One of the first blog posts on the UVd blog was about Java application called Wordle which created pretty looking tag clouds based on word occurrences in blog RSS feeds, del.icio.us accounts or any block of supplied text.
It is quite interesting to see a peripheral snapshot of how a blogs content changes over time. Saves the trouble of reading it all as well.
Whilst Gareth was attending the1st linked data meetup I was on the other side of the country in lovely Bristol attending the FOWD Bristol Tour. The day long conference was designed to let people get a chance to experience what the normal FOWD conferences are like in a place nearer to them without having to go to London or New York (And for a fraction of the price!).
Though, as I already live in work in London, the main attraction for me to travel all the way to Bristol was down to the fine line-up of speakers for the day. With the likes of Elliot Jay Stocks and Bruce Lawson I had no valid reason not to attend, and the small factor of being able to catch up with some old friends.
Elliot kicked the day of with ‘A Perfect Portfolio’. A talk aimed at highlighting the key strengths and weaknesses in portfolio designs, and some very valid points that you should take into consideration when designing your own. A subject that is very topical here at UVd at the moment due to us being in full swing of our own re-branding. It was very interesting to see the amount of points that came up that we have spent hours (coming up to years) discussing and deliberating over, such as the importance of showing your featured work on your homepage, to how you go about showing the process of your work: Elliot summed up the presentation succinctly:
It’s not about the finished project, it’s “How you get there!”
The next discussion of the day was from Paul Boag of Headscape titled “The Battlefield of Design – Designers vs Clients”. The first interesting thing to note was that Paul had decided not to use any slides at all and to rely purely on his memory (and cue cards) to educate us. Although, even with his new controversial style of presenting, it turned out to be a very insightful look into the process that Headscape use from brief to sign off. With the main aim of including the client throughout the design process rather than “designing behind doors”. I picked up some good tips from this, which we will be hopefully be putting into practice here in the future.
The HTML5 working spec is something that I have been following throughout the year and starting to become very passionate about. Therefore there was no doubt that in my opinion the best was saved until last, with Bruce Lawson’s talk on the Future of HTML5. He covered a wide range of basic HTML5 knowledge, from the introduction of new basic tags such as <header>, <article>, <section>, <aside>, and <footer> to some of the more advanced such as <video>, <audio> and my personal favourite <canvas>  which enables the dynamic rendering of graphics on the page through javascript, a good example of this can be seen here.
The most important thing to take from Bruce’s talk though, is the fact that you don’t have to wait for the HTML5 spec to be complete to start using it. That could be years and even more so for the browsers to fully implement it, the pages with the new doctype<!DOCTYPE html> will still render in the browsers we know today, and most will accept the new tags. So why not start experimenting and playing! We certainly have, as you’ll see if you take a look at the source of this very blog.
Overall FOWD was a very enjoyable day, yet there is no way I could have covered everything in one small blog post. So for more info Bruce and Elliots slides from the day can can be viewed here:
We’re so close; I can smell it! Our new site is careering dangerously towards completion. One element of the homepage is a frivolous physics environment which I was kindly allowed the time to make in Flash using the Box2DFlash physics engine.
The engine has been ported from Eric Catto’s powerful C++ physics engine (Box2D). It took a little time to adjust to some of the coding conventions that have also found their way from the C++ version but after that initial steep learning curve the engine is fantastic to work with.
I’ve released this today before the site launch so that people can play with it and inevitably find the bugs which I’ve lovingly engineered into it. Feel free to put it through its paces!
edit: This is now on our homepage
One of the most beneficial and exciting parts of being a web developer in London is the welcoming and engaging community which exists here. There are continuous events and workshops being held (usually for free) on various technologies and topics relating to our industry. My expectations of these usually small scale and low key events were massively surpassed by the 1st Linked Data Meetup I attended last Wednesday. A large portion of the Linked Data community were present and some of the leading developers and thinkers in this field were there to showcase applications of Linked Data.
For those not acquainted with the phrase and its meaning it would be beneficial to watch Tim Berners-Lee’s introduction to Linked Data at the TED conference. But in brief it is one of the many possible methods of incorporating meaning (semantics) into the abundance of information that is available on the World Wide Web. Essentially Linked Data could bring us closer to a Semantic Web or as Tim Berners-Lee calls it the “Next Web”. His image is of a web where explicit URIs are used to represent things in the real world (people, places, events, objects, etc). Once this URI exists, as a representation of a concept or object, it can then be used as a reference point to be talked about or linked to by other sources of data; hence creating linked data.
I cannot begin to cover all of the information relayed during the half day event particularly that relating to the formal specifications of linked data. However one of the messages of the day was the importance of exemplifying the incredible potential of Linked Data by either blogging about it (tada!!!!) or by creating compelling applications which utilize it.
Firstly we will be endeavouring to use RDFa in our future web projects to embed rich metadata into our web documents and I strongly recommend that other agencies and developers do the same. Secondly I would like to draw attention to a couple of the projects which were illustrated at the event which exemplify the possibilities of Linked Data.
MusicBore
A project completed during the Music Hack Day in London which uses Linked Data to essentially remove the need for radio DJ’s. \o/
Data Incubator
Data Incubator is a project which is focussed around taking mass datasets from willing participants (NASA, Discogs, OpenLibrary) and opening them up for wider reuse. They do this by converting the data into accessible linked data and through a community of developers maintain the dataset with the intention of eventually giving it back to the original owners. As stated on their site; “the goal is not to steal, but to show that there is a better way.”
Sig.ma
An RDF search engine. If for example you typed your name into sig.ma, you will receive results from various different online sources which already embed RDF, RDFa or microformats into their sites. An impressive array of information will be returned which is eerily specific to you rather than any of your namesakes which you tend to find on Google.
On a personal note I am very proud of myself (and Marc who I attended with) for not screaming like girls and demanding the autograph of Tim Berners-Lee when he arrived at the conference and sat at the table with us! I wish I was wearing my I LOVE THE INTERNET tshirt!
