Monthly Archives: September 2005

Woo We Woo WE05!

7:02am AEST (Sydney)
So seeing that the wifi at the conference is so utterly crap, and since my laptop weighs like a crapton, I figured since I got up so early this morning, and I don’t have to be at the conference till about 8:30, I’d come by a cybercafe and make post!

I haven’t gone far from Central Station in Sydney, but the fast food in Australia is of par standard. It’s nothing special, but it’s certainly edible. The food at the conference is great.

I uploaded the best photos I had from the conference onto Flickr last night via Telstra wifi from the comfort of my 6-share. My favorite has got to be Tantek and Eric Meyer staring each other down 🙂

There was an emergency evacuation yesterday. Apparently it’s the first almost-live podcast recording of a building evacuation! One of the guys from the conference was telling me he got a hilarious pic of Eric Meyer crouching outside the venue with his laptop out on his knees trying to get on Wifi! [photo]— can’t wait to see that on Flickr! Check out all the we05 photos on Flickr

All the talks yesterday were awesome. I especially liked Jeffrey Veen’s presentation on usability, Kelly Goto’s presentation on workflow in the agency, and Douglas Bowman’s visionary presentation reminding us that it’s only been 10 years and our art will most definetely look completly different in 10 years.

I’m really looking forward to the AJAX session, as well as Cameron Adams’ Javascript & DOM session. Tantek’s microformats session should be very interesting too.

I’m off to meet Found Agency today too. Probably around lunch time. We’ll see.

Blogging Food Outside Photos Web Essentials 05 2 comments

Babies, First Flight Overseas

2:33
So here I am in the international departure lounge for my first international flight. I’m writing this about 2:33pm. My gate opens at 3:10, with the plane taking off around 3:40.

CJ and I did the duty free store – there was hardly anything. CJ tells me to wait till I see Sydney’s duty free area – much better a selection. That said, I’ve never seen such a big bottle of Baileys or such a big bar of Toblerone in my life.

I’m listening to the Daily Source Code on my iPod. I really like listening to podcasts – they fill time so well, and there is always something interesting to listen to. IT Conversations especially.

If you can’t tell, I’m rambling. I try to blog when I have something interesting to say, but today, I’m blogging for the sake of blogging. An almost-live thought-dump if you like, seeing as I’m not posting this till I get onto some sort of internet connection.

I’ve told a few people that I used to have this recurring dream that I’d be flying to somewhere in the world, and I’d get to the other country, get to customs and I’d forgotten my passport; I’d left it on my desk at home. Of course, that’s not possible, because you need to show your passport before you get into the international departure lounge, but I was pretty scared that I’d forget something pretty important by the time I got to Australia.

I’m pretty excited about getting to Sydney. The flight is just a necessary boredom between here and there, even though I’ve never left New Zealand before; yes, this is the first time in my life.

I hope I can get a bed at wakeup tonight. The place looks pretty trendy from the website, but if I get there about 8pm on a Wednesday night, I’m concerned that they won’t be able to put me up.

. . .

So here I am on the Airbus A320 to Sydney. I don’t know what time it is, because I don’t know what time zone I’m in right now, and I my cellphone is off. (EDIT: When I wrote this, I didn’t think to look at the time on my laptop.) I’m in row 5 behind, the 2nd row from the front of the main cabin, behind Business Class. I can’t recommend this seat, because the front row of business is equipped with bassinets for baby travel, and there’s three babies traveling with us today. After 3.25 hours of this I can imagine I’ll be all “Argh! SHUT IT OFF SHUT IT OFF!”

It’s lovely above the clouds. I wish I could tell you how high we are.

OK, on goes the podcasts – damn babies.

11:33
So I got into Sydney about 5:30. I say 5:30 because there was a HUGE line at customs. But once we got into Sydney proper, we drove off to the centre of town to the Mercure where CJ was staying. The bellhop at the Mercure gave me bum directions to Wake Up, and I ended up walking around nearly the entire railway station. Man they have some really long pedestrian subways in Sydney; so long infact that in this particular subway there were two buskers who weren’t within earshot of each other.

So eventually after asking some random people where this place was I found it. It’s a really nice place – trendy, and really busy. I’m in a six-share with five other girls.

So I went to wake up’s bar “Side Bar” – a fitting name for a guy who’s a web developer. I ordered the special of the day (Steak & Kidney Pie + a pint – WTF, I hate kidney!) and grabbed a seat with some randoms. Backpackers are friendly people, always ready to strike up a conversation – I guess this is of necessity, as people don’t know anyone, and are looking for people to hang out with. I met two people from the US, one from Denmark and one from France.

Right now I’m lying on my bed typing on the laptop. It’s hard to keep my head up, especially with all the beer I just consumed. I should save this and go to sleep. BTW, I’m typing all this into Word, as there’s no public wifi available from this room.

Actually, there is, but it’s pay wifi, so I went and hunted down a AUD$20 Telstra PhoneAway card. So I’ll post this now and hit the sack.

No photos as yet. Will take photos at the conference tomorrow

Life Outside Rant Web Essentials 05 1 comment

Loose Ends

So, before I head off to Sydney two nights from now, I figured I’d post about a few loose ends I haven’t posted much detail about.

I’m working part time at 3months.com now, and tomorrow is my last day at the DRC. I love working at 3months: the attitude of the workplace is relaxed but focused; everyone is enjoying their work. I start full time this Monday (3rd Oct). They’ve already got me working on a fun but rushed PHP project. I was working three days a week at DRC, and Wednesday and Thursday at 3months.

