My friend Rob has been kickstarting the Liverpool geek talk sceene, with the guys at his place of work, organising and hosting SWIG. It’s grown from a small meeting discussing WordPress at InterconnectIT‘s office, to taking the upstairs at Leaf Tea Shop in Bold Street.

Rob had been on at me for a while to do something at a SWIG event, and upping the ante, he said they were doing a bigSWIG, and would I like to talk about one of my projects, MegaDrive.me. I’d asked Rob a hundred questions about WordPress – which MegaDrive.me is built in – so I did feel obliged to return the favour!

MegaDrive.me was a project I’d started to catalogue Japanese Mega Drive games, write reviews and comments, and learn WordPress on the way. I also stressed something which as an employer I think is very important.

The talk went well, I was up after my mate Dan Donald, and it was great to see loads of familiar faces from the Speak the Web event and Naconf the week before. You can find the slides from the talk on SlideShare.net.

Good things are happening in Liverpool, and it makes me proud to be part of it. Keep it going, Rob!

November again.

One year ago I broke my arm in three places and needed surgery after the .Net Awards party.

I get an invite to go to this years bash. Of course I go, right? I mean, lightning can’t strike twice.

And it didn’t.

We had a great time. I did four client visits before the first beer, and one during. Hooked up with Phil Sherry and Tweedy, joined by Techie Rob and a few more, then off to the do. The theme this year was “Rock”, as if you couldn’t figure that out from the picture above (from l-r: me, Rob Ryan, Dan Oliver, Bruce Lawson, Chris Mills and Patrick Lauke.

The Iron Maiden cover band were excellent, Guns2Roses… well, I’m not a G’n'R fan… and the last band, Conquest of Steel, with legendary Opera Dev Relations dude Chris Mills on drums utterly rocked.

So no shocking x-rays this year. No tales of train-catching heroics while on morphine. No more stupidity… for now.

Most of you know I’m a gaming nut. Most of you know I collect Japanese Mega Drive games.

I was browsing through the ace pcengine.co.uk site, watching videos, reading reviews, planning on buying a few more shmups, when I thought “why don’t we have something like this?”. The “we” being Mega Drive gamers.

Obviously, there are a lot of sites out there that details release dates, genres, covers etc. like the great SegaRetro.org, but there was something… complete about the PCE site. It had factual information, it had visual information, it had opinion. You could relate to the authors and what they were saying, and it did make me reassess my opinion on a game or two, and go and physically play R-Type again after browsing.

For me, the Japanese Mega Drive’s biggest charm was the box art. Glorious, explosive, full colour illustrations set the scene before picking up the box and looking at screenshots. Box art is where it’s at! When you stack them all together, there’s something really mesmerising about the colourful spines with Japanese type, topped with the red, green and black MD logo.

So,with my WordPress skills coming along well, I decided to see how far I could push myself and designed a site to show case the box art, the facts about the game, opinion of the review as well as providing a place for comment and discussion, screenshots and video.

Now, I knew I couldn’t do this on my own. Something my mate Ian Wilson had said to me kept ringing in my head. He’d edited some articles about Japanese Mega Drive games on Wikipedia, but the overlord page owners had reverted the changes. What’s the point in helping if it was going to be over-ruled? Sod it, let’s make our own! Together with Ian, and prolific games journalist Damien McFerren, I thought we’d have a good, knowledgeable trio to build such a site. We’re also all Mega Drive collectors, and it’s important to me that all experiences and thoughts about these games are from playing the original games on original hardware. Yeah, sad I know.

Please take a look at megadrive.me

Yes, know there’s a lot of work left to do! Writing the synopsis and opinion for all these games will take a long time. We’re only scanning cover art for games we own, so is an expensive journey ahead!

We’ve also got shirts and posters in the pipeline. These will be kept to limited runs, once sold, forever gone. We’re in talks with quality paper suppliers like Fedregoni and GF Smith, and print places like Team Impression, to make sure the quality is of the highest order. My good friend and fellow jaypee Dan Clarke is doing the illustration work, and the first piece looks awesome.

Stay tuned, and feel free to add your memories about some of the brilliant — and not so brilliant — Mega Drive games from 20 years ago!

Me and a few mates have been working on something…

Lucky me, I got tagged by heavy metal / web accessibility legend Chris Mills, so I shall enlighten you all, then tag seven friends who can do the same.

