It is my second year attending Barcamp Cork and I thought that this one was even better one than last year. It had great location (Webworks in Cork centre), tasty snacks and lot of interesting speakers. I do believe however that social media dominated most of the talks (or maybe it is just me attending those kinds?).

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to stay for drinks. Going back to Dublin does take a while. But I was rather happy to meet everyone I met on the night. Looking forward to next barcamps. Presentations should be uploaded soon on the website. Some photos from my iPhone are below.

AudioBoo

Even thought I did hear about AudioBoo before I never actually downloaded application. For those of you, who actually do daily podcasts – application will be soon available on Google Android.

Bootcamps

I really loved Sabrina Dent bootcamps – going through different websites and telling some good / bad things about them. It might be harsh, but it is always usable.

12 free tools for start-ups

Really loved this session by Brian Walsh and I will try to check out those tools which I still dont know:

1. Dropbox – free file sharing
2. Hootsuite – social media tool
3. pixlr – get graphics from web
4. SEO Firefox – tells you seo stats for sites
5. Firebug – allows you to modify HTML / CSS yourself
6. Google Webmaster tools – for sitemaps & other things
7. Prezi.com – zooming presentation tool
8. Photoshop – everyone can do that
9. CuteFTP or FireFTP for downloading / uploading files that has been changed
10. Google Adwords – for getting traffic to your website
11. WordPress – for blogging, simple first website (and don’t forget to use AllInOneSEO plugin)
12. Google Analytics – to know traffic sources, visitor browsers, countries etc for your country
13. ZohoCRM – how much sales calls you have to do to get stabile revenue?

Hmm… somehow I got 13 instead of 12 advertised. Not sure which one wasn’t there. I’m sure we talked about all.

How to create a social media strategy in 10 steps

Conor from Connector always amazes me with different interesting ideas. To hear more about his 10C tips, watch video here.

And more..

I really loved Catherine Wilson talk about e-mail Newsletters. If you are interested, definitely contact her.

I loved  Elaines tips for how not to run away from your business and how actually start earning something. One amazing coach!

And finally my last session was about debt collection from Ciara Crossan. I do believe that it is very vital question in recession. Even listening at her experience made me think.

p.s. if anyone is free enough to help me with some English texts, I would really appreciate it!

I was very, very surprised that I started to get DM and replies from my followers that everything I did on game was posted on my twitter feed. I was spamming all my followers with posts like :

“@gita_m has just done a job in Drug Deal in #MobsterWorld http://bit.ly/A9N4Yabout 20 hours ago from Mobster World”

And this feed was really, really long… So then I decided not to play this game any more.

Today I received DM from few people saying that this Mobster World is direct messaging all my contacts and asking them to join my Mafia family. I went into MobsterWorld again and there wasn’t anything telling me how can I stop it. Even “Contact Us” lead to the gmail e-mail that got no response.

Finally with help from my twitter fellows (special thanks to @brenstrong @antgalvin) I found that in Settings > Connections tab you can “Revoke” application access to my account. Thanks god its gone for good! Now I should do the same on facebook as I did accepted some gifts from friend of mine there and it might be spamming my friends

So the bottom line:

Please ignore all DM I sent to you and don’t play this game! You gonna loose all your followers.

If you see anyone else “playing” this game then tell them its not worth it.

Synergy Centre holds 1 lunchtime and 1 breakfast seminar every month for startups and SMEs. We were invited to talk about SaaS applications on 10th of August.

Here is the presentation of saas-lifecycle. Send me mail if you want to know more about:

• how new features kill your applications and why
• why scalability planning is important from the start of the project
• why relaying on existing software / frameworks isn’t always the best solution
• why applications are rewritten every 3-5 years
• how we make web apps the way users like it

I’m not a Microsoft fan as I do love Apple more, but it is always important to know news from competitors. I do love testing so seeing what’s new in IE8 was very valuable for me. It was also interesting to see their new search engine Bing.com which I still haven’t tried. If you want to know more about IE – try their blog.

