Sperrobjekt Weblog

On Sunday, I led my first session at a BarCamp. At earlier BarCamps I was asked to show off some of Serendipity's features, so that's what I did. Looking back, at Carl’s request, from almost a week later I must say that it was a pretty solid session. However, most of the attendees already used Serendipity as their blog software, so it was preaching to the converted most of the time. BarCamp Berlin 2 was intended to be an international BarCamp, and many sessions were held in English, so I adopted that and tried my best. After some trouble with my Ubuntu (still Feisty) notebook that did not correctly recognize the beamer, all went pretty smoothly thanks to Tobias who let me use his notebook.

I did not prepare any slides, but set up a separate installation of S9y 1.2 for this session. I added only the Spartacus and the adduser plugins simply because I wanted to let the others play around with S9y after the session. Only two participants registered, but that's okay. After a short introduction of S9y's concepts, I demonstrated how to install plugins and templates using Spartacus, created some entries and showed how to add and manage media. Finally I touched on user management and explained the Bulletproof framework. Fortunately, the other participants chimed in quite frequently and we had a lively discussion and exchange of opinions. Some issues could be clarified pretty quickly. One user still has trouble with the popfetcher plugin now and then; I guess he will have to ask for help in the forum.

Two more aspects came up during the end of the session. First, it was news to most that the admin area can be themed, too, but the Bulletproof backend theme did not exactly raise a cheer; there is still work to do backend-wise (both HTML code [tables!] and design). There were a few Wordpress users around who asked why we thought they should make the switch to S9y. The answer was simple and straightforward: Security! There have been too many WP bugs around lately, I guess.

Too bad no one seems to have taken or published a photo of my session. If any of the participants wants to share his thoughts (or photos), you're welcome to leave a comment or drop me a mail. All in all, it was great to exchange ideas with other S9y users face to face. It would be really great if we could get the envisaged !WordCamp (=NotWordPressCamp) off the ground next year.

I'm attending the Pylons session right now, even if I've never heard about it before and it is in Python which I don't speak. Had a chat with Daniel about Python earlier, maybe that's why I'm here. Pylons is a web framework for rapid development, comes with its own shell for developing and debugging. Looks interesting, but the presentation lacks some structure. Leaves me confused, sorry.

At last, I have overcome my network problems and can connect to the internet again. Well, kind of, at least, still no wireless connection, but I found a ethernet cable lying around, plugged it in, and it works. So far, the sessions have been interesting, but most of the time I struggled with the network after already having arrived late (the warmup party yesterday was nice, but I overslept because of it *g*). This doesn't sound like a good start, but I met a lot of nice people who made me foget my troubles )

Right now, it's getting noisy in here, but I will try to jot down some of my thoughts about the BarCamp so far. First session was about what social networks and communities can learn from game design. Quite an intersting approach to the topic, has given me a lot to think about. The second session was about blogs and metadata, yet in a different way from what I expected (I missed the session presentations this morning). Patrick concentrated on how to mark up blog posts with metadata so that they can easily be cited by reserachers. The Zotero Firefox extension helps with this. Some very interesting discussion ensued, touching on Microformats, RSS, RDFa, and similar techniques. I might even implement OCoins in Serendipity some day soon ;O)

Oh, and if someone wants to know: I'm planning to hold my Serendipity session tomorrow. I definitely need reliable network access for this, as it will include a live demo of a fresh S9y installation. Alright peeps, gotta change rooms now. Later.