Hackdiary

I had a great time presenting yesterday evening at the London Web Frameworks night. Huge round of applause to Dean Wilson for putting it together. I learnt interesting things about Catalyst and Django from the other speakers, and did my first public demo of the BBC Programme Catalogue. I’m immensely proud of the site, and I think it came across.

I had a great blessing from the demo gods. Simon Willison had borrowed my laptop for his talk. I was just about to demonstrate a search I’d pre-planned, but Firefox autocompleted my typing with ‘appleseed’, a term Simon had used to demonstrate local band search on lawrence.com. I took a deep breath and just hit ‘search’. The BBC archivists didn’t let me down – we found “A SERVICE FOR SCHOOLS, JOHNNY APPLESEED SUMMER 1981” that was broadcast nearly 25 years ago on Radio 4. I went on from there to show what else had been archived from that day in 1981, demonstrate other searches and show off the full FOAF and RSS feeds for every item.

For completeness, I’ve posted the slides, which are done in S5 as usual. However, I’ve been reading Presentation Zen recently and they don’t really stand up by themselves. I’ve really gone off bullet points, and I find that if I use them then I read off my slides rather than talking to the audience. Oh, and I only tested the CSS on Firefox/Mac. They did look quite pretty on the night, I reckon.