Soul, 6:30 for 7, evening of the 7th December. They do an excellent burger. It'll be smashing. Bring your paddles and drysuits. 

If you've never been to soul its here and we'll be somewhere round the side of the bar. 

If you haven't confirmed already I'd appreciate it if you could tweet / email me / comment below or just tweet with the #rafting hashtag that you're coming along – it'll let me confirm final numbers with the venue.

Ladies and Gentlemen. The proposed Festive Rafting is almost upon us. I need to confirm some numbers and get something properly booked up for the evening of the 7th December. So – shout from the desktops and round up the nerds. Tweet me or comment below to yay or nay your attendance.

Eeless makes it easy to implement {LESS} CSS in your expression engine templates without having to rely on browser side compilation of your style.less into style.css.

It's an early doors expression engine module I wrote to let me play with LESS within my usual EE workflow. It still needs some (a lot) work; but it's on github for you to take, modify, criticise and be mean to. Feedback / Testers 100% welcome. You'll also find Eeless on devot-ee.

As a quick follow up to this post, following the summer break the Aberdeen Mighty Meetup returns on 14th September. This time around my employer, Fifth Ring, are supporting the eats and drinks.

With any luck other agencies and companies around town will follow that lead and help support the event. Hint hint.

See you on the 14th.

The DIBI videos are up. They're all worth a look – but that's a weekend killer – so I'd suggest these 3 are the ones I've thought about most since the event and are worth pulling to the front of your list:

Kevin Mann – nice guy did stuff, doing it again, loads of interesting stuff in here.

Jeremy Keith – content first. devices or viewports. I won't repeat his prefered title for the talk here, my mum might read it.

Corey Donohoe – tools tools tools – watch this and tell me you don't want to work at github!

 

Friday 19th August 2011

12:30

Kilau Coffee on Little Belmont Street

#rafting + #meatismurdermonth = #veggierafting

#RAFTING with a twist. Normally rafting involves a collection of geeks / nerds gathering for the consumption of large burgers at the Globe while discussing web, tech and the '80s music collection of a certain rafter. In support of the @mcaulay obsession with #meatismurdermonth we are going veggie for the day. Depending on the success this may be a one time thing – or we might all be hardcore vegans by Christmas.

Nerds welcome. Seriously. We're totally inclusive. As long as you have a klout score north of 30!

I really enjoyed DIBI this week. Some really inspirational talks from some leading thinkers and practitioners in the web. Some great discussion with peers from across Europe and the US. I met some webslebs. Drank some guinness. Had my first ever RedBull.

Well worth the trek south.

A major topic at the after-events was the availability of meetups and tech events in everyones local area. Talking to people from across the UK, it was clear that the kind of meetups which we take for granted in 2011 Aberdeen are not available everywhere. Niche user groups are relatively common, but the kind of 'general web' focussed events like the Mighty Meetup is unusual anywhere. 

So it was disappointing to hear that the turnout for the Mighty Meetup was so low last week.

I felt an urge to urge everyone to come along. So, if you earn your living from the web, do me a favour.

This is a focal point for our industry in Aberdeen. Once a month, make the effort, show face, have a chat, learn some stuff and have some snacks / beer.

If the format / location / timing doesn't work for you – tell @iansted about it. He's a lovely guy, he'll listen. But come along, let's make it work for everyone. 

It strikes me that Aberdeen has an opportunity to build a real web community to the benefit of all. The Mighty Meetup has a really stupid name – but it has real potential to help bond the community together and raise everyones game.

During the DIBI keynote last week, @zeldman painted the most beautiful picture of a mobile strategy for A List Apart. The 'wow' moment for me was when he described 'drinking coffee in a strange city and hitting a button to see where all the nearby geeks are who might want to talk responsive design'.

That's not ready yet – but all the Aberdeen geeks should be at the Mighty Meetup. 2nd Wednesday of the Month.

Some legacy sites bring tears to the eyes.

Right now I'm making some changes to an old site for a client. A very old site. It's rough. It's written in an outdated language, with an outdated structure, quirky templating mechanism and various layers of functions. It's scheduled for replacement, but needs a minor change in the interim.

I feel like the work experience girl that loves animals, and gets to work at the vets for a week.

She skips along the road that Monday morning. Turns up with dreams of giving vitamin drips to puppies and watching them scamper off to their loving owners. Fully expecting to have a day full of rollercoaster emotions always ending in happyness and fluffy cuddles. Maybe rolf will turn up. Maybe she'll get a heart of gold award for resuscitating a badger! Within 5 years she'll have her own series on BBC 3 giving celebs tips on keeping their Daschunds breath fresh.

Instead she gets handed the rubber gloves and sent to the owl suffocating room.

The only problem with the excellent Hardboiled Web Design by Andy Clarke is the lack of an index. Nothing makes me less likely to grab a book for a quick lookup than a lack of an index – and it’s a great book for lookups. So I pulled one together this evening while listening to Radio 4 – how civilised. I’ve posted the markdown, ODT and PDF on github – please fork and improve it, it’s just a start. Print A4 and trim to fit!

Update – we're official 🙂