Journal tags: dusseldorf

I see that Russell is planning to bring back Interesting this year. This makes me happy. Just seeing the return of in-person gatherings—run safely—is giving me life.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think that lots of people are yearning for some in-person contact after two years of online events. The good news is that there are some excellent in-person web conferences on the horizon.

Beyond Tellerrand is back in Düsseldorf on May 2nd and 3rd. Marc ran some of the best online events during lockdown with his Stay Curious cafés, but there’s nothing beats the atmosphere of Beyond Tellerrand on its home turf.

If you can’t make it Düsseldorf—I probably can’t because I’m getting my passport renewed right now—there’s All Day Hey in Leeds on May 5th. Harry has put a terrific line-up together for this one-day, very affordable event.

June is shaping up to be a good month for events too. First of all, there’s CSS Day in Amsterdam on June 9th and 10th. I really, really like this event. I’m not just saying that because I’m speaking at this year’s CSS Day. I just love the way that the conference treats CSS with respect. If you self-identigy as a CSS person, then this is the opportunity to be with your people.

But again, if you can’t make it Amsterdam, never fear. The Pixel Pioneers conference returns to Bristol on June 10th. Another one-day event in the UK with a great line-up.

Finally, there’s the big one at the end of June. UX London runs from June 28th to June 30th:

Bringing the UX community back together

Yes, I’m biased because I’m curating the line-up but this is shaping up to be unmissable! It’s going to be so good to gather with our peers and get our brains filled by the finest of design minds.

Last week was a bit of an event whirlwind. In the space of seven days I was at Indie Web Camp, Beyond Tellerrand, and Accessibility Club in Düsseldorf, followed by a train ride to Utrecht for Frontend United. Phew!

Indie Web Camp Düsseldorf was—as always—excellent. Once again, Sipgate generously gave us the use of their lovely, lovely space for the weekend. We had one day of really thought-provoking discussions, followed by a day of heads-down hacking and making.

I decided it was time for me to finally own my replies. For a while now, I’ve been posting notes on my own site and syndicating to Twitter. But whenever I replied to someone else’s tweet, I did from Twitter. I wanted to change that.

From a coding point of view, it wasn’t all that tricky. The real challenges were to do with the interface. I needed to add another field for the URL I’m replying to …but I didn’t want my nice and minimal posting interface to get too cluttered. I ended up putting the new form field inside a details element with a summary of “Reply to” so that the form field would be hidden by default, and toggled open by hitting that “Reply to” text:

<details>
    <summary>
        <label for="replyto">Reply to</label>
    </summary>
    <input type="url" id="replyto" name="replyto">
</details>

I sent my first test reply to a post on Aaron’s website. Aaron was sitting next to me at the time.

Once that was all working, I sent my first reply to a tweet. It was a response to a tweet from Tantek. Tantek was also sitting next to me at the time.

I spent most of the day getting that Twitter syndication to work. I had something to demo, but I foolishly decided to risk it all by attempting to create a bookmarklet so that I could post directly from a tweet page (instead of hopping back to my own site in a different tab). By canabalising the existing bookmarklet I use for posting links, I just about managed to get it working in time for the end of day demos.

So I’m owning my replies now. At the moment, they show up in my home page feed just like any other notes I post. I’m not sure if I’ll keep it that way. They don’t make much sense out of context.

Then again, I kind of like how wonderfully random and out-of-context they look. You can browse through all my replies so far.

I’m glad I got this set up. Now when Andy posts stuff on Twitter, I’m custodian of my responses:

@AndyBudd: Who are your current “Design Heroes”?

adactio.com: I would say Falcor from Neverending Story, the big flying dog.

Indie Web Camp Düsseldorf took place last weekend and it was—no surprise—really excellent.

It felt really good to have one in Germany again so soon after the last one in Nuremberg. Lots of familiar faces showed up as well as plenty of newcomers.

I’m blown away by how much gets done in two short days, especially from people who start the weekend without a personal website and end it with something to call their own. Like Julie’s new site for example (and once again she took loads of great photos).

