News from March, 2008

Ok, here' goes some live blogging for the first ever Manchester (the UK one, not USA) BarCamp...

For once, I arrived early - I was lucky as there was a blockage on the track just after my train and most other people were delayed by up to an hour.

Due to the train delays, the event started 1 hour late so during that time I ended up signing attendees in which was a superb way to meet people. I'd seen posts on mailing lists from many of them and it was good to finally put name to face. Hopefully they'll be attending the post-event party later tonight which Adaptavist are sponsoring.

So, first talk of the day...

Microformats

I've been promoting the use of Microformats in many of our plugins so this talk grabbed my attention instantly. We use hCard microformats extensively in our Community Bubbles plugin and if you've got Tails Export installed you'll see the little icon light up all over this site.

One really neat thing in the talk that I wasn't previously aware of are a number of sites that parse a web page looking for microformats and then provide a downloadable file containing the exported data:

• http://technorati.com/events
• http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/

Another useful tip was a common error when importing hCalendars in to Outlook 2003 - if you get a recurring lunar appointment error, you need to include the following properties in your markup:

• uid
• dtstamp
• method

Katie's talk on 10 mistakes that startups should avoid...

Great talk, very professional looking slides. It's great to see that other startups are thinking this way:

• Don't get office space - Adaptavist buy in to this idea already, we all work from home. The closest thing we have to an office is our hosting facility in Manchester, but being filled wall to wall with servers it's not a great place to hold meetings LOL.
• Don't focus on local - Adaptavist's first customer was in Canada and we've now got customers in 55+ countries.
• Don't waste time on protecting the unprotectable - At Adaptavist, we focus on keeping the good people good and don't waste time on bad people. If someone wants to hack our software, they're going to do it anyway no matter what we try. Then again, we give free licenses for personal and non-profit use anyway so there's little incentive to hack.
• Never give up - When we started out we had a mantra "Nothing's impossible until you give up, and we never give up"

OMFG, I can barely believe I'm writing this blog post - Microsoft are actually going to default IE8 to standards compliant mode...

To say this is good news is an understatement: read the announcement

For the first time ever, all major browsers will favour standards-compliant websites! This is staggeringly good news for web developers and web app vendors as it means we can start ridding ourselves of the constant cruft caused by earlier versions of MSIE and start spending more time on making great web interfaces.

As if that wasn't enough, MS are also looking to improve interoperability. Is the evil empire starting to listen to customers? If so, lots of amazing things are going to happen.

Prompted by a post on Ajaxian, I've just installed this sweet Firefox plugin...

Firecookie is a an extension for Firebug that makes possible to view and manage cookies in your browser. Apart from all the other cookie managers and viewers available as Firefox extensions, this one is made as an extension for Firebug, so web developer has the functionality accessible within familiar Firebug's UI.

I've been looking for something like this for a while - it feels much nicer than other cookie plugins I've tried and it's UI is located right where I want it - inside Firebug! It would be great to see more of the Firefox developer extensions move in to Firebug, allowing me to de-clutter my browser which currently has roughly 100 toolbar buttons wrapped around my web pages.

For more info, see their blog

Testing against the latest milestone release of Confluence 2.8, it's clear that swathes of plugins are going to need to be re-released to handle the changes..

As with any plugin architecture, plugins are dependant upon the API of the parent application. With each point release (2.3, 2.4, 2.5, etc) of Confluence, the API changes, but usually only a little.

Confluence 2.8, however, is one of those releases where the changes are pretty big and widespread, especially for the larger plugins. Many classes no longer exist and have been replaced by completely new classes so plugin developers will have their work cut out for them.

That being said, Confluence 2.8 is a great step forward and the milestone releases are proving invaluable to detect the compatibility issues sooner rather than later.

It's not yet known when 2.8 will be formally released, but due to the nature of some of the changes I dare say it's going to be a few months before the more complex plugins catch up. In short, if you use lots of plugins (especially those that are cluster-aware), don't go upgrading your production environment to 2.8 the day it's released!

A scarf with pockets...

It's been one of those uber-busy days and with a fried brain I decided to hit the interweb to see what crazy things I could find.

Behold: Spockets!

Keep your hands toasty with a Spocket — a scarf with built-in pockets.

Found via Earmuff History via Bailing Wire via List of problems solved by MacGyver via Trivia

Just been explaining Confluence's MS Word export to someone and noticed this totally awesome feature...

We're increasingly using the wiki to collaborate on legal documents - things like version control and the ability to mark insertions and deletions, not to mention the fact that we can give access to the customer so they can review and participate, is a huge time saver.

So, I was explaining to someone how you can export a wiki page as an MS Word document, and look at what happened - it shows the insertions and deletions as tracked changes as seen above!

Unfortunately some products don't display tracking so well (eg. "Pages" on OS X), but for word processors that do support change tracking (MS Word, OpenOffice Writer, etc), it's a fantastic bonus!