The sessions were as usual a very good mix my favorite by far being about Hacking rock band drums with php by @tomnomnom who created his very own ASCII version of rock band. He also showed us evolution recreated in php which was impressive to say the least.

@martin88 gave an excellent talk on getting noticed on flickr.
My favorite tip was that you should upload your best photo last, as it is the one your friends are most likely to see. You can find Martin of flickr here.

Another very enjoyable session of the day was @ghalfacree‘s Keeping your Secrets Secret, and I now feel exceptionally paranoid about the world.

I’m looking forward to going again next year, but there will be many more BarCamps before then starting with BarCamp Sheffield on 16th and 17th April. Are you going?

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The day kicked off with a range of presentations running us through various APIs that we might liked to have worked with. There were a wide range of different APIs demoed all giving us more ideas about what we could build.

• Ade Oshineye – Buzz
• @themattharris Matt Harris – Twitter
• Oliver Ogg – GigJunkie
• Nick Johnson – AppEngine
• Michael Mahemoff – Chrome/HTML5
• Thong Nguyen – mFlow music APIs
• Reinier Zwitserloot – Safari Extensions
• Tim Nash – United Nations World Food Program

Hack prizes were announced including a prize for the best sandwich hack.

This is only the second hackday I’ve been too and I am really not much of a coder but I still managed to arrive with way too many ideas of what to build. Most of my ideas had started with a small idea and by the time I arrived into London on Saturday morning had mutated into gigantic ideas that would have been too much to make in a weekend even if I knew how.

So I built a twitter sentiment analysis app. It’s not 100% accurate and is still a bit buggy but I learnt a lot doing it and don’t think it’s bad for 24 hours work. I plan on working on it more in future as at the moment it is not as sophisticated as it could be. But like I said we had 24 hours.

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I wanted a wordpress plug in that would help me run a competition.
After a bit of going round in circles I decided what I really needed was a wordpress survey plugin. My ideal plugin would have a range of question types:

• A rating scale
• Free text answers

I found some great articles across the web reviewing WP survey plugins. Unfortunately they were al quite old and the plugins that were recommended stopped being updated round the wordpress 2.5 time and many were no longer available for download. Survey Fly for example sounded great.

It looked like my best bet was WP Survey or Survey.

I tried them both out and both were a resounding fail. One of them did not have the option for users to enter their own text. They would have been great if I wanted to run a survey with multiple choice answers but really neither appeared to offer anything more than this. If I had more than a smattering of PHP skills then I may have considered hacking one of the survey plugins to do what I wanted.

I had a compulsory cuppa while I considered my options.

I had a look at surveygizmo, which looks great and would have certainly done the job. However, it’s not a free service so despite its wonderfully shinyness I decided that I’d have to move on. It would be great if I wasn’t looking for something for nothing.

Time for more tea and another rethink.

What I had really wanted was a plugin that kept all the responses in wordpress so I could access and download them or stored them all in a nice mysql database for me. I did not really want each response to be e-mailed to me. I’m hoping to get quite a few entries and that just seems like a nightmare to go through all the responses.

WordPress Contact forms

The second cuppa though had brought me to the conclusion that a simple contact plugin would do the job as it would give me more control over way the questions are displayed on the page (so I can at least try and make it look pretty). Most contact form plugins also offer a wide range of question types. After a bit of research I decided that contact form 7 would do the job fine.
It was easy to work out how to create the contact page and to get the questions on there.
When I tested it I was baffled that although I was getting the e-mail it didn’t contain any of the data. I would like to point out that it was getting late at this point and though my sleepy eyes I’d failed to notice that the e-mail part was really quite fancy and you could choose what info was displayed in the e-mail and exactly how it was displayed.
So the contact form 7 plugin is the solution I’ve gone for. Not ideal for the purpose but the closest fit that I could find without parting with a lot of money.
The competition is now up and running so I’ll soon see how good my solution was.

Have a look at ratemyspoons.com to see how the finished competition entry form looks. It’s not a work of art but it seems to be functional enough.

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For those who don’t know in the words of the organiser:

“Think Visibility is a series of conferences on “the things that usually get left behind in the web design process“. The conferences feature well known speakers, new talent and great networking opportunities.

Think Visibility’s first outing, in March 2009, sold out within weeks. We discovered that there was an appetite for more of the same, covering a wider range of subjects.

So Think Visibility is back on 12 September 2009 – and this time, we’re bigger!”

Tickets are on sale now and if you want to get hold of one you should most definitely get your arse into gear before they sell out.

So I wanted to say more about Think Visibility but I got distracted. What could possibly distract me so much. hmm I am rather ashamed to say so instead i will ask a question. Why am I looking at a picture of your cat?

Yes, I know it’s not big and it’s not clever, but I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine and really that’s all I can muster up as an excuse.

So erm for you viewing (dis)pleasure… from why am I looking at a picture of your cat:

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It started off quite relaxed with an after work visit to Wetherspoons to sup pear cider while we waited for the others to arrive.

Yum

Which I got ID’d for.

WTF!

TheHodge and I were met by Sarah who successfully completed the finding people in a Wetherspoons needle in a haystack challenge.
Over the road to Mr Foley’s to accidently offend the bar staff by ordering a selection of cider and ignoring their fine selection of beers. But it was clearly a cider drinking kinda night.

Oops

I thought I had a clear memory of the rest of the night until I read Tim’s recount of the evening. It may not be how I remember things but it is certainly a very eloquent tale of ranking terror, yoghurt and some rather fetching hats.

Northern SEM is a monthly meeting that is loosely tied around the SEM industry. It’s in Mr Foley’s on the first Friday of the month. So if you are interested in search, geekey, and or beer get yourself out next month.

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What you mean “What time of the month”?

Why, it’s the monthly Northern Bloggers meetup of course!

Kicking off at 6pm in Old Broadcasting House and then heading to Mr Foleys.

TheHodge will be doing the presentation this month and telling us all about how he lost his blogging mojo. It promises to be a very interesting talk indeed.

Related posts:

1. A northern SEM oddity

They have tried but they haven’t made me cry yet – I’d have my bets on tomorrow night if I was going to have a flutter on it.

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Thanks for visiting – something more interesting will be here soon.

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