Journal tags: manchester

I’ve just returned from delivering a day of DOM Scripting training in Manchester. The workshop went well but, given the significant distance between Brighton and Manchester, the journey there and back took quite a while.

I passed the time on the train doing a little bit of hacking, all the while listening to my Huffduffer podcast which I had loaded up with stuff I thought I might be interesting. Nothing makes a train journey go faster than stimulating the mind with some audio nourishment.

I’m very happy to report that the quality of stuff being huffduffed is extraordinarily high. Just check out the material being huffduffed by Jason Weaver, for example:

• Susan Blackmore on memory,
• A speech by Tim Berners-Lee,
• A discussion of Pinot Noir and
• much more.

As I said when I announced Huffduffer a few days ago, I really built it to scratch my own itch. I wanted to somewhere to gather together the audio files that I stumble across while I’m surfing the web. It looks like I’m not alone. It’s immensely gratifying to discover that others share my craving for a quick’n’easy way to create a podcast by bookmarking MP3s. The site is starting to feel more “lived in” and the network effects are beginning to make themselves felt in the tags and popular items.

I’ll keep iterating on the site, of course (whenever I can find the time). If you have any ideas or suggestions, I’m all ears. I launched Huffduffer with a very minimal set of features. How the site evolves will depend on how people use it. I don’t want to try to second-guess too much of that.

After all, I wouldn’t have predicted that the killer app for Huffduffer would be long train journeys.

I’ve been seeing the inside of a lot of airports lately. Right after getting back from XTech in Amsterdam, I flew up to Manchester to deliver a one day workshop in Ajax.

It was my first visit to the mighty Mancunian metropolis and a very pleasant visit it was, especially given the opportunity to go drinking with Patrick Lauke, James “Brothercake” Edwards, and Chris Mills in a bar that was decked out like a sci-fi version of the Hard Rock Café from parallel grungy dimension.

Tomorrow I will once again be doing the airport shuffle. This time the airport is Stansted and the destination is Copenhagen, the setting for the eighth iteration of the Reboot conference. I’ve never been to Denmark, let alone Reboot, before. I’m really looking forward to it.

I will be speaking but for once it won’t be a code-filled techy presentation. Instead, I plan to deliver the most pretentious talk ever devised: In Praise of the Hyperlink.

I also managed to solve the mystery of the missing email and figured out that the person doing the pre-Reboot podcast was Nicole Simon. We had a little chat over Skype and you can listen to the conversation if you want to get a taste of what I’ll be talking about.

If you’re going to Reboot, I’ll see you there. If not, expect the usual cascade of Flickr pics and liveblogging.