Entrance is only a fiver and the schedule looks great. Like its predecessors (OT2005 and NotCon2004) OT2008 is “informal, low-cost”, but the slant is more towards using technology to promote and enable low-carbon and sustainable living.

I’ve also been roped into compèring one of the sessions. It’ll probably be one I know nothing about (just from looking at the running order), but the beauty about compèring as opposed to actually chairing is that you can be completely ignorant of the subject matter and nobody might ever realise. Should discussion begin to flag, I may do a little dance. That’ll be worth the entrance fee alone.

Keynotes are confirmed—Andy Budd of Clearleft and Matt Biddulph of Dopplr—and we even have a (deep breaths) geek troubadour introducing the whole evening.

I’m getting more involved with the organising of it this time, having had a huddled conversation with Andy of Oxford PA Hire about how to set up the sound system a couple of days ago. It’s good fun, although I don’t have Natalie’s gift of always being able to smile at people. Too much of it makes my face ache.

The hallmark of a good frameworked site is that it’s not easy to guess which framework was used, and TeamSugar manages that admirably. While I can’t really comment on the design—I find most networking sites pretty busy, and this is no exception—it certainly feels like a lot of hard work is distancing the user experience from the limitations of the framework, and that’s admirable from a usability perspective. The fewer visitors jumping through hoops to indulge the whims of your CMS the better.

There are a couple of interesting observations in that thread, mostly because they’re guarded criticism coming from an otherwise happy user of the framework:

… We have four app servers now, I believe, and a dedicated database server. We have also extensively edited the code. The architecture of drupal, unfortunately, lends itself to doing things like issuing one query per module per node on a page. For our 8 content sites this isn’t too bad because they’re easily cached and don’t make use of many modules. For TeamSugar it’s much worse because each feature generally requires at least one module. We cache where we can and refactor code elsewhere…. [link to 1971521]

… When you’re creating web applications you’re typically going for one of three things: speed/scalability, flexibility, or maintainability. Drupal is high on flexibility, average on maintainability, and poor on speed, in my opinion. If your priority is maintainability then I’d go for one of the RAD environments like Rails or CakePHP. If speed is your priority then I’d write your own lightweight framework, or whatever, and do it yourself…. [link to 198497]

I’ve never known the first in (hopefully) a series of events go so well. Clearly from the reaction of the crowd this night fills a hole in the Oxford geek community’s calendar. I can’t comment on my own talk, of course, but there was some interesting stuff there: without doubt the two keynotes from Simon W (OpenID) and Olly Willans (Photoshop CS3), but also Tom’s peastat, James Wheare’s scraping of bus timetables LiveBus.org, and the Drupal and Mapnik introductions.

My talk went as well I could expect: I hope to put some slides and screenshots up here shortly. Unfortunately it touches on work that I’m trying to make live by the end of this week—the new version of my short story site—so I’m snowed under with that right now. Gosh, it’s all go, isn’t it?

(Note: I work with, for, by or under several people mentioned in this post. Take it as fawning sycophancy if you like.)

The fragrant Natbat, my co-worker and fellow cheese-eater, is organising an Oxford(-shire)-based geek evening:

Oxford GeekNights #1
Wednesday, February 7, 2007 @ 8.00pm
Jericho Tavern, Jericho, Oxford

Two or three 15-minute keynote talks, followed by some microslot talks on the night for any speakers from the floor with something to share. And for the Upcoming users among you, here is the event to watch.