Sometimes it's excellent fun to work with somebody to produce a website in a day. With no requirement for ongoing support, just get it up and running, instant gratification. In a way, it says, "Look what we can do when we set our minds to it!"

winchesterwebscene.co.uk

Yesterday, @sydlawrence phoned me to ask if i'd like to help make a new site for the Winchester Web Scene. Without a second thought, i said, "DEFINITELY!" We got together at 3pm today at the Bridge Patisserie. We drank lots of coffee, went on to the Bishop on the Bridge, then went back to Syd's house and ate pizza. We got the whole site designed, coded, integrating with Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, Gravatar and Campaign Monitor for email subscriptions, with a blog plus comments, events list and RSS feeds … in about 5 hours.

It was nice that two Winchester web companies, Marmalade on Toast and Eden Development were able to combine talent to work on a fun social project together. The two of us had a great time making it!

The site gives a far greater prominence to the Winchester Web Scene than the old Ning site did. Still in its first few hours of existence, the site has already had 71 unique visitors. The future of the Winchester Web Scene is looking very bright!

The next event is a barbeque at the Hyde Tavern on the 6th July from 7pm. If you live near Winchester and are interested in anything to do with the web, you're very welcome to come along! :)

Just a little notice to say that i have enabled Disqus on my blog. It's a pretty clever tool that links up comments on blogs all over the Internet. When you hover over the picture of somebody who has commented on my blog, you also see some of the comments they have left on other blogs. You might also see their Twitter status, or get a link to their Flickr account, their Delicious account, their Facebook.

Here's an example of how it can look:

It's a really neat way of bringing the web closer together. For me it's also a great advantage in that it immediately gave me nested comments and the ability to send email replies to people who have commented. I thought i was going to have to make some fairly hefty changes to my WordPress theme in order to enable nested comments, but it turns out Disqus can just do it all for me!

Oh yes, you also get to rate other people's comments up or down, youtube-stylee! ;)

Disqus is particularly good in that it works across multiple blogging platforms. So i installed the WordPress plugin, but there are also plugins for Blogger, Moveable Type, Tumblr and more. Wouldn't it be great if LiveJournal would take it up? :)

Thank you to ChrisMDP for finding Disqus and telling me about it! :)

Approximately a year ago, you may have wished me a happy 2008. If you did, thank you! I had a pretty awesome year!

Reading back in my blog, it feels like a long year. In fact, i noticed a stark contrast between the two halves of the year, pivoting on the moment i got my new job. I was amazed by how much of a difference it made in my perception: the first half of the year feels much longer than a year ago, but everything since my new job feels very recent. Yet the two halves are separated by just one weekend! I also noticed how many more blog posts i made in the earlier half of the year compared to the latter.

So it's new year's eve again, the time when i get all retrospective and nostalgic. I actually quite like staying in on new year's eve and blogging. Here is a summary of the year.

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Who knew that coding could be such a social activity! I really like GitHub, with its ability to fork people's code base, apply your own changes, offer it up to be merged back in, see the difference logs, comment on the difference logs … ah, now that last one's genius!

Somebody happened upon this quiet little commit from DHH … yes, the DHH, creator of Ruby on Rails. The bright spark goes and posts it to Reddit, prompting the world and its duck to chime in with an opinion! It's quite funny reading through the comments, both on Reddit and on GitHub.

What does the commit do? Not a lot. It's what we call syntactic sugar: aliasing something in code as something else. It means we'll be able to do this:

['a', 'b', 'c', 'd'].third
=> 'c'

Of course, i have an opinion too. I can see why it could be useful, but i don't really think it is worthy of being in the Rails core code. I doubt i will ever use it. I also agree with the person who says it widens the gap between Ruby and Rails. When Array#first is available in Ruby, people will wonder why Array#second is not.

I do wonder, if anyone other than DHH had submitted this 'patch', whether it would have been accepted into core Rails.

After laughing at this thread over lunch today, one of my colleagues sent me an instant message:

Coffee.third?

I replied:

return true

I think it's good that people are looking at the commits, seeing what's going into Rails, and having their say about it. This is community-driven development at its best! Cheers, GitHub! :)

Update: DHH has responded! It now only goes up to fifth … but Array#forty_two has been added in as compensation! DHH calls it accessing "the reddit".

Resumo: Mi tre ĝuis Bifeston hieraŭ. Mi vidis malnovajn amikojn, amikiĝis kun novaj amikoj, kaj faris abundo de trikado.

