I was at Mashed 08 at Alexandra Palace yesterday. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to go back today, but I’ve made some progress on my project from home.
It was a successful day all in all though. Here’s what I did.
- Watched Jonathan Tweed talk about the BBC /programmes api. If I hadn’t already had an idea of what I was going to do I would have been very tempted to play with this. A year ago, I was working for the BBC on one of the projects that underlies /programmes, so it’s great to see it being given a public airing.
- Watched the Guardian’s Damian Carrington talk about what the Guardian’s enviroment web team are hoping to inspire people into doing. Well, to be honest, I sat in his talk whilst getting my wireless connection working. Sorry Damian.
- Met up with a fellow Perl hacker. Last year the venue was full of Perl hackers. Shame there were so few there this year. I suspect many of the cooler kids were at Interesting instead – note to organisers: having two events like this on the same day is all a bit silly.
- Had an interesting conversation with someone from the BBC who is working on the next version of the Radio iPlayer. It sounds as though following the release of this new version, my BBC streams page will be redundant. Alternatively, it might be easy to make it far more useful. And I’ll be able to retire all the grungy old HTML scraping code.
- Had an interesting conversation with the O’Reilly UK people. Might be some announcements coming out of that in a couple of months. Oh, and I might have opened myself up to lots of hassle about writing another book.
- Watched Doctor Who on a huge screen. In the wrong aspect ratio. Honestly, you’d thing that if there was one organisation who understood aspect ratios then it would be the BBC.
And despite socking up most of the day doing all of those things, I also managed to get stuff done on my own project and the first draft of Political Web is now online. It doesn’t do most of the things that I want it to do yet, but it’s a good start. Have a play and let me know how it goes.
Update: I should, of course, reiterate that what I’ve done so far on Political Web is largely just to repackage stuff that’s available from from They Work For You. I have plans to add other stuff soon(ish).
Update: Having just got to a Windows PC for the first time for days and tried using Political Web in IE6, I see that it doesn’t work for some reason. Probably some Javascript glitch. I’ll try to look at it in more detail later on. But in the meantime, use Firefox – you know it makes sense.
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