The rules

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Seven fascinating factoids about me

• I am a video game nut. I used to work at Sony in Liverpool and I collect Japanese Sega Mega Drive games.
• I have the dyslexia symptoms where you cannot tell right from left when pushed for an immediate answer. Obviously know my right from left, but if you ask me off the cuff, I *will* get it wrong. I wrote L and R on my hands when doing my driving test, for the instructors sake as much as mine!
• I’ve met one of my heroes. Trent Reznor. Only briefly, and he wasn’t a cock. Hero status upheld.
• I have titanium metal and 6 screws in my left arm, after breaking it in six places. No, they don’t set off metal detectors.
• I’ve studied five different languages in my time. French, Latin, Japanese, German and Spanish, the last being the only one I’m proficient in.
• I’m a big Star Wars freak. So much so that I have the original trilogy on Japanese LaserDisc…
• I do an awesome Yoda impression.

My last WordPress update to 3.2 couldn’t happen on one of our older shared servers, as it was running earlier versions of PHP and MySQL. I forget which was the culprit, but it meant I wasn’t getting the new lovely interface and other enhancements. I also run about 7–8 personal projects and friends sites off our company servers, which while they’re not big hitters or bandwidth guzzlers, I have been known to take the server offline while “trying something out”.

Therefore I decided to look at finally getting my very own hosting. Can you believe it? 15 years of making websites and I’ve never had my own hosting! I know a few friends use WebFaction, Melbourne Server Hosting and RackSpace, but I wasn’t convinced I’d need anything too big, or expensive. I run a few blogs, we keep all media on services like YouTube and Vimeo and average page impressions hover in the 30-100 a day per site, with exceptions for houseofninja.com and speaknspell.co.uk.

With this in mind, and already having an Amazon AWS S3 account, I did a bit of googlin’ about Amazon’s EC2 cloud hosting. We’ve all heard the phrase “cloud computing”, even my mum has, and it is very much the buzz at the moment. In brief, it’s about providing resizable, scalable, cheap on-demand computing. In my case, about letting me set up a server that operates on an “as used” basis, upping it’s processing power when called upon, pumping out bandwidth when hammered, and I only pay for those occasions.

At the moment on EC2, you can start a micro instance server, and not pay a penny for 12 months in terms of monthly fees. The first 1GB of transfer in and out is also free. Potentially, I get a years worth of hosting for nothing… and even without the free tier, it was working out to $1.08 for the month with 1GB in/out and an elastic IP. Yes, you read that right. one. dollar. eight. cents.

I tried a few instances out, one a Ubuntu instance with WordPress pre-installed, and was going to run one instance for each site… but thought better of that. One micro instance should be able to handle a bunch of sites. Time for more googlin’.

I ended up following this excellent tutorial from Caleb Ogden. Aimed at a mac user, clear, concise, I was up and running in about 30 minutes. There is little point in me re-dressing this for my step-through, just follow it. I have used Ubuntu/Linux a little, and am not afraid of the Terminal, but if you can follow instructions, you shouldn’t have any problems with the tutorial.

When done, you can then follow his walkthrough for configuring Virtual Hosts, so your instance can run multiple sites.

I will add that he doesn’t explain how you get Transmit/Filezilla/Expandrive working with your EC2 instance, due to sftp needing the .pem certificate. This quick reference allowed me in with my usual mac gui tools.

A quick config of my domain’s DNS and boom, this site is now hosted in the cloud.

Notes:

One thing to note, is that if you intend to let WordPress resize images to your defined media settings, you need to install the GD lib, like so;

# yum install php-gd

Then restart the httpd service.

Oh, and you’ll also need to edit the httpd.conf file (in /etc/httpd/conf) to allow the mod_rewrite rules for permalinks to work. Open the httpd.conf file in Vi, and look for this;

# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
# It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
#   Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
#
    AllowOverride None

Change None to All, then restart the httpd service again.

If you update to Lion OSX 10.7, you may not be able to connect with Transmit/Expandrive, so you’ll need to add the certicficate again…

ssh-add [yourkey].pem

Last night, I spoke at the latest Opera back standards>next gig, hosted at MadLab in Manchester.

Chris Mills put the call out months ago, asking if I’d like to take part, and could I herd up anyone else to speak. I recommended my fellow skating (albeit inline-blader!) and Fudge front-ender Mike Byrne as he’s a lively character, and certainly knows his shit, and that made four. Chris kicked off, followed, by myself and Typography Online.

Next up, Opera’s own Patrick Lauke talked (and talked) about media queries and viewports, which is very topical to work we’ve been doing this last week. Finally, Mike rocked up and went balls deep with CSS3 animations and transforms, loads to learn.

So, as promised, here’s my slides, and here’s some of the example code… enjoy.

Example type effects with CSS3 code

• 3D text 1
• 3D text 2
• 3D text 3
• Retro 3D
• Inset 1
• Inset 2
• Neon
• Stroke (webkit)
• Stroke and glow (webkit)

This week Howie and I attended a new conference in Nottingham, New Adventures in Web Design, organised by Simon Collison, or Colly as he’s better known.

