Its been a while since I last posted online… I’m trying to work out why that is but I think its a combination of a few things.

When I first started this blog it was around the time of @media 2005 conference. These were exiting times for me, I had just finished reading Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards and lots of my peers I had discovered in the blogosphere were networking at this and other conferences. The knowledge gained from this book coupled with the speakers papers gave me the extra drive I felt I needed to move forward in my web development career. This was at a time when most of the local Wolverhampton web development companies were still using tables for layout and probably had never heard of CSS Zen Garden and what CSS could do.

I then got myself involved with a local group of geeks who met regularly to discuss new technologies over a few beers, we even organised a few grass root conferences along the way. However my attendance gradually wained because of family commitments and most meets seemingly clashing with Wolves games.

This blog which started nearly a decade ago has seen web design change completely from an industry with no real direction to a set of guides and best practices which everyone should adhere to. But this has had a knock on effect to my enthusiasm for all things web, things just don’t excite me as they did. People getting into the industry now don’t know how easy they have it… or maybe its just my age!

Anyway, this is me saying I’m still here, 10 years older, knocking out websites and that I’ll try to post more meaningless drivel on a regular basis, albeit on a more personal and less web centred basis (:

Dear Matt, you’re six today!

Unwrapping your cards and presents this morning I was reminded by the elegance of your words, the agility of your thoughts and the nature of your actions of why I am so proud of you and the young man that you are becoming.

Every time a birthday approaches I think back to how much has changed since you were born, and I look forward to how much will change in your lifetime, and hope I will be around long enough to give you the tools you need to navigate the world and grow into yourself.

Happy birthday, son. I love you.

Last Saturday brought about the inaugural Multipack Presents event kindly hosted at the One Black Bear offices. The theme of this first event was “Emerging Standards” — Matt Machell, Bruce Lawson and Stuart Langridge discussed ARIA, HTML 5 and Whizzy Javacsript Stuff respectively.

The event kicked off at The Old Crown pub where most of the attendee’s met up, it was good to see some new faces along with the regular peeps — about 25 people turned up, which was better than we expected considering this was our first event. After some liquid refreshment we headed over to the One Black Bear offices where the talks began. At this point I have to state that Gaz and Ross have the nicest working environment I have ever seen, very jealous!

Matt started the presentations, his talk was a good introduction to the new ARIA specification and explained how to make rich internet applications more accessible. The presentation raised some good debate, Stuart came up with a nice idea about creating an ‘aria stylesheet’ without altering existing markup, which he quickly knocked up the next day.

Bruce’s talk followed, discussing HTML 5 and talked through the process of his HTML 5 redesign, explaining certain new tags that are being proposed. Maybe I’m mistaken, but one thing that I found odd with the specification is that there isn’t a tag that describes the actual main content for the page, there are tags for <nav>, <footer> etc but nothing to describe the actual content. There is <section> but there can be multiple instances of <section>. I think there should be a unique tag to describe this, Bruce has asked for developers to give feedback to the working group on anything they see as incorrect or has been overlooked so I may just send some feedback.

After a break for munchies in the form of pizza kindly supplied by Campaign Monitor the presentations were finished off with Stuart’s talk which discussed JavaScript and some nice features that are already built into particular browsers. All the methods discussed can be achieved using a variety of frameworks but it was interesting to know which methods were supported without a framework in particular browsers.

I’m really looking forward to our next Multipack Presents event which is currently being organised, we’re asking for feedback on what you would like to see discussed, so if you want to be heard post your comment on the Multipack blog. Until then, maybe I’ll catch up with you at the March meet.

After a two year hiatus Geek in the Park returns to Leamington Spa on Saturday 9th August 2008 and if the 2006 event is anything to go by you’ll be foolish to miss this years event organised by The Multipack.

It all kicks off with a friendly family orientated picnic with fun & games in Jephson Gardens followed by an evening of talks by web industry leaders Jon Hicks and Drew McLellan at KoKos. Jon Hicks will present “Pixel Pushing: An Introduction to Icon Design” and Drew McLellan will talk about “What Brian Cant Never Taught You About Metadata”. If that isn’t enough to tempt you, don’t forget the event is free.

See you there!

2008 has brought with it a renewed vigour for the direction The Multipack is heading, with this in mind and being a community of web developers and designers in Birmingham the natural way of getting the ball rolling was to create a new design for our website and logo.

Holding the paint brush was Paul Lloyd who created the mock-ups for the website and logo—which I’m particularly pleased with. Trevor Morris has done a brilliant job of implementing the design into html adding in Microformats and parsing all popular external feeds where possible.

We also have a new forum that Ross Riley has configured and there are a few others working behind the curtains making sure everything stays spick and span.

There will be no excuses for people not knowing where and when things are taking place either, as we now meet up every second Saturday of each month at the Old Joint Stock with the premise of moving out further afield within the West Midlands a couple of times throughout the year.

So whether you’re an existing member or not, register on the forum and get the details for the next meet from Upcoming and I’ll see you there!

Keep watching for some interesting forthcoming events…