Let’s make quick list of new things that seemed important to me in IE8:

• Standards compliance – their new IE won’t be compatible with previous IE however it will now follow all standards – CSS, HTML, ACID2 and DOM
• Rendering website to previous IE versions. This is a big benefit to all developers and testers. Finally we don’t have to install numerous IE versions to make sure our site looks good on all of them. It is also possible to set a meta tag for website to make it allways be generated as one previous IE versions.
• Web Slices – follow only the part of site you are interested. E.g. in independent.ie there is section of latest news. You can slice only that section and see it almost like bookmark (hard to explain it, I know). All you have to do is add to the < div > tag text class=”hslice”. To be honest is very similar to Apple Web Clips which have been around for quite a while. There is still no standard for Web Slices.
• Accelerator – it is possible to add pop-up menus for different words on sites. E.g. if I select word Paris, my pop-up menu might contain hotel deals, flights or search for it in Google.
• Be a Search Provider – IE8 allows you to use different searches from websites. E.g. not only Google search, but also independent.ie search. You can do this with simple XML.
• IEAK – build your own IE8 with settings you want your users to use and let them download your version
• As usual there is a lot of improvements in security – anti-phishing, data protection, XSS filters, InPrivate browsing and InPrivate blocking. And I hope they won’t do the same mistake as before where there was more security than usability.
• Improved Performance allowing more threads and connections as well as JavaScript improvements
• New Developer tools – JavaScript debugger, HTML&CSS debuggers, JavaScript profile

Second presentation was made by Sabrina Dent. I have been looking at her blog before and I really love design.

Her presentation was meant to start with Froggie ad from 1955. However, there was connection problems so we missed it. We received few really great tips on how designer should work.

1. Eliminate choices. If you give customer too much choices of design, he gonna pick what he thinks important from all of them. So at the end you will get good for nothing design. 90% clients will be happy with first version you send to them.
2. Like Yoda be – to be honest I didn’t got this point
3. Just say No and don’t explain. If client wants some small changes (from his perspective) and you know it will take few days, say No. He took you do the job and he shouldn’t teach you how to do it. You don’t teach dentist how to fix your teeth, don’t you?

After this presentation I really understand why people love Sabrina. She has really strong personality and does what she loves to do.

See more at the presentation slideshows here

Following paragraph is my summary of what I understood from the evening. Please correct me if I’m wrong at some points.

As I understood ESB is message layer that communicates between components within enterprise system. There are asynchronous ESB listening processes that handle each message request and distribute them. It is good for scaling, but ESB integration needs big money investment, constant monitoring and it has large learning curve. This is one of the reasons it’s not usually implemented in small systems / small organisations.

You can read more about ESB at Wikipedia or buy a book about it

I would argue that OSSBarCamp was really bar camp. In real Bar Camp sessions are proposed and scheduled by attendees, mostly on-site, typically using white boards or paper taped to the wall. Most of the talks was scheduled beforehand and there wasn’t much discussions what people want to hear. If we say it was conference then it was presented marvellous. Thanks to Jaime and Laura for organising it.

I heard 2 great talks in OSSBarCamp. First talk was about introduction to Ubuntu. I’m not really familiar with it so it was interesting to listen to it. Second talk I went to (there was 3 parallel talks all the time) was about green party’s IT policy. We got to the few suggestions on how make people use it and implement it in practise. Great way to actually impact what will be going on in IT world in future. Can’t wait to see real policy, which will be created in next few months.

Girl Geek Day was organised by Laura and supported by Martha Rotter from Microsoft. We got really nice dinner from Celtic kitchen and talked about different difficulties what women get working in IT. Girl geeks are minority in IT so we work harder and it’s difficult to achieve things. And sometimes we do feel lonely because people don’t take us serious.

I had to run away so I didn’t stay for the rest (drinks afterwards and few more talks), however I did enjoy it. All photos taken by my camera are blurry again (I really should buy new camera), so no photos this time.

Update – got photos from Girl Geek Day