Since Colly is possible the nicest guy on the internet and well respected, finding quality speakers wasn’t going to be a tough job, and for the conferences first show, the list was impressive. There were gripes from some quarters that all these speakers have been seen before, it’s the usual industry pundits, but I think that’s just sour grapes and being picky for the sake of it. Out of the ten speakers, I’d only seen five before.

In an effort to make conferences affordable and accessible, the venue was Colly’s hometown of Nottingham, which is in a great location, allowing access to people travelling from all points of the UK, the likes of Cole travelling from near Edinburgh, or Remy from Brighton, plus of course the foreigners who always make it over.

We hung out with Chris Mills, Dan Donald, Rob O’Rourke and of course, my long term partner in crime, Phil Sherry. On a side note, it was Phil’s 40th birthday last week, and I needed to get him a present. What can you buy a loud mouthed smart arse who likes to make his opinion or cutting wit known, especially in a crowded venue? Why, a megaphone of course! The look on a few people’s faces (especially the ones who know Phil) when we unveiled it before the conference kicked off was utter gold. Any situation is instantly made ten times more funny by adding a megaphone. Even the bouncers in the boozer the night before had to agree.

The Speakers

Dan Rubin – The New Language of Web Design
Cool, calm, collected, with a great delivery, Dan was an inspired choice to kick things off. His talk was about the language we use to define our trade, and how it’s about time this language matured and became “ours” instead of borrowing phrases or meaning from other trades, such as “page”, “fold” and “bleed”.

Mark Boulton – A New Canon
Mark talked about the need for a New Canon, a new set of rules for design interactive content in today’s digital age. Screen sizes and content delivery devices are all different sizes and shapes, meaning a lot of old ideas and methods are clunky. We need to design from ‘content out’ – not ‘canvas in’ as traditionally is done – to create connectedness and bind the content to the device. Mark’s delivery was a little nervous to begin, as he himself has acknowledges on tweets, but he soon found his stride. I’d not seen Mark talk before, and admire his design and typographical approach, so found this enjoyable.

Sarah Parmenter – Crafting User Experiences
I missed Sazzy‘s talk at DIBI, having stayed in a Build track, so it was a first for me. Sarah focused on the more emotional level of design and UX. Rapid cognition, sensation transference and how to connect on an emotional level to influence actions and reactions. A few good branding examples involving Coke and Pepsi showed where she was heading, and the colour chart that maps colours to different emotions around the world was great (for instance, while red may mean love in the West, it’s green in some Eastern countries). Unfortunately, I think the session lost it’s way a little towards the end, a few more strong examples of execution would have been good as Sazzy alluded to how you could use the emotional ties in UX for a shopping cart system, but while the ballon and card marketing for her agency was good, but I’d have preferred a more recognised brand, and not self-focused.

Refreshments –

Elliot Jay Stocks – With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
I like Elliot. He’s one of these people who can design, program, draw, play musical instruments and basically – I think – turn his hand to anything creative. He’s also really bloody modest. His session was a rant, a rebellion against the over use of the Web 2.0 look that is prevalent in online design. He calls it the “distraction of the real”, trying to make everything look like a real object by overuse of bevels, shadows and no real consideration to content. Good examples about traditional design styles, a look at print design, humour, typography and actually admitting that “giving in was ok” when a client wanted some of these drop shadow and real adornments, based on their audience. He’d get on well with our Creative Director who bloody hates the over embellishment by designers who’ve learnt “on the job”.

Jon Tan – Language and the Lizard Brain
A comment Jon‘s friend made to him, about the brain having a small area that literally had no language. This struck a chord with Jon, and he talked about connections on an emotional level, and how we can elicit response from colour and shape, without knowing meaning. He used a couple of typographical examples for this with the words love and hate (written in a foreign language) in fonts that said exactly the opposite. He showed how the designer for Blue Note records could design a cover that spoke volumes about the audio content of the record, despite not particularly liking jazz, because someone had written what kind of emotional response and feeling the record should produce. He even wove in a Bruce Lee slide and quote to illustrate his points. Good stuff!

Q&A session 1 –
A few questions that had been sent in via the twitter back channel, and a few from the crowd.

Lunch –
Interesting point about lunch. Because the conference was running a little behind schedule, Colly and the organisers had been following the back channel on Twitter – #naconf – and adjusted timings accordingly, cutting things short when people were complaining about being hungry around 1ish. Very smart.

Tim Van Damme – Designing On Solid Foundations
Tim tackled the issues of  one hit wonder, pixel heavy sites compared to relatively clean and minimal design on sites that keep you coming back for more. Calling us all Web Bums, for doing the same kind of job and getting paid as we do for free for our own projects, he urged us to make lists about the Good and Bad after a project, see where we can refine our processes. He talked a lot about best approaches for handling clients and the process in general. Tim’s delivery was a bit stilted, not because English is not his native tongue, but because it felt like this talk was brand new, and he was still getting to grips and trying it on.

