been put out of work by Web 2.0 (I’m talking creatives, not entrepreneurs), and it seems that some focused retraining is really all it takes to make the leap. It’s not like the industrial revolution when your Spinning Jenny suddenly needed to be replaced; we even had the luxury of knowing our equipment was still adequate and the training was completely free (especially if you knew how to use a search engine, and most web professionals don’t feel they even need to include that skill on their CV these days).

This was all part of something big. It wasn’t just about clean code and semantics. Nor was it wholly about getting your styling to work in every goddamn, picky version of Microsoft’s browser. It was about a general step forward which brought us nose up against the glass bottom that is Genuine Progression.

Staring at the arse of Genuine Progression is also where we left Ug. Ug is a simple chap who has very recently learnt how to light a fire. Even before he mastered how to create it for himself, he knew what could be achieved with it. He saw it warming things, destroying things and cooking things. Ug is harbouring big ideas for his new skill, but frustratingly he doesn’t seem to be able to execute them.

For a start, Ug wants to make a bonfire with a Guy on top. The problem is that King James won’t be born for another 8,000 years, and no one has a clue how to make sculpture because ancient Greece doesn’t even exist yet. Ug knows what he wants, but he just can’t do it. He also pines for wonderfully sqidgy, sweet, melt-on-a-stick marshmallows, but despite having more sticks that he could ever desire, he sadly lacks the powdery pink and white confections needed to make the experience truly ‘complete’. Roasted sticks just don’t taste as nice.

And this is like us, the web professional in early 2008. Save for a few minor distractions and spending time taking a Polyfilla-like approach to smoothing out the gaps in our knowledge, we can’t actually go much further without improvements to the technologies we work with.

There are two monumental events that still and always will get web pros excited (aside from LOLcat). The first is the release of a new web browser. This really gets us going, especially if anything vaguely interesting has been done with the rendering engine. Wowsers at browsers.

The second things is far more important, and far more rare. In fact, it is so rare that at the going rate, a web professional might only ever encounter four of these events in their entire working life. What I’m talking about is a Specification Upgrade. Oh how we lust for a Specification Upgrade; waiting for some acronym-prefixed-decimal to increment just once is like hanging around for the phoenix to figure out how to begin the ignition sequence.

So is this going anywhere? Good question. I’ve always been interested in what we can do to improve the web, and more than happy to get into discussions where we debate future progress. After all, those choices we make now will affect our direction in the future. But in recent weeks and months, I’ve become bored of the debating floor. Far too many superfluous opinions make making judgements cloudy and decisions hard to make. Bitterness between parties is prevalent, enlightened argument is either lacking or overflowing - either way, no one seems to be able to agree on anything - and I’m not talking major divisive issues - I mean anything.

Our next scheduled monumentals are Firefox 3, IE 8, widespread adoption of CSS 3 and then finally HTML 5. The first two are on the radar (albeit with a wedge of time between them) but the last two are not. The bickering, the in-fighting, the lack of direction, the flawed design by committee route means that a decade will pass between the recommendation of 4.01 and the ordination of new version (and then we can look forward to the adoption process afterwards - like an after-party, but one that goes on for just a little longer than eternity itself).

Essentially like Ug, I am disillusioned with staring up the backside of progress. We’re waiting for a monolithic system to finally display some kind of life and allow us the space we need to fly some new kites, and which ultimately is the reason why the entire web community for the foreseeable future will continue to waste dedicate all it’s creative resources and energy to having a massive free-for-all arguments on topics like the use of a meta tag.

Yesterday I had a request to set up some hosting by a friend of mine. He does some small web design projects for local businesses and regularly asks for a small dollop of space to host the sites.

Once in a while you come across a great example of someone not understanding how the web works, and when he told me the domain that this newest client wanted to host, I couldn’t help but cringe at the address they’d picked.

The domain starts http://www.a12one … (I’ll leave the rest out to spare their identity), and despite my friend’s explanations that the logic was faulted, the client had come to believe that, because it starts with ‘a1’, it will appear at the top of Google searches.

Ah if only. I think you would find if that we’re the case. Being A A J Higgs it would have tangible advantages for me. Needless to say, I can’t really see it happening, although it would be quite amusing soul destroying to have to press the ‘o’ in Gooooooooooooogle approximately 24 billion times to get somewhere near the Zs pages. Poor Xerox, Yellow Pages and Zoo Magazine; they wouldn’t fare well.

As an additional punch to the groin, I have a feeling that mixing letters with numbers might cause a migraine like headache when recalling the aforementioned address. It could only have been ‘improved’ upon by inserting hypens at every available opportunity.

This morning (after yesterday’s speedy departure from The Lakes) saw me in central London, in a suit. Not just in general central London, but more specifically in Microsoft HQ on the first floor of some huge glass-clad building in Victoria.

I was given the opportunity of tickets for this small event not too long ago, and thinking it might be good chance to hear some big names speak, snapped them up.

It had been arranged (or at least was being compared) by Ryan Carson of Future Of… fame and the idea was for the speakers to express ideas about the relationship between software, services and Web 2.0 companies in the UK.

The talks were opened by Lars Lindstedt, MS Software Economist and probably the least known of the major speakers. He referenced research which essentially said that in recent years enterprise productivity has been going downwards, but that trend can be bucked by the use of software (basically a justification for more systems I assume) and discussed the way Microsoft is predicting that the way enterprise-level systems will evolve into something called the cloud (essentially using S3 / EC2 / distributed services – except later on we discovered Microsoft will be launching their own competing version on similar lines to these existing products – this will apparently be good for the users as it will keep prices competitive in the marketplace).

