Archive for March, 2009
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009
March Tech Meetup – Techdirt, Google App Engine and Django
For the March Tech Meetup we had talks on Techdirt, Google App Engine and Django. With Sam skiving in Mexico, Hasan introduce the talks for the night, and we proceeded with usual introductions, beer, pizza, networking and general chat.
Micheal Clouser kicked off the night introducing Technology Entrepreneur Online (techent.org) which contains courses to advise budding entrepreneurs in the technology sector. He then introduced Mike Masnick who is the founder/CEO of Techdirt and Floor 64.
Mike Masnick on TechDirt
Mike wasn’t prepared to talk so with some prompting he gave us the story from the founding Techdirt.com to the current day. Techdirt started as a personal project while Mike was doing an MBA at Cornell, He wrote about current technology and sent it out to fellow students, the newsletter proved popular and grew as Mike finished university and started working, he carried on writing and expanding Techdirt as a side project. Eventually while looking for new work Mike decided to create a business from it.
Turning down the idea of advertising on the site he decided that his content could be targeted towards particular companies and sold, the companies Mike contacted said they needed this and were happy to pay, they became part of the beta test which grew into a full service and Floor 64 was born. As Floor 64 and the public blog of Techdirt grew they started leveraging their community of experts in various fields to help generate their packaged content. Following this idea the insight community was formed, a place for companies to have conversations with experts on various subjects relating to their business.
Although Mike was unprepared he is an excellent speaker, and the evolution of Techdirt from a university newsletter to a valued source of information for some of the worlds biggest companies was a very interesting listen.
“Internet Scale Apps for Dummies”
Janek Mann on Google App Engine – Watch Video
Janek Mann then came to introduce Google App Engine(GAE). GAE provides an infrastructure that will allow applications to scale from the outset by preventing the common issues that make scaling hard (shared states, relational databases), they also provide the hosting of that infrastructure. Janek outlined the advantages of GAE such as the fact it is an end to end service, with Google dealing with your hardware infrastructure while also providing a software platform that help scaling. He also explained the times when GAE are not suitable, such as video transcoding, hosting large files, or times when you need libraries that arent provided by Google.
“why you should never use PHP again”
Peter Braden on Django – Watch Video
Ending the talks for the night Peter Braden came to talk about Django, the web framework written in Python. He listed and explained a few of the modular components that Django provides, url routing that map urls to functions, views which handle the page logic, ORM (Object Relational Mapping) which abstracts the database so you can use native Python objects as opposed to SQL, templates which provide clean seperation for designers, and form utilities (generation validation / sanitation etc) along with a huge number of other handy utilities such as the admin panel and even a lorum ipsum generator.
Peters conclusion was that Django was designed to let you build internet applications very quickly while at the same time keeping large codebases manageable and maintainable.
Sign up for the google groups list to get updates for when the next meetup is and who will be talking (groups.google.com/group/techmeetup), see you there!
Media
Mike Masnick from TechDirt and Floor64 from TechMeetup on Vimeo.
Janek Mann talks about Google App Engine from TechMeetup on Vimeo.
Peter Braden talks about Django from TechMeetup on Vimeo.
Monday, March 9th, 2009
February Tech Meetup – Usability and SEO
For the February meetup we had talks about usability and SEO, two pretty vital topics for those starting up new websites. The pizza and beer flowed as usual, this time however we had a gap after introductions to let people mingle after finding out who’s who which worked well.
Sam talked about the expansion of the techmeetup over other areas in the UK, the Glasgow meetup should be going ahead soon, and the website will be overhauled to facilitate these extra meetups, then we got on with the presentations.
Chris on SEO
Chris came to give us an introduction to SEO, while SEO has gained somewhat of a bad reputation due to the amount of people that abuse its nature, it is simply about helping users find your website, in an ever growing internet, being found easily is becoming increasingly important.
Chris’s talk revolved around 2 main points, link building strategy and on-site SEO, on-site SEO is the steps you can make during development to help your website gain visibility in search engine rankings. The first and most important step in onsite SEO, Chris explained is generating unique and valuable content, once you have this, then you can follow the rest of the steps including making sure you use friendly URLs, have unique page titles for individual pages within your site, using clean semantic code etc.
However one of the most important factors for search engines when determining your ranking is the incoming links to your website and Chris explained his methodical approach to link building. Pick 3 categories where you would like incoming links from, Build a spreadsheet of the targets within those categories that are high value, popular press and media is a common target, and credible popular sites within your sector. In the spreadsheet keep the contact details and record all correspondence and activity, this helps you keep on top of which sites work and which ones don’t.
Chris Rourke on Usability
Now that you have improved your SEO and you have thousands more people coming to your website, what do you do with them? Another Chris, Chris Rourke from UserVision came to talk to us about usability.
Why should you care? Chris explained the conversion rate graph, at which the start is is all the visitors to your site, at the end is “conversions”, people that have performed the action you want them to (such as buy something). Between entering the site and completing that action there are a lot of points at which a user will get confused / frustrated and leave. The goal of usability is to remove these pain points.
So the usability silver bullet? as Chris stated, there isn’t one, each site is individual, and usability is an inherently human task, the important thing is to test, this can occur before you even touch a line of code through paper prototypes, and should be carried on throughout the life of the site. Testing doesn’t need to be a complicated setup, its can be as simple a sitting down with some users and watching what they do.
Taku on Character Animation
Taku came in to talk on the studies into character animation he has been doing at the University of Edinburgh, he briefly explained the process he was using of building small patches of precompiled interactions which can then be knitted together to make a full scene, however most of the time was spent watching the very cool low res animations, I recommend going to http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/tkomura/ to check them out, they are doing some cool stuff.
Open Demo
Gordon Guthrie from Hypernumbers also led a discussion about the visualisation of information, In todays age when the amount of information that can be gathered can be staggering, its a good time to sit and think about how that information is displayed in order to be able to understand the large amount of data points. Gordon introduced Visualisation of Quantitative Data from Edward Tufte, and also demoed some tools used by hypernumbers to display metrics, including internal test tools and SVN information.
Apologies for the tardiness of this post, the next meetup is scheduled for Wednesday, with talks on Django, couchDB and some others to be announced. See you there.
Media
Chris SEO Talk from Sam Collins on Vimeo.
Taku talking about multi character animation from Sam Collins on Vimeo.