News from Mar 01, 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"