I’m so glad I’m not working two part time daytime jobs any more — three Mondays a week is lethal to your mind. I personally believe in sticking your focus to one a project a week at work, using the natural downtime on the fringes of the weekend: use Friday to ‘swap to disk’ for the weekend, and Monday to load the week’s project back into memory. The brain isn’t too good at swapping.

3months also issued me a laptop as my main work computer. This is awesome because I’ll be able to blog from the conference, and maybe even tap into the subconciousness of the lecture attendees, AKA the conference IRC room. Oh, and maybe do some work… 🙂

My mum is off to Brisbane to live with her new squeeze. She’s flying out of Palmerston North on the 15th, so I’ll be up there to see her off. She is saving up for my brother Stuart and I to visit her for Christmas. Sydney will my first overseas experience, so I’m looking forward to following it up quickly with a visit to Brisbane.

Speaking of holidays, I’m off to see the Guru, the wonderful Guru of Bob, erm, GuruBob down in Mosgiel (near Dunedin) for New Years: Bob has offered for me to crash at his place for a few days. I’ve never been more south than Christchurch, so seeing some of Otago with a born-and-bred Dunedinite’s point of view sounds like fun 🙂 Maybe even see Bob fly his new RC Plane…

So yeah, my next post will probably be in Sydney! I’m taking my camera, and will be trying to find buildings from The Matrix on Saturday… w00ta! (is that Australian for “w00t”…? 😉 )

Blogging Family Hardware Life New Zealand Web Design Web Essentials 05 Work 5 comments

I got a Golden Ticket!

No, not one of those banal “go see how chocolate is made” tickets, rather one that grants me access to the new beta WordPress.com! WordPress.com is to WordPress what TypePad.com is to MovableType — a hosted blogging service. But wordpress.com is invite-only, and I guess, free.

So I got my invite, signed up and ended up with glutnix.wordpress.com — yay! The app is totally based on WordPress, but it looks slightly different, and has some improvements, like a not-so-rich-text editor (over editing HTML), collapsible sections in the edit page, including an AJAX categories selector which lets you add new categories to your blog without leaving the page, even suggesting existing categories that other bloggers on wordpress.com are using, forming a type of folksonomy.

No plugins though.

Will I use it? Nah. But it’s good to see what progress is being made on the newest version of WordPress 🙂

And incidently, I have a golden ticket to give away to someone who wants it real bad. First person to ask me for it will receive it…

Blogging Internet Web Design 4 comments

Comment Spammers from Australia

Dear comment-spamming morons at foundagency.com.au, and their customers who probably didn’t know better at allrealestate.co.nz

Hi. I don’t appreciate it what you’re doing with the blogs that I manage, subverting its intended purposes so that you can make money, by creating comments on my stories for the sole purpose of having a link to a site you are “SEO-ing”.

My blogs are:

  • http://www.webfroot.co.nz

You might notice that both of these blogs use the rel="nofollow" attribute on links entered using the comments form. Google openly IGNORES any links with this attribute applied to it by not giving any of that page-rank goodness to the target site that you’re trying to achieve. More information here at the Official Google Blog and Google’s site itself.

While I appreciate your SEO company has hungry employee mouths to feed, I’d appreciate it that you’d take your scum-of-the-earth “optimisation techniques” and retire them.

What I am demanding you do:

  1. Continue to use Ethical SEO techniques, but stop using the unethical techniques, like the link spamming you’re doing right now. See Wikipedia’s entry on Search engine optimisation for more info on ethical and unethical SEO techniques.
  2. Stop mis-using other people’s blogs to pimp your wares.
  3. If you MUST spam peoples blogs, at the very least, don’t waste your time with blogs that use rel="nofollow".
  4. Remove my blogs from your un-ethical blog-abusing SEO machine.
  5. Stop selling lies to companies that you can improve their ranking on Google.

I’ve posted this communication on my blog for all to see at this URL. And you’ll note that the links to your websites have rel="nofollow" applied to them.

Screw you guys,

Brett Taylor

UPDATE: Zak from The Found Agency just contacted me on my cellphone from Sydney, and after a short friendly chat I have provided him with the comment records from my databases. He was really friendly and deadly serious about looking into it within their organisation, which is a real credit to FoundAgency. I really appreciated the call, Zak 🙂

As the email address on the comments entered was the main reason for tying the comment to The Found Agency, it’s true that they could have been framed. I checked their site, and saw they did SEO stuff, and one of their clients was a real-estate website. It could have been entered into the form by anyone — but it got past my spam filter, so it’s unlikely that it was automated.

He also saw that I was coming over to Sydney next week for WE05, and invited me to The Found Agency offices to see what they do and how they are not blog spammers, which I intend to do. If it turns out that I was wrong, I guess I’ll be buying Zak a beer 😉

HAPPY ENDING: Turns out Zak is buying the beer 😉 It turns out that a new employee got over-eager to impress at his new job, and that employee has now been put to the task of collating a list of the sites he posted to, and I’ve been told that The Found Agency will be apologising personally to the owners of those sites.

Good has been done here. A problem solved. I’m going to be dropping by The Found Agency while I’m in Sydney, and I’ll report back. I hope that I’ll be able to come away from this meeting and recommend The Found Agency in the future! They certainly took this seriously and are taking excellent steps to rectify this occurance, which is highly commendable.

Blogging Internet Rant 2 comments