Yesterday I was one of the speakers at Paris Web and my talk was “Working in the now”:
[slideshare id=749394&doc=workinginthenow-1226584706289320-9&w=425]

Originally I meant to talk about HTML5 goodies and how to simulate them with Flash and DHTML right now (writing a small abstraction library) but seeing the latest rounds of crashes and layoffs I changed my stance and talked about things that we could be doing now to both secure our jobs and not lose all the momentum the standards movement got in the last few years.

I’ve explained the reasons and my thoughts on the subject in detail in another post here. In the talk I advocated re-using components and systems we already have to work faster, deliver better and have less hardware and software overhead in doing so.

These are:

• Design Patterns, Design Pattern Stencils
• CSS frameworks: YUI grids, YAML, 960, Blueprint
• Exceptional Performance Tips, YSlow, Hammerhead
• Fix your picture sizes with smushit.com
• Page widgets (things that HTML doesn’t have): YUI, jQuery UI
• Build an own search engine with Yahoo BOSS
• YouTube API
• Amazon S3 for storage
• Batch video conversion with Amazon S3 and EC2
• Captioning on a shoestring with CastingWords
• Mechanical Turk

The feedback so far was great, but there was also a lot of “yeah this is open source, but what if the company running it goes down and how can I trust it” questions. I will write something longer abut this soon, it is just very interesting to see that there is a big problem with free things and trust.

I wanted to give a list of all my presentations on SlideShare right here on the blog and started playing with the SlideShare API in earnest. As I failed in just including my results in the blog, I wrapped them in a WordPress plug-in in case you also feel like listing your SlideShare achievements.

You can see the plugin in action on the presentations page and here’s a screenshot:

Notice that I am offering a link to Easy SlideShare as an option so that blind users can only go to the transcript instead of having to try to understand the Flash embed. The API actually has a transcript element, but there is no content in there right now. Would be cool to see it enabled :)

Update: The Plugin now also allows you to copy and paste the “WordPress” code from SlideShare into any WordPress blog running this plug-in.

This screenshot shows what the inital state of a post (with some CSS) looks like:

When you click the “here and now” link you get the “normal” SlideShare experience:

The plug-in is open source, BSD licensed and if you want to use it you need to get a developer key from SlideShare

Once you have those, simply change the variables in the slidesharelist-config.php file accordingly. Say SlideShare gave you a key of “minor” and a secret of “I really like Weird Al Yankovic” then you’ll have to change:

$key = ‘YOUR KEY’;

$secret = ‘YOUR SECRET’;

$apiurl = ‘http://www.slideshare.net/api/1/’;

?>

to the following:

$key = ‘minor’;

$secret = ‘I really like Weird Al Yankovic’;

$apiurl = ‘http://www.slideshare.net/api/1/’;

?>

That’s all you need to do, simply FTP the whole folder over to your plugin directory of WordPress and activate the plugin inside WordPress.

All you need to display your list of presentations in a blog post or page is to add the following:

[*slideshare-username-amount]

For example the following would show my latest 5 slides:

[*slideshare-cheilmann-5]

The other option you have is to copy and paste a single presentation into the blog post. You can either use the following syntax:

[*slideshare-presentation:url]

An example would be my “Creating Happy Little Web Sites” presentation:

[*slideshare-presentation:http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/creating-happy-little-websites]

Alternatively you can use the copy and paste code slideshare offers you for blogs hosted on slideshare from the SlideShare presentation page itself. For example my presentation “Yahoo is Open for Developers” from the Ankara Open Source event:

[*slideshare id=477388&doc=opensourceankara-1213971414957829-9&w=425]

This is taken from:

http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/yahoo-is-open-to-developers

New in 1.10:

As requested in the comments below, you can now also list slideshows for tags and groups. The syntax is the following:

[*slideshare-group:{group}:{amount}]

For example:

[*slideshare-group:yahoo-developer-network:3]

And if you want to see slides for a certain tag:

[*slideshare-tag:{tag}:{amount}]

For example:

[*slideshare-tag:ajax:3]

• Download the SlideShare List Plug-In for WordPress 1.10
• Download the SlideShare List Plug-In for WordPress 1.05
• Download the SlideShare List Plug-In for WordPress 1.00

Last Thursday I went to the Google offices in London Victoria to attend a bi-monthly unconference called Open Source Jam. I was running a bit on autopilot as I was in Leeds the day before talking about the YUI at the Geekup meeting and originally wanted to skip the session as I was pretty knackered. It was great though that I didn’t follow my instinct, but instead have a nice unconference with Pizza, Beer and lots of 5 minute+5 minute Q&A sessions revolving around creating interfaces for humans.

In comparison to other barcamps the Open Source Jam was a lot more technical and speakers were more coders than web developers. I’ve learnt about a chess program for the iPhone, how to write APIs to make them more accessible to humans, UXON - a User Interface Object Notation (more on this coming soon), Behaviour Driven Development, holes in the Flickr API and a lot of other things.

My initial idea of staying for an hour and then leaving for a speaker’s dinner of a company-internal conference was foiled and I took the last tube back from Victoria.

My own talk was a preview of a session I will give at the Abilitynet Accessibility conference in April, talking about how accessibility is not an extra task but – if taken into consideration from the beginning – an opportunity to build better products for everybody.

I want to thank the organizers and will very likely be there for the next jam.

Photo by Adewale Oshineye