Last week I was asked to present a quick informal piece about developing for Android to the Interactive Team of Global in London. Rather than a “Hello World” example it was to be a background to the platform, the languages you can use, and a bit about the applications we’ve released. I presented on Friday along with colleagues who spoke of iPhone and Symbian.
It went okay (it’s not like much can really go wrong is it), but I certainly have a hell of a lot of room for improvement. It was my first semi-proper presentation, and I can see myself enjoying presenting in future, but right now I get unaccountably nervous. I hope I get lots of opportunities to give informal presentations like this in the future, because that is what it’ll take to get better and begin to enjoy them.
I decided it’d be nice to change things a bit. It’s not that I fell out of love with the old site, but that I wanted this site to be more informal, in the style of notes and observations, rather than full articles. I’ll still write articles, but when I do I’ll give them the time they require. So here I can write shortish notes, and can do so without needing to devote loads of time to each post.
Design
This time I decided to go heavily for simplicity, and with the intention of building up from there. If anything, I hope this will be a learning opportunity, to see how I can implement more functionality and provide more rich an experience, whilst maintaining this original simplicity.
I’ve built the site around the Atom XML language. I felt that if the user will likely be consuming this content from an RSS reader of some kind, I should organise the content around this standard language, the obvious choices being Atom or RSS. I plumped for Atom, and extended it with GeoRSS to include location data in the form of a longitude and a latitude. I love meta-data, and like the idea of including it wherever possible. Meta-data simply improves data beyond measure, making it far more interesting, allowing the consumer to learn a great deal more than they can see from the surface. With that in mind, I know location data isn’t the most fascinating piece of information to have about a post, but I think it does enrich the experience, and I believe you should include possibly useful meta-data wherever you can.
For now this site is simply grabbing the contents of the Atom XML document, and presenting it in the form of this page. This can’t remain as the XML will grow and grow, but it’ll stick for now. I need to decide if I want to database drive this, or stick to static files. I’ll make the Atom feed available once I’ve decided how I’m going to do this.
Also of note, I’ve built this front-end in HTML5. I love experimenting with new things, and although this may lead to a poorer service for some (such as those using older browsers), it’s worth it for the chance to explore new methods of presenting information.
With this new format I hope I’ll be able to add to this site more often now, and I hope to bring back interestingness in the form of flickr, twitter and last.fm integration soon. Also, maybe a little about me.