ricroberts

Winner at Kent Developing Solutions Camp

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:44:14 +0000

Last week I took part in the Developing Solutions Camp in Gravesend, Kent, and was delighted to win a prize for the best Mobile App prototype.

We worked on a prototype for the Learning Game, one of the ideas that had been proposed before the event, and ended up winning top-prize in the Mobile App category! There was a small cash prize, and the opportunity to develop the idea further with the help of Kent Business School. I’m looking forward to see where we can take the prototype.

Ruby on Rails Bootcamp - the second coming

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:14:18 +0000

Later this week, I’ll be running another 3-day Ruby on Rails bootcamp at the Madlab in Manchester as part of their Omniversity programme.

The last bootcamp was a great success, so we’re using the same formula, with a few minor tweaks based on how the first bootcamp went in August.

To get a feel for what people thought of it last time round, check out this blog post on the Omniversity blog: Ruby & Rails Bootcamp 3 months after.

There are still a few spaces remaining, but please be quick: you only have one day to snap up a ticket before the course starts on Wednesday.

You can find out more and sign up here.

Making the most of Open Data

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 20:22:57 +0000

I’m going to be attending Kent County Council’s Developing Solutions Camp, in a couple of weeks. In my capacity as a Linked Data “mentor” for the event, I posted a guest blog article on the Open Kent website.

Studies around open data often focus on the “armchair auditor”, and although these people do exist they are just a small contingent of those who could benefit from good open data. When considering the audience for open data we should also include consumers, businesses large and small, and decision makers in public and third sectors.

Except to true data nerds, data in its raw form isn’t really of much interest to anyone. Released datasets can often be too big to open in Excel, and can contain unfathomable codes or abbreviations. So, open data isn’t an end in itself: the true value still waits to be unlocked…

You can read the full article on the Open Kent blog.

Freeing Data with Free Software - a talk at the Madlab

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 06:47:49 +0000

I’m going to be giving a talk tomorrow at the Manchester Free Software Group meetup at the Madlab tomorrow night (Tues, 18th Oct at 7pm).

I’ll be exploring the benefits and pitfalls of using free software to
build Swirrl‘s Linked Data platform for publishing open data, PublishMyData. I’d also like to discuss with the group its opinions on licensing models for releasing
part of our platform as a free software community edition.

Michael Dorrington, one of the group’s organisers, will also be talking about UK Copyright, and then we’ll be heading to Common across the road for drinks.

If you’re free tomorrow evening, please come and say hello.

UPDATE: the slides are available on github here as a ‘showoff’ presentation.

Swirrl wins Open Data Challenge prize for Manchester bus data

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 16:10:08 +0000

We (Swirrl) were really pleased to hear yesterday that we were the winners of the Talis Award for Linked Data, one of the prizes in the Open Data Challenge, a Europe-wide competition run by the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Open Forum Academy. The award was for our Linked Data version of the Greater Manchester bus timetable data.

Its running on our PublishMyData Linked Data platform. You can access the data in a variety of formats including HTML, JSON and XML over a RESTful interface… or you can run custom queries against our db (full api docs here). If anyone’s got any questions about how to use it, I’d be happy to help – just drop me a mail. We’re a few days away from getting an auto-updating version going, which regularly picks up the most recent data timetable data from TfGM (the data is currently a few weeks out of date but still mostly pretty accurate).

You can read more about the award and the process we went through to create the Linked Data, on Swirrl’s blog, here.

Ruby on Rails Bootcamp at the MadLab, Manchester in August

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 18:23:37 +0000

Tekin Suleyman and I will be delivering a 3-day, affordable Ruby on Rails bootcamp at the MadLab in Manchester, on 17th-19th of August, as part of the Omniversity programme.

It’s aimed at developers who already know a bit about web development and object oriented programming, but have limited or no experience with Ruby or Rails. The course will provide the skills, knowledge and experience necessary to build and deploy your very own Rails applications from scratch.

Things we’ll cover:

the basics of the Ruby language
how to build a Rails application from scratch using Rails best practices
how to manage your database with migrations
how to build complex models using ActiveRecord, including associations, validations and callbacks
how to enhance your UI using Rails’ built-in support for unobtrusive JavaScript and AJAX
how to quickly add functionality and extend your Rails applications using third-party plugins and gem libraries
all about REST and how following RESTful conventions leads to code that is easier to develop and simpler to follow
about TDD (Test Driven Development) and how Rails helps you quickly and easily write tests to validate your applications behaviour
the options and best practices for automated deployment for quick, headache-free deployment and updating of your apps.

As well as 3 days of intensive learning, the £360 course fee also includes hot lunch.

You can find out more, and sign up on the Omniversity website

Lovely Data 2 at FutureEverything

Mon, 23 May 2011 08:30:38 +0000

Last weekend, I attended the 2nd Lovely Data Hack Day, part of the 2011 FutureEverything conference and festival in Manchester.

As well as getting to meet more people interested in open data, it was good to catch up with people from the previous event, and see what they’d been up to with our Linked Data API.

We’re really pleased to see that developers have been able to use our linked data and API to build great apps, without themselves having to go through the work of understanding and processing the raw data files.

You can read my full write up of the event (and the apps to come out of it) on the Swirrl Blog.

Technique Retreat, Manchester 2011

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 12:47:47 +0000

Last weekend I attended Technique Retreat 2011, held in Manchester and organised by the White Room. There were several streams of training available, but I concentrated on mobile and JavaScript.

Matt Ryan gave a good introduction to iPhone and Android development, and I thoroughly enjoyed Seb Lee-Delisle’s Creative JavaScript sessions, where we were introduced to creating animations and modelling physics using the HTML5 canvas. By the end of the weekend we were most of the way to making a fully functioning Asteriods game. :)

The mobile development sessions only scratched the surface of what’s possible, but it gave me the confidence to get started developing for those platforms. And Seb’s course demonstrated how something that looks complicated can be made from a series of very simple components (the concepts are accessible to anyone with basic JavaScript and maths knowledge). In fact it has inspired me to create my own game using some of the principles and techniques he introduced.

The birth of PublishMyData

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 13:08:14 +0000

Earlier this week, we unleashed a beta version of PublishMyData, Swirrl’s new Linked Data publishing platform. As my colleague, Bill, said yesterday “nothing has broken yet, so we’re calling it a success”. And the reception on Twitter has been better than we could have wished for.

In a nutshell, here’s what we’re trying to achieve with the platform:

Help data owners publish their data as high quality Linked Data, in a way that makes it easy to find, understand and use.
Make it as easy as possible for software developers to use the data published on our platform.

You can read more background behind the idea on the Swirrl blog.

This week’s launch was just the start. If you’re interested in being kept up to date with developments, please sign up to our mailing list.

New blog design (featuring Typekit fonts)

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 19:54:23 +0000

I’d been meaning to try out Typekit fonts on a site for a while, but hadn’t had really had the opportunity to, so I decided to give my blog design a bit of an overhaul. If you’re reading this via a feed reader, please check it out in your browser. Yes, I know it’s very green, but I’m red-green colourblind, so sticking to one colour avoids any problems :)

Anyway, it turns out using Typekit to add fonts to a web page is really easy.

You just need to add a couple of script tags to the <head>, and then you can either use special Typekit classes on elements to make them use your chosen font(s) e.g.

.tk-etica-display

…or you can use the font directly in your font-family CSS rules.

If you go for the Typekit class, you can provide font fallbacks via the TypeKit control panel for browsers that don’t support @font-face (or, presumably, if Typekit’s CDN is down).