There were a  number of stand-out sessions for me. After a morning of fairly techy talks (including a first look for me at Django, given by Bartosz Ptaszynski) there was a session by Pat Phelan & Alexia Golez called “Lunch is for Wimps”. This was an informal talk about some of the business challenges facing people who have, or are thinking about setting up their own tech business. There was some great advice and experience shared, but two things stuck with me when it all finished:

• The first was to “just go and do it“. So, either launch a product / service or set up a company, and then work on developing it further from there. It’s often too easy to keep working away on a project without it getting finished and seeing ever the outside world. Being in a situation such as this at the moment, they are some wise words for me to get finished up;
• The second theme that stuck with me was the need for community. By this I mean helping out others working in the same area when you can. Parallels were drawn between the openness of tech community in the US, and the situation here in Ireland. I agree with this type of thinking (which is why I liked the Tuesday Push idea so much). I don’t think that sharing contacts or writing a blog post is a major hassle, particularly when it’s helping someone that’s starting out. (although, obviously it depends on the circumstances – just in case I drown in spam after saying that!)

The second stand-out session for me was by Eoghan & Des from Contrast who gave a talk on Violent Web App Design (with some of the best slides I’ve ever seen for a presentation!).

They gave a lot of great advice on developing clean, usable web applications that are “opinionated” – that users will want to use, will see a personality in, and will identify with. They also motivated me to go and pull out some of the fade-in, fade-out messages I spent ages adding into my latest work of art.

Other sessions I was impressed with were those by David Behan (on sales), Alan O’Rourke of Spoitchild (looking for interface solutions for Toddle), and the parts of the new media panel that I saw.

Other Barcamp Cork Related Stuff:

• Alexia Reflecting
• Paul’s Review
• Damien’s After-thoughts on Barcamp II
• Tagged photos on Pix.ie

I’m heading to Cork for Barcamp next weekend (1st of November). There are lots of interesting sessions planned by the looks of things, and a good list of people attending so far. And it’s still a week away. The sessions cover everything from the technical to the business side of working with the web, with an interesting sounding one planned on developing a web app in a day (no details released for that yet though).

The post about session ideas on the Barcamp site gives a good feeling of the type of event they’re looking to develop:

BarCamp is a non-commercial unconference and, as such, straight company or product pitches are not appropriate. We don’t want to sound negative about this but it’s important. We all love our own companies and our own apps but speaking for 20 minutes about you isn’t really that interesting or educational.

…so, there’ll be no whoring your work then!!

The community spirit is alive and well in Cork too, with a meetup for the Irish Webmaster Forum members planned for the Friday night before, and pre- and post-barcamp food & drinks on the cards too.

I went to the Barcamp in Galway last year (when I was only a couple of days into working for myself) and found some of the talks (and people) really helpful. Given the number of both successful and up-and-coming Web companies based in Cork at the moment, I reckon there’s a lot to learn from talking to them. And, of course, there’s the opportunity to meet some nice people too!

If you’re interested, you can register over here…

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• Barcamp Cork Deux
• Pre Barcamp Cork dinner
• BarCamp Cork II
• Pre-Barcamp Cork Food

Image via Wikipedia

After playing with the latest version of the Firefox web browser, it seems a bit more impressive than it’s earlier versions. Some things that struck me after using it for a few hours were:

1. I’m probably most impressed that I used Google Webmaster tools and Gmail about 4 times and the browser didn’t crash….which already makes it 50% better than Firefox version 2.
2. The new address bar is a nice addition. When typing an address the browser shows you both address suggestions (as usual), but also the site’s favicon and the the title of the corresponding page. It’s just a small addition, but it makes the browser more usable for those who frequently type addresses into the browser rather than relying on search engines.
3. The quick bookmarking function is also a nice addition. To bookmark a page it’s just a matter of clicking a star in the address bar. It’s a similar idea to “starring” emails in Gmail or Thunderbird, or RSS stories in Google Reader.

On the downside, there are a number of addons that I haven’t been able to install.  While this is (hopefully) because of the amount of people trying to upgrade their browsers at the same time, it’s still a problem. In particular, not having the FireBug Web Development extension is slowing things down as I’m in the middle of working on an AJAX based web application.

There also seems to be a problem with the inline spellchecker that I’ve been using doesn’t seem to be working (so apologies for any typos). Again, I don’t know if this is because of the Addon service being overloaded.

There were a number of problems with the old one, such as too much of the screen being taken up things that weren’t content. Because the original site was designed before the blog was added, maintaining how it all looked was awkward (with separate stylesheets being used), so I sorted that out too.

The old site was also being overrun by the daily postings from del.icio.us, so I’ve just added a listing of recent bookmarks to the footer of the homepage.

I’m also going to start adding the notes and examples for CSS & JavaScript that I’ve used when lecturing in the past. It’s mainly introductory material, but will be of more use up here than on my computer. I’ll update links when I get them onto Slideshare.

As always, any comments on the new look are welcome below!

To use it, you need to install a plugin (which is easy to do from their homepage), and view websites that are set up for it (including Google Images, Facebook, Bebo, Flickr, and lots more – full list on their site). When looking at pictures on these sites, you can choose to view in full screen by clicking on the “Play” button shown when you hold the mouse over an image, and you’ll see a “wall” of images that you can zoom in and out from.

An example of a portion of the results for a Google Images Search for “Galway” is shown below:

The plugin is fast, and works on Windows & Mac on Firefox, Internet Explorer & and Safari. There are tools for creating PicLens slideshows on their site, as well as a link to WordPress plugin.

They were caused by the way that version of the browser handles CSS padding and margins – even though the code was validating as compliant CSS and xHTML

This site will be replacing the old www.d-kelly.com site that hasn’t been updated for quite a while.

Feel free to drop me a comment to let me know what you think of the new design.