Well I attended only my second ever Open Coffee event on Tuesday at Old Broadcasting House in Leeds, and it was something that I enjoyed actually. For people who don’t know, Open Coffee is an informal meeting of geeks from the local area who get together regularly to chat and hang out for a couple of hours. One thing I didn’t know was that it is a global event with Open Coffee Meetings taking place in 82 different cities from San Francisco to Sydney, although I only thought it was a Yorkshire thing until someone told me! (No Scottish ones though, may have to start the Dundee version later in the year!)
I was a little daunted before I get there as I can be shy in new situations and these events are all about meeting new people and generating conversation so I wasn’t sure how it would go. As it turned out everyone was friendly and I met a range of interesting people who spoke to me about subjects ranging from mobile web development to producing TV adverts. A few of the people that I spoke to were also there for the first time and it was good to speak to other “newbies” as I felt like less of an invader to the event.
Overall I enjoyed going along to Old Broadcasting House and will be going back again next month.
In a follow up to my previous post about reference materials, I’m on the lookout for a PHP reference that will teach me the basics of this server side language. It is undoubtedly one of the most popular languages today and as such I feel it is important to swot up a bit this summer.
It will be a topic that is covered when I go to University in Dundee this summer, but I’d be interested in using some PHP in a personal project this summer before I go. Nothing fancy, but just so I’m able to understand the principles. I already have this book which I’m slowly working through, and I’ve recently discovered this tutorial site which I will take a look at, but wondered if there were any other recommendations that people have?
With the recent release of Firefox 3, and in response to Sharon’s post I thought it would be a good idea to include a list of what I feel are the best plugins available for Firefox, well according to me anyway.
I couldn’t live without this toolbar in Firefox as it can literally analyse every part of a website from the image details, CSS styling and div order. It has come in immensely handy when developing sites as it clearly outlies the different areas of the site whilst still displaying the site.
What I consider to be one of the best FTP clients available at the moment, it couldn’t be simpler to use. Local files are displayed on the left and the server files displayed on the right, with transfers executed at the click of a button. Connections are created by entering a few simple details provided by your web host and each time that connection is required it requires only a single click. I use this plugin on a daily basis to manage a number of sites and can’t find fault with it.
This is a great timesaver when registering on new forums or websites, as all your personal details are stored within this plugin and entered into the relevant fields at the touch of a button. It saves on having to re-enter the same details time and again on each new website that we register for.
Quite similar to the web development toolbar in that this allows for the display of the web pages structure such as HTML code and style attributes whilst looking at the site. One advantage that it has over the toolbar is that HTML and CSS are displayed simultaneously giving more of an overview of the page as a whole. However, I feel that it contains less features such as image manipulation and outlining capabilities of the web development toolbar.
OK, so not technically a plugin but if you’re like me and like to have your web apps all shiny and nice looking then themes are the best place to go for that! Almost any style can be applied from Mac styles to your favourite sports to retro styles. Easily downloaded and switches you could have hours of fun browsing the different themes available