My own bit of hacking was quite different to what I got up to in Nuremberg. At that event, I was concentrating on the interface, adding sparklines and a bio to my home page. This time round I concentrated more on the plumbing. I finally updated some the code that handles webmentions. I first got it working a few year’s back at an Indie Web Camp here in Brighton, but I hadn’t really updated the code in a while. I’m much happier with the way it’s working now.

I also updated the way I’m syndicating my notes to Twitter, specifically how I send photos. Previously I was using the API method /statuses/updatewithmedia.

When I was at the Mobile @Scale event at Facebook’s London office a while back, Henna Kermani gave a talk about the new way that Twitter handles file uploads. There’s a whole new part of the API for handling that. When she got off stage, I mentioned to her that I was still using the old API method and asked how long it would be until it was switched off. She looked at incredulously and said “It’s still working‽ I thought it had been turned off already!”

That’s why I spent most of my time at Indie Web Camp Düsseldorf updating my PHP. Switching over to the TwitterOAuth library made it a bit less painful—thanks to Bea for helping me out there.

When it came time to demo, I didn’t have much to show. On the surface, my site looked no different. But I feel pretty good about finally getting around to changing the wiring under the hood.

Besides, there were plenty of other great demos. There was even some more sparklining. Check out this fantastic visualisation of the Indie Web Camp IRC logs made by Kevin …who wasn’t even in Düsseldorf; he participated remotely.

If you get the chance to attend an Indie Web Camp I highly, highly recommend it. In the meantime you can start working on your personal site. Here’s a quick primer I wrote a while back on indie web building blocks. Have fun!

One of the great pleasures of travelling is partaking of the local cuisine. Today I travelled to Düsseldorf. As soon as I arrived, I went out for ramen.

Wait, what?

You might be thinking that I should really be making the most of the pork and potato dishes that Germany is famed for, but the fact is that the ramen here is really good.

Düsseldorf, you see, has one of the largest Japanese populations of anywhere in Germany. It all started in the ’50s when a number of Japanese companies set up shop here.

The result: great ramen in Düsseldorf.

The weather is glorious right now here in Brighton. As much as I get wanderlust, I’m more than happy to have been here for most of June and for this lovely July thus far.

Prior to the J months, I made a few European sojourns.

Mid-may was Mobilism time in Amsterdam, although it might turn out that this may have been the final year. That would be a real shame: it’s a great conference, and this year’s was no exception.

As usual, I had a lot of fun moderating a panel. This time it was a general “hot topics” panel featuring Remy, Jake, Wilto, and Dan. Smart, opinionated people: just what I want.

Two weeks after Mobilism, I was back on the continent for Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf. I opened up the show with a new talk. It was quite ranty, but I was pleased with how it turned out, and the audience were very receptive. I’ll see about getting the video transcribed so I can publish the full text here.

Alas, I had to miss the second day of the conference so I could down to Porto for this year’s ESAD web talks, where I reprised the talk I had just debuted in Germany. It was my first time in Portugal and I really liked Porto: there’s a lot to explore and discover there.

Two weeks after that, I gave that same talk one last spin at FFWD.pro in Zagreb. I had never been to Croatia before and Jessica and I wanted to make the most of it, so we tagged on a trip to Dubrovnik. That was quite wonderful. It’s filled with tourists these days, but with good reason: it’s a beautiful medieval place.

With that, my little European getaways came to an end (for now). The only other conference I attended was Brighton’s own Ampersand, which was particularly fun this year. The Clearleft conferences just keep getting better and better.

In fact, this year’s Ampersand might have been the best yet. And this year’s UX London was definitely the best yet. I’d love to say that this year’s dConstruct will be the best yet, but given that last year’s was without doubt the best conference I’ve ever been to, that’s going to be quite a tall order.

Still, with this line-up, I reckon it’s going to be pretty darn great …and it will certainly be good fun. So if you haven’t yet done so, grab a ticket now and I’ll see you here in Brighton in September.

Here’s hoping the weather stays good.