Jon Udell is in the middle of another project demonstrating what he does best on the Internet, and what he has been doing time and again since I first started following his work back in the BYTE magazine days.
He's working out simple but effective ways to weave together the tools available on the 'net to make it a more coherent and more useful place. This time his focus is on community calendars.
He's avoided the typical programmer trap of trying to automate everything, and instead is looking at ways to build tools that automate what can be automated, and ease the work required to be done by hand.
I've been following the project with interest, as I think a centralized grouping of all the event data for an area is an invaluable resource for the community. Jon is building such an item for his local area, but it only scales when other people take the lead of curating the event listings in their cities.
This blog post is in lieu of me actually getting the Liverpool listings up and running with Jon's system. When I've got a spare couple of hours sometime (so probably after Be2Camp North and Howduino) then I'll re-read Jon's blog posts and work out what I need to do.
Until then, I'm going to start collecting any Liverpool-related calendars I find online on my delicious account, and will tag them with "Liverpool" and "calendar". If anyone wants to help, then they can either tag any links in delicious themselves and I can pick them up, or leave a comment with the details in here.
Back in October I had a day down in London for an un-conference looking at what happens when the Web meets the built environment. It covered all sorts of topics, from ways to better manage email overload to using 3D sketching software to engage communities in regeneration work. Since the event there's been an ongoing community of attendees sustained on Twitter, and continued discussion about the next event.
I'm pleased to announce that I'm helping to organise the second Be2Camp event, and better still, we're hosting it here in Liverpool.
Be2Camp North is being held at FACT on Friday 15th May. It will be somewhere between an un-conference and a normal conference, with an idea of the day's sessions being fleshed out beforehand. Head over to the Be2Camp North topics page to see what's being planned, or suggest something yourself.
Or just sign up and come along to debate and learn more about the ways that computing can help construction, architecture and our built environment.
Tags: Be2Camp Be2CampNorth FACT Liverpool
I loved this quote:
"They all act like they are some sort of gangster and think they have power and drive flash cars but the reality is they all live at home with their mums."
On Easter Sunday we took a trip over the border into North Wales. Our destination was the hill Moel Famau, just past Mold on the A494. It seemed to be a pretty popular place to visit, quite understandably because it's a reasonably gentle walk with great views over Snowdonia, the Irish Sea and the Liverpool Bay.
You can see our route below, the way up was along part of Offa's Dyke and is a broad, easy-to-follow path that's never particularly steep. The first part of the way down, however, was quite a bit steeper (although never mountainous) but there is an alternate route for that top section - simple to find on the way up, and I assume it links up with the Offa's Dyke trail; there was certainly a route off from the Offa's Dyke path that looked like it would link up.