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Apart from posting in the wee hours of the morning, I have been working to get the better pieces of my various portfolios into some sort of presentable format to put them into yet another ‘portfolio’ section, this time on this site.

The problem with this undertaking - apart from the fact of finding the actual pieces of data i want to feature - is that I seem to have pitched myself against Kronos (or Chronos) the god of time (he doesn’t like to give people a lot of his resources these days). My second opponent(s) are the tiny tiny gods of backup - yes tiny tiny - who seem to have wandered off with at least one of my oldish backup discs.

Stay tuned to find out if I can make it against those guys.

That’s all, Ben out.

The ‘API & Mash ups’ presentation by Kevin Yank and Cameron Adams (presented by ‘Bluepoint’) demonstrated just how easily data offered by a range of popular online services (MySpace, Upcoming.com, Google Maps) can be combined - mashed up so to speak - into an aggregate data pool feeding some of the most interesting and powerful tools, for anyone who has enough time on their hands to make us of it.

I will use the word ‘interesting’ in a slightly negative way because I believe that the potential issues that some of these mash ups may present outweighs the overall ‘coolness factor’ by a long shot.

Think about the following:

Amazon’s purchase data combined with the Google Maps API, to find out who bought George Orwell - 1984 and where in the US do they live?
Not too bad right ?

Now think of Upcoming.com’s event data (which can provide the attendees name for certain events) combined with the Google Maps API. This scenario would give any a nice overview or where exactly John Doe will be from next Wednesday.
Starting to get worried?

Finally I’d like you to think about the scenario above and throw some more personal information into the mix, by say tapping into the MySpace or Flickr API’s, potentially giving you a fairly comprehensive picture of a person you would like to track.
Stopped smiling yet?

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So, after an absolutely fantastic week at WD06 in Sydney I have safely landed back in good old Perth.

I have to say the whole thing was an absolute blast and my initial reservations disapeared almost instantly shortly into the events of day one. All the people I met as well as the outstanding quality of the speakers and last but not least the incredibly effort that John and Maxine and everyone else involved put into this event really showed.

Even thought the flight back was shocking, because I stuffed my neck/shoulder trying to find some rest, I have started writing the first of a few blogs that I will post in the coming week as I finish them off.

Thanks to Andy Clarke for taking time to have a quick chat with me after his fantastic keynote on day two even though he was dying to get outside for a smoke. Also thanks to the Sitepoint guys for their closing eve party, especially Kevin Yank for the free drinks the quick chat, and the t-shirt & book bribe offered.

Of course I’d also like to thank everyone else that I talked to over the last week whom I haven’t mentioned here right now, rest assured a lot of the conversations that I have had will make it into the upcoming WD06 blogs.

Will I be back next year? Definitely !

I almost forgot to post about this. While i was setting up this site and playing around with things like Simpleviewer and later on Lightbox, an old “problem” resurfaced when I thought it would be cool fed both apps from the same data source.
“I need to find a simple, and effective XML parser”

I’ve read many a tutorial about how to parse XML, be it method X or method Y, but all of them went yacking on about god and the world without actually getting to the point FAST. This is obviously good for people that want to know every single last thing about a technology they’re using (and don’t get me wrong I’d love to have that much time), but I need to understand it and be able to use it as quickly as possible without much fuss.

There are so many things that I am catching up on at the moment that there is just not enough time for all the gossip.

To my surprise I found a very nice and simple XML parser withina couple of seconds after trawling through Googles results and looking at what was thrown back at me.

My choice in the end fell for Eric Pollmann’s excellent parser script which is exactly how I like code. Simple, fast and to the point.

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