Greg Wood – Art Direction & Editorial Design on the Web: Does it Work?
One of Greg‘s first slides had us laughing, about being able to piss a 50 mile bike ride, and his slides were all beautifully presented. Greg set out to illustrate the connection between seeing and experiencing, and how good art direction will connect and resonate with a reader with greater impact. And he was right, as he backed it up with stats from his own personal test with styled and unstyled content. Very interesting results, and I know Howie really got a lot from this talk. I think this may have been Greg’s first talk to a big audience, as he began brightly, but his delivery dried a little as he neared the end. Biggest reason for this, I reckon, was that he literally read out what was on the (well designed) slides. Still, the actual message and stats were very enlightening.

Veerle Pieters – Unraveling the Mysteries of Inspiration
Veerle‘s choice of subject was going to cause problems. Inspiration is unmeasurable and almost indefinable, you set the conditions up time and time again, sometimes you get it, sometimes you don’t. Her artwork and illustration was beautiful, and I found her lilting accent a little hypnotic, but it certainly did not get in the way of the delivery. Veerle talked her way through a piece of work, how she got started, how she was inspired, how she mixed it up to change track and put her mark on it. Good slides but nothing earth shattering. I think the best takeaway from Veerle’s session was the sources of her inspiration, her Firewall. She chose a tough subject to articulate, and that did show at times.

Refreshments –

Andy Clarke – Once Upon a Time In The West
Like him or loathe him, Malarkey can tell great story. Confident, well dressed and sharp wits and words, he is a great speaker. I’ve seen him twice before at Speak the Web and DIBI, and enjoyed them immensely. This talk was different. There wasn’t one slide with code on. There was no rant about supporting IE and designing in a browser. He talked about telling a story, using comic books formatting to speed up, slow down and give sense of size and space through clever boxing of content. He did apply this to how design can be expansive and let the brain fill in the blanks and how this may work on new devices like the iPad, but generally, we were there to think a little differently than we may normally do, sans grids.

Brendan Dawes – Produced for Use
I’ve known Bren for about 15 years. I’ve seen him on his soap box and riffing in a studio and on stage, but bloody hell he was on fire at #naconf. Bren’s been trying to declutter his life, and get rid of consumer products he doesn’t use, but get excited about the inherent beauty in products that do their job well. Crap tea strainers and paper clips from different countries, delivered in his “favourite uncle” style, I tell you, he had us all in stitches. Stand out line was when advocating a bit of digital play time, he said “Yeah, it’s in Flash, and guess what? Nobody died!” to which we gave him a round of applause. Bren’s approach to work is very creative and not tied to a platform or medium. He just makes things. A few glimpses at actual live projects and his latest acquisition, a Maker Bot, added oomph to his ranting, and showed he’s not full of shit. Great pick to be on last, he really gave the conference a massive, massive finish.

Q&A session 2 –
Again, a few questions that had been sent in via the twitter back channel, and a few from the crowd.

Thank you and goodbye –

After party –
The after party was at Escucha (Spanish for “listening”) where we got to catch up with all the online friends you don’t see often, or have yet to meet. Great bunch of people, from luminaries like Jon Hicks (taller than I thought) and Elliot mixing it with the crowd and chatting, to a bunch of Irish design students, who had the balls to introduce themselves and listen intently to industry advice.

Thoughts –
Colly has undoubtedly given the best inaugural birthing to a conference he possibly could (sorry DIBI, he just about pinched your newly acquired crown!) A brilliant community feel, great mix of speakers, lovely venue and exceptionally good price point made it all very worth while. If I could change anything, I’d move the date, as so soon after Christmas, some people’s pocket have taken a pounding, but I am really looking for a reason to be pick on here. I’m very much looking forward to next years event, and seeing how other people can up their ante in the aftermath of such a high quality event.

Thank you Colly and team, it was awesome.

Links –
Flickr group
Twitter stream

My mate Phil sent me a link to this forum thread, which inspired this post…

My SysErr WP install had been stuck on 2.8.5  for a while, due to a bunch of full dbs and laziness, so finally moved things across and sorted it out. Bringing it kicking and screaming to the WP 3.0.x era wasn’t easy, as I had the Automatic Upgrade problem where an upgrade file starts downloading, but the update screen stalls, giving no further information, and the file stays at 0 bytes.

After an hour or two on a Saturday morning, I finally found the solution. So, future me, if you get stuck upgrading a WordPress blog with the stalling of an Automatic Ugrade (that phrase should help me find an answer in Google!), you need to add these 2 lines to the .htaccess file…

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

And it’ll be fine.

(if not, increasing memory might help!)