While performing a long overdue catch-up of things I'd bookmarked to read later, I was introduced to the lovely Hebrew word "Firgun" by Jo Franchetti's talk about mentoring "Being The Help You Wish You'd Had".

[…] an informal modern Hebrew term and concept in Israeli culture, which describes genuine, unselfish delight or pride in the accomplishment of the other.

I've embedded the presentation from FFConf below, and it's well worth your time. Jo's slides can be found on Google Docs.

(Updated 10th December to add the video)

Last night I took part in the final JS Oxford of the year, which consisted of a series of lightning talks on all manner of subjects, from lessons learned in Developer Relations, to an introduction to Kubernetes.

I gave a very brief talk on cat gifs… wait, I mean getting started with CSS Grid (It’s written in Reveal.js so you can view the speaker notes by pressing <kbd>S</kbd>). I started by explaining some of the terminology around Grid, and then ran through the case study of converting this site to a Grid layout.

As always, it was an absolute pleasure to present at JS Oxford. They’re always interested in new speakers, so if you’re thinking about giving it a go, they’re a lovely welcoming crowd.

As it was a lightning talk I didn’t get a chance to link out to further reading, but I can do that here.

• Rachel Andrew’s excellent Grid by Example is full of useful information, examples, patterns, and resources. She has literally written the book on Grid.
• Grid Garden is a fun way to get your head around some of the general concepts.
• Jen Simmons’ has been doing some amazing experiments with Grid, and has also collated a useful list of resources on her Learn CSS Grid page.
• I have a continually growing list of Grid resources on Pinboard.

Last Wednesday (25th April) I gave a talk at the UX Oxford Speaker Series about the work I’ve been doing at the WDCS over the past year, and why to my friends it seemed like I had vanished off the face of the earth.

It’s a wide-ranging talk, looking at the problems with the current site, our initial research and findings, and the the content-out/responsive approach we've taken towards the redevelopment.

The talk itself lasts around a half-hour, with another half-hour Q&A session afterwards.

The books that I reference during the talk are:

• The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane
• Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson & Melissa Rach
• Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte
• Adaptive Web Design by Aaron Gustafson

And the list of useful links and further reading can be found on my Pinboard account under the tag uxoxford2012.

Thanks to UX Oxford for inviting me to speak, it was great to finally show everyone what I've been working on and I really enjoyed the questions after.

Fingers crossed we're due to go into public beta sometime in June.

(8th May 2018: Updated the "accompanying links" URL to point to Pinboard)

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Leeds GeekUp event. It was a 20:20 style presentation on a subject of my choosing, so I went for tips on running a successful online community.

Still flushed from the success of the Oxford Flickr Exhibition and having given a lot of recent thought to just how much we've achieved as a group in the last three years it seemed a good subject to tackle.

The talk seemed to go down very well with more than a few laughs elicited from the crowd. I had a really great time and the Leeds lot are a really nice bunch of people. It's good to see the grassroots level geekery flourishing all over the country.

20:20 style talks are pretty tricky and if I learnt one thing it's not have so many bullet points in my notes, there's really only time for one nugget per slide. It was a lot of fun though and I'm going to see if JP is up for trying them out at a future Oxford Geek Night.

I've posted my slides if you want to have a look but I'm not sure how much sense they'll make in isolation. Of more use are the ~~accompanying links on delicious~~ accompanying links on Pinboard.

Thanks to everyone at Leeds for a great night.

I've been meaning to post this since I got back from the Oxford Geek Night on Wednesday but I was struck down by a dose of man-flu (more commonly known as “a cold”). Apologies.

So, Wednesday 7th February 2007 was the inaugural Oxford Geek night event, at the Jericho Tavern. I was asked to give a talk as part of the first 'microslot' session, where 6 individuals talk for 5 minutes on a topic of their choosing, and I chose Drupal, seen as I spend the bulk of my development time hacking on it in one form or another.

The presentation started with a quick introduction to Drupal Core with a focus on the Taxonomy module. Then I walked people through the modules that I use the most: Pathauto, Views and the Content Construction Kit. Finally a whirlwind tour of some Drupal sites out in the wild including MTV UK, The Onion and Ask A Ninja.

Trying to give an overview of a system as large as Drupal in 5 minutes is a pretty hairy proposition, but I think I at least managed to pique peoples interest enough for them to want to find out more.

Overall the night was a great success. There were some really interesting talks, Simon Willison's OpenID presentation and James Wheare's Oxford bus times mash-up being two highlights for me personally. I also got to meet some cool new faces in the Oxfordshire development scene, and there was beer. Top night all round really.

Natalie will be putting up the slides and podcasts of each talk at some point, at which time I'll update this entry. In the meantime there are the obligatory pictures on flickr.

Update: Links to the slides and podcasts are now up on the Oxford Geek Nights site.

I've just been reading the slides (.pps) for a presentation Cal Henderson of Flickr gave at Web Design World, San Francisco last month. There are some very interesting numbers on the 4th page.

• Over 2 million users
• Over 93 million photos
• 368TB of hard disk space

It would be interesting to find out what percentage of those 93 million photos are licensed under a Creative Commons style license. I'm sure I came across an article that gave some numbers a while back but my google-fu is letting me down. Does anyone else remember seeing that?

(368 Terabytes!!)

Hat tip: Adactio