I think it was a really good day, although on the day I only sat in one session (and spoke in one session), I met a lot of old and new friends and learned a lot, We as NorthCrew had a good session and won an xbox (even if a bloke from the bbc blamed us for the north / south divide) but we will talk more about that on the northcrew blog when Ryan gives me access to it!

There seems to be a video floating around the internet of me, I believe its called Gravy in yer Servers… I deny all knowledge of it.

I will say on a personal level, having people tell you that they honestly think your doing a great thing for the community and give you ideas and suggestions is an amazing feeling and even the people who had concerns or didn’t find the service useful offered suggestions and ideas… we take each one and talk about them… we will be blogging about a few of them soon (but anyone paying attention to the northpack website will notice that we now have search button (I’m told theres an easter egg in there as well)

As for barcamp Leeds, im unsure what I’m going to be able to do with it this time around, work, northcrew and the missus take up a lot of time :)…

I can say that northcrew has some things up there sleeve but its more local developer / designer focused… *ooooooo** suspense!!

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks for the northcrew since the launch of NORTHPack, , we’ve had a lot of comments and feature suggestions and trust me, we are working on them (right now!)..

I’ve been speaking with a lot people who have added blogs this week but the one who has been most active has been Mark Sailes, he recently launched his website (SVN-Checkout.co.uk)  and has said (and he’s not the only one) that northpack has given him a bigger push to blog and write articles, the fact that people are going to at least see the title is enough of a boost for him to write around six articles in its first week…

Over half of traffic in the first week came from northpack and with the introduction of the NORTHPack RSS Feed, we hope this will continue

Our original aim was for 50 feeds in the first month, just over a week in we need 10 more feeds…. come on baby!

in a default feedburner set you your feed is at feeds.feedburner.com/yourFeedName, thats all well and good but what if you want to leave feedburner at a later date, maybe you’ve developed your own feedtracking service or you’ve decided to go without… you carn’t change that feed and you’ve lost all those subscribers…

When Google bought feedburner they made all the “pro” features completely free the best one of these has to be myBrand with a simple DNS entry you can have feeds.yourdomain.com/yourFeedName and have complete control over the links and the subscribers and if you feel at a later date you want to leave… you just create that subdomain and 301 people to the new url (which I also hope is on your domain name)

Northcast

Northpack

Northcrew 

The We I mention are Paul Stanton, Ryan Taylor, Deb Bassett and of course ME!..

We had a good response yesterday from the preshow which was just to get Stanton and Taylor used to talking via a podcast and will be recording the next one… soonish

The real one launches in Jan with lots and lots of shiney (read: crappy) video until we can afford some decent stuff

Version Control by Lorna

Q and A by Rockstar

(half of) TV 3 by Mark

and a few others, I really was intending on podcasting the day and doing some interivews but that really didn’t go to plan, however people seemed to like the day and have blogged some good stuff (especially about my session) and who could forget the ultimate barcamp battle of Rockstar’s latest game - Wii Table Tennis, in one corner - DOM, someone who never touched the game before, in the other corner IAN - Art Director for Rockstar Leeds, it was a tense battle with the warmup game handed to Ian first off but when The Hodge got into it Rockstar was defeated!.

The best bit about barcamp is the evening, and thanks to Rockstar for helping us out with that (congratulations to all afterparty attendees for out geeking a Rockstar coder), theres a lot of pictures floating around the internet, (do a search on flickr for barcampleeds)

God knows when the next one will be but I’m sure you’ll be informed..

As for geekup, last night I did a presentation about MTGCast and how it grew from this small little podcast to a network of casts thats too big for its own good ;), it was a 20:20 presentation that I felt went badly because well basiclly with everything that had been going on this week, I didn’t have time to sit down and go through it, but the information was there and it was a starting point for people to ask me questions after the presentation (of which I got quite a few).

We also announced the development of Northcast (I’ll link when things are up), a podcast that will demonstrate the abilities of northen companies and developers, the presentation was a “test the waters” thing to gauge peoples reaction and I’m glad I did a lot of people had comments and seems genuinely enthusiastic about it, a lot offered advice and quite a few wanted to book a slot to demo / talk about there site, company, experience, Ryan and Paul of Havoc Stuidos also joined as partners in podcasting, podcasting with people you know and gel with works a lot better (as was said in my presentation).

Monday, the MELD launch event, which arrived and went with mixed reaction, a lot of people were disapointed at been asked to make posters as a “MELDING” event, but the concepts and the ideas discussed were worth the crappy drawings :), I like MELD as a concept though I think the implementation of it at the moment is too broad and lacks focus, not to mention you had to apply for a place to come to the event and a lot of people were put off by the “invitation only” status..

Tuesday, the Apple launch event at Old Broadcasting House, I feel I will be blogging a lot more about this place over the coming months, not only because Linda is constantly bugging me to join, but also because thats were we Barcamp Leeds will be, but more on that later

Wednesday, Good old Geekup, upstairs this time in a more intimate environment,  good presentations and good company, I may be presenting next time.. IF I can get my skillz in order

Thursday, Work Night Out… nuff said!

Friday, Spent the evening playing Magic, something I havn’t done for a couple of months, which is Ironic considering I run a magic the gathering podcast network

and somewhere inbetween that we announced the date for Barcamp Leeds… which looks to be an awesome event..

if you would like it contact me to discuss anything dominichodgson@gmail.com, thanks for everyone who listened, if you like it or don’t like it, please comment on this blog

• Domain Name
• Internal Links
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• HTML and CSS
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What would you like me to talk about, I’m all ears… well.. eyes technically

GeekUp is a lot more social and its mainley developers or people with some ideas who just want to talk about the industry or get ideas, I don’t have a website which I could display but I still wanted to go and have a chat with people.

Open Coffee however seems to be a small group of investors or big developers and I find open coffee a bit more… “clicky” than the geekup, I arrived half way through due to my lunch hour and it took a while to get into the flow, if I didn’t know some people from last time, I don’t think i’d have enjoyed it, thats not to say that Open Coffee is a bad thing, but I feel its aimed at higher level management who can take time off, people who live off there websites :P, people who don’t work 9-5. That cuts a lot of people out (I was talking to a few people about this at GeekUp), I think if it becomes a bit more flexible, the attendance numbers should rise and it should be a better morning :).

The divides are getting bigger with each meeting, I think I’m the only one at the moment that has been to both events, that might be just bad advertising or geek snobbery, you can already see at least one person wouldn’t attend the GeekUp! if Imran wasn’t there….Mate, come on…. he’s a good bloke, but you gotta get out on your own!

The next GeekUp is in 2 weeks and I’m doing a 6 Minute presentation on SEO, hopefully people will like it and I can do some others, (Revenue for the 2.0 site, beating banner blindness, catching clickfraud).

BarCamp Leeds is the one event I hope will bring everyone together and “get this party started”, that’s probably going to be in september but i’ll keep you informed a bit more over the next few weeks.