So i am really glad we went to BiFest yesterday! That was definitely one of the best i have ever been to. Nice points were: it was well spread out with plenty of spaces we could go and not feel cramped up together, they provided a buffet tea for us, we got to watch Doctor Who (yay!!) and the weather was simply amazing for us!

I was able to see and catch up with some old friends and make some new ones. It seemed as if there were several new people there, but there were also many people noticeably missing, which was a shame.

The craft corner was a massive success, building on previous years. I think there were at least ten people doing some sort of knitting or crocheting during the day. I like to joke that bisexuality is synonymous with knitting! In truth, i believe it is all thanks to Ludy! I got a lot done on my blanket yesterday (pictures to come later today!) and i taught somebody how to knit! Yay! :) I also got chatting to somebody else about crochet, who had a totally excellent idea of a group crochet project where multiple people can work on the same thing simultaneously, using multiple threads, joining in or dropping out as they please. This sounds like something for BiCon! :D

Doctor Who was so much fun with a room full of people watching it together! We were all laughing and cheering and shouting at the television! A very interactive television watching experience!

All in all, i had a great time, met some lovely people with whom i'm hoping to keep in touch, and i do hope we'll be able to go to BiCon this year. I am thinking of running an Esperanto workshop at BiCon, to introduce other people to the delights of the language! :)

Last night my dad came round to visit, tonight i had a lovely evening with a friend i used to know from university. That was really very special to see each other again. Tomorrow i am going to stay with nyecamden for the night, and Friday aster13 is coming for the weekend!

This is really very extremely social for me, and i hope Aster doesn't mind that i might be rather worn out by the weekend! I'm sure we'll be able to take it easy and have a nice relaxing weekend together!

The C# course continues to go well. Today i learnt about ArrayLists, HashTables, Queues and Stacks, interfaces, delegates (pointers to functions), events, error handling, and some of the finer points of object-oriented methodology.

Happy Easter to those who celebrate it! It has snowed the last 3 days in Winchester, and is snowing right now. My friend^[0] Jack even managed to catch a photo of some snow settling!

We had a lovely Purim. My partner made Hamentaschen and we read the book of Esther. I love that story! We had Shabbat again yesterday, which was also very nice and we had a friend come to visit for the afternoon.

Contrary to my earlier post, i did actually go out to see part of the Winchester Passion. We arrived just in time to see Jesus coming down the high street. We followed down to the Buttercross where there was some sort of trial i suppose, but we couldn't see because there were too many people. We skipped to the cathedral and hung around to see Jesus get killed, and then it was too cold so we went home again! I think, as a piece of street theatre, it was very well done. It was really well attended too: well over 1000 people turned up, i should say. Jack also got a little photo of some of the crowd.

Today is a day for catching up on chores, and i am working on a few enhancements to MyChores.

[0] 'Friend' as in we are friends on Facebook. We've never actually met in reality, but what does that matter these days, heh!

I feel like a Life Review is in order. But i'll keep it short. [Edit] no i didn't! It's kinda long!

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I have finally succumbed to the dreaded Facebook! Over the past few months i have been consistently ignoring all Facebook requests … but today i find out that one of my siblings is using Facebook for a blog, and i do want to keep in touch … so i have joined.

Things i don't like … i can't use OpenID, i have to provide my full name, there doesn't seem to be any RSS to keep track of friends (you have to sign in to the Facebook blog platform)

Things i like … it is a clean, well thought-out interface (unlike myspace!) and … well … maybe i'll find some other things to like about it later!

Things that just scare me … how easy it is to find other people, and whether i'm going to be inundated with faces from my past now. I found the group of the theatre company that i used to be in, and there are so many people there i recognise. I'm not sure whether i want to be in touch with them all again. Maybe it's just because i know i'm not very good at keeping in touch with people, and i don't want to disappoint people. Perhaps i really do want to be in touch with them, but i'm not sure they'll want to know me. I just feel apprehensive.

And yet, in contradictory news … today i have been making the XFN and FoaF to specify my other identities, and links to friends. I have a nice sidebar on my blog to show them all, and i found a good FoaF visualisation tool.

Well, we shall see how it goes with Facebook. Chances are i may really enjoy it once i get used to it. Right now i'm going to upload a few of my holiday photos.

This is EXACTLY how i feel today:

Having a very lovely day, got all my chores done early, and enjoying time with a good friend today. We had a lovely walk around Winchester, which looked especially beautiful in all this sunshine, and enjoyed listening to a great jazz band in the high street! Today i feel particularly aware of why i love living in Winchester! :D