On Friday September 9th I went to the d.Constuct conference in Brighton.

Organized by clearleft, d.Construct is a one day conference about the future of web applications.

There were many speakers, with Jeff Veen and Jeremy Keith, being a couple of my favourites.

Although I wasn't technically savvy with all that was discussed, I'm keen now to learn some more JavaScripting and build the next killer app to take over the world...or something.

APIs were discussed more than once, and I want to start looking into these further.

All in all it was a great conference, and it would be great to go back next year.

dconstruct2006

My most recent project is finished.

The Sioe Gelf, one of Cwmni Da's staples, produced four special programmes from the National Eisteddfod in Abertawe.

My job was to design and build a website to accompany the programme. I worked with a producer for the content, and I ensured that everything was up and running.

The site showcased the four programmes, and the panelists in each. It also ran two blogs, a video section, daily photos from the Eisteddfod field and a forum.

Everyone was very pleased with the result, and the company received good feedback from S4C about the site.

I've just got back from the Royal Welsh, where me and Sioned spent four days filming content for S4C's Sioe site.

All preparations for the site had been made previously, so we could concentrate on the shooting. With no preparation things started slowly on Monday (and a cold shower in the morning didn't help), but we soon got into the swing of things.

The only drawback was the limited resources, so (as of today) none of our stuff has been edited and uploaded. However I really enjoyed the experience and got a nice tan too!

The Jones Jones Jones Concert has been launched, and I uploaded the accompanying website last night, jones.tv.

S4C and Cwmni Da are launching an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the most number of people in the same place with the same surname. The previous record of 583 is held by the Norbergs of Sweden, and we hope to smash the record at the concert to celebrate the name Jones.

The site has been built with WordPress, the extremely popular open source blogging software. WordPress comes with many different and varied themes, but for this project I have had to design my own. This called for some (X)HTML, CSS and PHP skills, and after a frantic two days I have it looking the way I want (in Firefox, Safari, Flock and IE6.0).

Also a big challenge was to get the system working in a bilingual way. Although there are some plugins available to do this, I did not have the time to implement them. I opted for a simple system of having two categories for the posts, Cymraeg and English. I then use these two categories at the head of the page to link to the posts. WordPress uses static posts as for the information pages, and creating the pages as children of a Welsh page and an English page, then using CSS to hide these two 'parent' pages.

Articles have appeared in some of the national daily newspapers, and some of the producers have been speaking with radio shows, including some from Australia. So everyone expects the website to attract lots of attention.

We will be using the site to announce acts and artists that will be appearing at the concert. As WordPress is a blogging tool, this makes it an ideal choice for adding content to the website easily and quickly, and it also takes care of the management of the site, and creates RSS feeds automatically.

I will be updating the site constantly from now on, to update with news of the concert and to keep it looking fresh.

Eugene and Alex, from Lim Kok Wing college in Kuala Lumpur, came up to the wilds of the north yesterday to visit.

I brought them over to Cwmni Da to see what we do there, and also around Caernarfon castle. They both thought that my this castle was much better than the folly on Queen Street Cardiff Castle, a view with which I wholehartedly agreed.

After dinner at Galeri, I took them up Llanberis pass to see the quarry and Snowdonia. Unfortunately the weather had the better of us (we were driving in fog for 15 minutes), but the trip was worth it.

I visited the Cyfle office in Caernarfon this morning to say goodbye, and had a quick photo taken.

Graduation

On Monday I travelled down to Cardiff for the Dimension 10 scheme's graduation. In partnership with Lampeter University, the graduates were given a Postgraduate Diploma in Interactive Media.

Also at the ceremony was Iona Jones, S4C's chief executive and Skillset Wales's chair, and Jane Davidson, the Welsh Assembly minister for Education and lifelong learning.

It was a great opportunity to meet others in the business and to chat about what we had been doing for the past year.

Exit Day

Then on Tuesday we had our exit day. This was to prepare us for the freelance world (if we choose to join it). Sion Hughes, Cyfle's chief executive, spoke with us about the Bectu union, and the benefits of joining.

Then Jack Wynne-Williams briefly taught us about the financial side of things, and how to keep the VAT and taxman happy. Jack has been keeping accounts for TV companies and freelancers for 15 years, and I learned a lot about the ins and outs of keeping books.

We then had a session with Sue Jeffries, who's a producer when she's not coaching Cyfle trainees on CVs. As a producer, Sue looks through many different CVs when crewing a shoot, and so had lots of experience in what works and what doesn't work. There were sample CVs (based on real ones) which we were given to critique, and we got to write our own opening sentence.

Here's mine (subject to change, of course):

An innovative multimedia developer proficient in new media technologies and providing innovative new ways of interaction with audiences.

I've finally recovered from the Urdd Eisteddfod 2006 experience, and what an experience it was. After spending Monday running about screaming, frantically waving our arms in the air, me and Alice got in the swing of things for the rest of the week.

The SMS message service (finally) worked liked a dream, but the take up was light, so it will need stronger marketing next year.

We got to produce and film our own work, then Wendi, the editor, threw it together to create some of the many clips that were on the site. I was really chuffed when it was decided to show one clip on the Saturday morning show, as the camera work was bothe mine and Alice's.

It's something I'm very proud to have worked on, and I look forward to the working on the Royal Welsh next month.

s4c.co.uk/urdd

In other news...

There is an interesting article by the BBC on Malaysia's MultiMedia Super Corridor.