Tag: ianforrester

24 ways to impress your friends

24 ways to impress your friends site

So I've been pretty quiet about 24ways to impress your friends this year. The reason why is because I've been writing a tip titled Making XML beautiful again to go into the 24ways collection for 2006. The tip centres around a client side XSL transformation on a ATOM feed. I thought this would be simplier that RSS because I would have to create templates to support RSS 0.91, 0.92, 1.0 and 2.0. ATOM 1.0 feeds are also very much a like so a safe ground to start on (although a lot of ATOM 0.3 feeds use a different date element).

The actual XSL took me all of about 5mins to write but the explaining took a good few weeks. I have spell checked it, grammer checked and run it past the eyes of Sheila (my XSL friend). Sheila helped a lot on making it sound less like me talking and more like me writing, but there is still bits of my twisted humour in there. I also wanted to explain the difference between client-side and server-side transformations but decided it was out of scope. As was spending 3 paragraphs on what XSL is, which I finally cut down to 1. There is also something else which has been bugging me while writing the tip. Firefox 2.0, I can not work out if its actually broken when it comes to client side transformations or not. Some people seem to think so, but I'm getting just odd results like the output escaping not working. I've tried to install Firefox 1.5 in a Virtual Machine but I can't get it online (for many reasons). So I'm currently loading up a old Ubuntu Boot CD on a spare machine. I'm sure the comments will come flooding in soon.

Anyway big thanks to Drew McLellan for thinking about me when relaunching the 24ways project this year. Maybe Drew took it to heart when (in a good way of course) I asked why he didn't use XSL for parsing Microformats at BarCampLondon. I was still amazed he used a non rules based language to parse Microformats. It shows talent. Thanks again Drew, I just hope it comes across as well, as the other excellent authors on 24ways..

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My BBC talk at Ravensbourne College

Ravensbourne

So on Tuesday afternoon, I gave a lecture at Ravensbourne College to a mix of interaction design, broadcast and graphic design students. John told me, it just needed to be inspiring. So I was torn between my day job at BBC Backstage and things I think about daily. So I started with my presentation about what is backstage. I got to the 3rd slide before the whole lecture turned into a dynamic conversation about the BBC. It was fantastic, the students and staff wanted to know where the BBC was going in the future. Along that path we explorered the questions of advertising on the BBC's international facing website and the Microsoft BBC agreement. Miles did say this

I did find myself reminded of John Battelle's description of AltaVista as it was fucked over by DEC (just prior to the sale to Compaq): “a mammal chained to a dinosaur more likely than not will get trampled.

While I don't know the details of the agreement, there were lots of thoughts and worries about the future of non-DRM content coming out of the BBC. Someone mentioned Dirac and asked whats happened to that? There was also a serious debate about why we didn't write our own DRM? The suggestion was that DRM in understandable if we can't make up our mind between DRM and NoDRM at this point. And you know what thats actually a good question, even if we internally couldn't build it. Maybe someone else could have from a netrual position. I've heard good things about Open Source DRM but not seen any marjor adopters. This would be an ideal project for the BBC to trial. Hey maybe even a Backstage Project? Someone (i think miles) did ask what would happen if someone today created a videoplayer which looks and feels like the BBC player which is being worked on? I said we would certainly be interested in it from a prototype point of view and if it was that good, who knows what might happen.

Although most of this could sound like BBC bashing, it was far from that. It was concerned people wanting to understand why certain choices were being made without them and wondering what they could do to make sure the BBC values lives on in some form into the future.

For any students who might be reading, I uploaded the raw html from the cache of my desktop RSS reader. I hope to clean it up a little more in the near future.

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Geek and Geekhag podcast 14 – Why a Second Life?

Me and Sarah did a podcast last night, number 14 (really 13 but lets not go there). This time we discuss Second Life, Myspace and Youtube, Feast of Fools and Sarah's new (non-hand me down) phone. The other good news is that Sarah has agreed to do the podcast every week now. So expect more geek and geekhag next week.

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Geek and Geekhag Podcast 13 – Race and interracial stereotypes

Me and Sarah did a podcast last night about some comments on her blog recently.The post was about race and interracial stereotypes and centres around a piece in the guardian over a year ago (march 2005). Now someones called werdz has decided to write a comment and get back at Sarahs comments on the original guardian article. Sarah felt it best to reply by a podcast.

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Senior Producer at backstage.bbc.co.uk

So before the modern equivalent of the rumour mills start rolling (maybe blogs or more like myspace and bebo). I'd like to let you all know that I've been offered the position of Senior producer of backstage.bbc.co.uk and of course I have accepted it. This does mean crossing London everyday (SE18 – Woolwich Aresenal to W12 – White City and back everyday) but this also means my main job is to open up the BBC a little more everyday. What more can you ask for? I already have plans in my head for increasing the profile of backstage and of course providing more public feeds and apis. There's also lots of areas where backstage could go which hasn't been visited yet. So don't worry folks I'm on the case with fresh thoughts and enthusiasm like you've never seen before. But to start off, we need to work out the details such as a start date, etc. Hey and theres the first british barcamp and geekdinner's to be arranged. Talking of which… if anyone knows a place where we could hold a geekdinner in Brighton on the 9th September please do let me know.

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