Following Lars was Brent Hoberman, the guy who is most famous for the creation of the practically prehistoric lastminute.com which was one of the handful of truly successful companies that survived the dot com bust. He was passionate about innovation, and scathing about marketing, saying it should be the product that generates it’s own publicity. His main tips for web entrepreneurs were to remain incredibly over ambitious, to go for big markets and to create buzz with great products and constantly improving interface. He also disclosed that he is now working on another start up in home furnishing.

The ‘keynote’ (although I don’t think that word is ever used at Microsoft anymore) was delivered by an industry heavyweight. Steve Ballmer who replaced Bill Gates at the CEO of Microsoft in 2000 talked about a range of new products and introduced a demonstration of the new Silverlight, Seadragon, Popfly and Photosynth technologies/software.

Until now I hadn’t really seen Silverlight in action, but it looked similar to what Flash can already do, though I do understand it does develop on concepts. I had been initially quick to dismiss the impact this technology might have, but thinking about it, it could make a dent in Adobe’s market if people are prepared to develop applications on Windows boxes (big .NET firms) as Microsoft intends. Flash has been a bit of problem on Internet Explorer for a while due to that patent case they lost, and I can only assume the next version of the browser will be bundling Silverlight.

That said, it won’t kill Flash (too many people develop don’t use MS coding platforms), but it will be highly adopted on client machines because of this, which could let it see success.

They demo-ed some mash-up stuff too using a web based app (called Popfly, built on Silverlight) that made the whole process of linking different services look incredibly simple, but I’m still not sure of it’s relevance to the everyday user. To me it looked a little bit too much eye-candy and not enough substance for most developers, but maybe they will find a niche for it.

They also demoed SeaDragon – a technology that allows seamless browsing of vast quantities of data through streaming. It was quite impressive and the example they used was a quantity of text that would have required a table the size of Wembley Stadium and a 14 Terrapixel digital camera. Apparently Curry’s don’t stock a camera like that, but IKEA do sell that table (joke directly from MS).

Ballmer took Q&A and mentioned a few strategy points. He said Office and other Microsoft apps will never be fully web based, but will remain an amalgam of both web and installed technologies, although he discuss the streaming of software (like that Windows-in-your-browser that appeared on the web a while ago) and said categorically that they have no intention of opening up development of MS languages/tools to other platforms (although Silverlight will be deployable to Windows/OSX/Linux/Mobile).

Overall it was entertaining and he had no problem in slating Google’s advertising methods in GMail or Oracle’s databases. It made it worth listening too though. I still feel MS are not an innovative company as yet, though they do appear to be doing more and pioneering work, none of it yet appears to have made it to market. They certainly are covering all bases though; this morning they also announced collaboration spaces (Basecamp anyone?) and showed an entire raft of products to cover all needs.

Clearly Adobe are getting defensive too, with today news that they have acquired a Writely clone, maybe we will see them branching into other realms of software too.

Finally there was a panel discussion, chaired by Ryan Carson and consisting of Ben Way from Rainmakers (who appeared on Secret Millionaire if that helps put a face to a name), Saul Klein (Seedcamp) and Cary Marsh (Mydeo). It mainly discussed how to start-up, manage money and deal with failure. A good way to wrap up, but not as insightful as some of the previous discussions.

It was then lunch and the 100 or so attendees milled around eating sandwiches, canapes and drinking Microsoft bottled water (I was going to get a photo, but it looked a little odd lurking around the drinks table). There weren’t many developers there by the looks of things, mostly VCs, industry types and NCGE types, but I did bump into Jeremy Keith who was there with Andy Budd and Simon Willison. I had wanted to talk to a couple of the speakers, but as I was pressed for time I had to leave DDS to himself and head back to the trains.

I’ve made it my policy over recent times not to overly-plug client projects for various reasons, but I’m willing to break with protocol to announce the launch of RateMyPlacement .

The concept is simple, if you have been on a placement year, share your experiences by filling in a review. This information becomes freely searchable and viewable, and it means that if you are looking for a placement year or opportunity, you can get honest perspectives on the companies you are applying to.

Before now, this sort of exchange wasn’t possible. People looking for internships had to rely on the patchy feedback that placement offices had to offer, but now this takes the rating of student work placements to a national level and will prove an invaluable tool for students and university placement offices alike.

I’m really pleased to be involved in this project and wish the guys running it all the success.

If you have been involved in a work placement in recent years, please add your review to the growing number already online. It only takes a couple of minutes, and if you have the time, please leave some additional comments alongside your ratings.

So here’s a plan. You want to monitor what traffic is coming through your sites, and you want to do it for free. Google Analytics is the obvious choice.

But what if you wanted to go all Web 2.0 and get your site hits, keywords and referrers without having to wade through all your stats? What if you wanted just the essentials wrapped up and delivered in a manageable daily RSS feed?

Well it’s not the future anymore…

PulseRSS is a great little free, hosted service which you tag onto your pages and keeps you posted on the most essential statistics for an unlimited number sites.

It means rather than having to manually check your ‘vitals’ in an overblown interface, you can now be fed them regularly; keeping an eye on your site’s pulse rather than doing a full and time-consuming “please cough, sir” style inspection.

This isn’t a replacement for full featured statistics package, but instead a daily supplement, adding some great functionality which is missing from the big guns’ offerings.