e! Science News is a revolutionary website where absolutely everything is fully automated by harvesting content from other websites RSS feeds, article tags, reciprocal links, and no doubt many other techniques: http://esciencenews.com/

At the fully automated extreme it’s a fairly niche idea (as most organisations will want at least some control over their content), however it could certainly be a powerful framework to use for a single section of a website.

Here’s a little more information on how it works: http://esciencenews.com/about

I must have read dozens of books about programming and related disciplines. Some are dull as ditchwater, but a lot of these are admirably clear in explaining and presenting the information they need to get across. Very, very few are actually what I’d consider a good read, however.

So, for the record, here are three notable exceptions - techy books that made me laugh out loud:

• Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing (online or hard copy)
  This book from MIT lecturer, photographer and all-round brilliant person Philip Greenspun is a great introduction to database-backed websites. Although the system he describes (ArsDigita Community Server - a mix of AOLServer, Tcl and Oracle) is esoteric and pretty much defunct, the quality of writing is excellent, and all of the underlying concepts hold true. Philip speaks with humour, passion, and has a healthy skepticism of Internet Entrepreneurs (”the world’s grubbiest club”).
• Dive into Python (online or hard copy)
  This is a super-fast-paced introduction to Python for experienced programmers, written by Mark Pilgrim. In it, he provides an extremely comprehensive introduction to Python and some real-world programming examples. However, more than this, he lets you see the kind of mindset you need to get the most out of it, as well as pre-empting a lot of potential pitfalls and nagging questions that you would have about the language and his example code. Most importantly of all, he does so with accessible prose and understated wit.
• why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby (online and hard copy)
  Written by somebody known only as why the lucky stiff, this is quite the most bonkers computer programming book I’ve ever come across. A huge, meandering journey across the Ruby landscape, copiously illustrated with cartoons and peppered with surreal asides. If you looking for ‘just the facts’, you’ve come to the wrong place, but if you want to be hugely entertained while picking up a fair bit of Ruby, then this is the book for you. Hilarious and utterly, utterly brilliant.

So… those are my picks. Leave a comment with your own suggestions for other techy books that should be considered as cracking good reads.

Last Saturday saw Brighton’s first Hack Day, organised by the Farm collective as part of the Digital Festival, with the venue hire (and sherbet flying saucers) sponsored by Cogapp.

Around 40 assorted coders, thinkers and designers turned up at the Brighthelm Centre for a day of hackery: after a brief introduction by Paul Silver, it was time for everybody to ‘tag’ themselves using specially created stickers to indicate their abilities and requirements. Then we went round the room with each person saying who they were and what sort of thing they’d like to work on.

After that, we all divided into small groups to work on our chosen projects. I worked with Paul Perrin, Jonny Cross and Georges Panis to create a Facebook app called ‘de-facer’ which allows you to scribble on any of your friends’ profile pictures using a Flash interface, and to have the resulting picture saved as an image and uploaded to a Facebook album. It’s still distinctly a work-in-progress, but if you’re interested, you can try it out by adding it to your Facebook profile.

There followed 6 hours of coding, interrupted only by lunch (sponsored by Magpie), and then it was time for the demos of the final projects. Apart from our own, the projects that were presented were as follows:

• Real-world text adventure by the Coding Dojo group
  A crazy Heath Robinson unholy mashup. A text-based adventure game was enhanced to allow real-world interaction, such as pouring hot coffee on a temperature-sensing chip, or scanning cards embedded with RFID tags. Extremely inventive and successfully delivered on time - a testament to Scrum and the the agile programming techniques that they used.
• Jokes by Tweet by Paul Silver and others
  This group used the Twitter API so that when you follow this ‘person’ it tells you a new joke every hour.
• In-browser bluescreen compositing by Jamie Campbell
  Jamie harnessed C++ and Python to allow you to mix bluescreened photos with other backgrounds within your browser.
• Semantic web friend finder by Tom Morris
  Tom created a PHP class to allow you to query RDF data to find related friends across different social media networks. This will be released as open source, and in a variety of languages shortly.
• ScOolBOok by Stamati Crook
  A web application to allow school children to upload and manage programmes they’ve written in scratch. The design aim was to be a ‘Facebook for 8 year olds’

All in all Hack Day was a great success. There were loads of interesting and passionate people there, which made for a great atmosphere. Here’s to another one next year!

Links:

Hack Day blog

Photos on Flickr

    &    

Hot on the heels of barcamp comes another techy unconference, and this time we’re sponsoring it! Yes, it’s Brighton’s first Hack Day, which will take place on Saturday 17th November at the Brighthelm Centre.Hack Day is organised by local freelancer collective The Farm, as part of the Digital Festival.

Details are sketchy at the moment, but the basic idea seems to be that people from all walks of life (well, designers, developers and ‘ideas people’ at the very least) get together and spend the day in small groups creating fun projects.

Tickets are free, but limited to 80 places, so keep your eye on the official site at www.farmhackday.com to make sure you get a place once registration opens.

If you’ve got any ideas for projects that you’d like to see us work on, please leave a comment.

Last weekend, I was fortunate enough to attend the first ever Barcamp to be held here in Brighton. For the uninitiated, Barcamp is a grass-roots ‘unconference’ where all the attendees are also the speakers, and is a great way to meet those interesting, passionate and creative geeks who are busy shaping the digital world.

Thanks to the contributions of the organisers and sponsors, the event was a great success, with around 70 attendees, including representatives from BT and Yahoo! as well as a host of people from local companies. There were nearly 100 talks over the weekend - my only regret is that because there were 5 streams running at once, you didn’t have time to see all the things that looked interesting.

Highlights of the talks I managed to attend included:

• Jim Purbrick on why everything is web-enabled (and he does mean everything)
• Mikel Maron on OpenStreetMap
• Paul Downey on interesting phone hacks
• Tom Morris on querying the Semantic Web
• Paul Annett’s great Magic Trick
• Alkesh Vaghmaria on how BT is QAing its Rails applications
• Powerpoint Karaoke

Found this nice little shockwave (does anyone still use shockwave?) app some time ago whilst doing discovery for an interactive project. It’s part of the Getty ‘interact 1o ways’ campaign, in which companies such as Tomato, Less Rain, Sumona etc… created apps that explore the ‘power of the image’ - it’s been on the front of digg when it was launched way back.

Here’s a short blurb by Sumona:

“From its content to its visual components, a photograph is filled with information. Choose a point on an image and delve deeper into it, linking one idea to another in a never-ending chain.”

Reminds me of those fantastic Chuck Close paintings, which is why it inspires us.

The endless loop of interaction, a journey, telling a story - all parts to be considered in any user experience.

Interact 10 Ways - Sumona App