Hello campers. I went to the Speak The Web conference in Manchester’s Noho (that’s in Northern Quarter, yeah?) this week, to hear internet luminaries wax lyrical about their prospective fields and the future of net-land.

Speak The Web

The event included talks from Ben Childs (mobile web development chap), Dom Hodgson (SEO and all-around coding geekery), Remy Sharp (HTML 5 know-it-all) and the self-styled rockstar of CSS Andy Clarke (or ‘Clarky’ as he kept referring to himself).

It was an emotional affair, particularly with Remy Sharp’s explanation of HTML 5’s current limitations – he was showing examples of flash-less video content using only html, as well as showing how HTML5 will be able to communicate directly with MySQL without the dependence of PHP – if I’ve got that correct. Either way, it blew my tiny mind somewhat.

Even more rousing was Andy Clarke’s ‘Hardboiled’ or ‘no-compromise’ proponent of CSS3 usage, where he advocated graceful degradation of the more advanced CSS3 techniques – basically, he wants us all to build websites using all the latest CSS3 techniques available to us, and then work backwards to try and fix up horribly old and massively annoying browsers such as IE6. This was controversial in that most web designers have been under the mantra that ‘thou shalt make websites that work across all browsers and look and function the same’ – Andy Clarke simply stated that this was rubbish and if we don’t take advantage of the latest CSS3 offerings as well as the facilitations of the latest browsers, there may never be need for people stuck with IE6 to upgrade. Other than the frequent security risks that have been in the news a lot of late.

His talk drew the most criticism, but was thusly the most entertaining. There was also quite a bit of facial hair in the room. And much coding-knowledge-pugilism.

If you get chance, you should go along to another Speak The Web event as they’re focusing on the web-talent of North England, rather than doing what most of the other conferences do and just focus on London and Brighton, which makes a nice change.

View the website here: http://speaktheweb.org

Starting a new job can be an unnerving experience. There’s the new people, the new surroundings, the new challenges, the new…smells? But at Cuckoo (who were lucky enough to employ a chap of my stupefying talent) – the hair-pulling, the name-calling and bruising from stolen lunch-money fisticuffs has been kept to a respectable minimum.

So far I’ve been designing and building the new Cuckoo website, which should be up and running very soon. The website should improve and simplify the current information flow, and should have some cool little things thrown in. Like, for example, an option of a larger view of the Cuckoo webcam, for the nosier among us. Also, there’s the option of choosing your favourite background for the website, which should provide hours of fun for all.

And, for those who missed it, Cuckoo are still looking for sponsors for their 10k Manchester run to raise money for the NABS charity – and you can see their rather entertaining Rocky-inspired training video here.

Stephen and colleagues at Cuckoo.

Over and out.

Stephen Fairbanks