Carsonified’s FOWD Tour 2009 is taking in Belfast this September the 2nd. I just grabbed one of the last remaining early bird tickets for £45 so if you want similar I suggest you hot foot it to the booking page pronto.
The day is split in two – a morning of tutorials and an afternoon of presentations & speed networking. Topics to be covered over the day:
The Importance of Beauty in Absolutely Everything
The Future of HTML5
Top 50 Rookie Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Bauhaus Ideology and the Future of Web Design
The Battlefield of Design – Designers vs Clients
Speakers and teachers on the day will include Andy Clarke, Brendan Dawes, Drew McLellan, Elliot Jay Stocks, Paul Boag, Simon Collison and more. Further info is on the FOWD Tour website.
Twitter failSomeone please tell me why Twitter thought it was a good idea to put the ‘Accept’ button right on top of the ‘Block username’ link on their web interface?
It’s caught me out on more than one occasion and to this day I still haven’t figured out how to ‘unblock’ a user.
Dear Twitter, please fix! In fact, I’ll do the work & give it to you for free, just stick this line into your CSS, you don’t even have to touch your HTML as it’s already being referenced!!!
Jason is taking the BTW event to Cork today at the Boardwalk Bar & Grill at 6pm. I was at the last one in Dublin and it was a fantastic informal meetup of a great mix of people from various walks of the online world most of whom I probably wouldn’t have met ‘offline’ otherwise.
There’s some tasty badges on offer too if you need further reason to attend Would love to have been there but Cork will have its’ claim over me next weekend instead for the International Choral Festival which I will be posting about later on. Directions for how to get there. Have a great evening all!
Stu’s virus is getting contagious. Ridiculously so. I can’t help but think of songs as bloody alert boxes now. Some really awesome ones over on the Buzzfeed page, expect more later.
And about 15 mins later I had another one, good God help me.
I was up and out early this morning for the filming of a dance scene for Ireland’s first bollywood movie today (awesome fun, post coming later). Glancing in on Twitter during rehearsals I found out that the posts I had written about the Fine Gael website had made page 2 of the Sunday Tribune.
Fine Gael are still sticking to their guns and now claiming that all sorts of research was done into finding inspiration for their new online face. My favourite quote from the unnamed FG spokesperson:
“What has been asserted is not correct; there are grains of truth in this thing but they would get a life of their own on the internet,” a party spokesman said.”
Their lack of understanding of the issues surrounding the website now outweighs the seriousness of their actions. Their lack of engagement with the online community on top of the poorest of efforts in delivering a suitable, usable and useful website is the basis for a total failure in the management of their identity and image online. As Suzy said earlier:
“Above all this incident is about the second biggest party in the state and another example of it’s lack of serious commitment to on-line engagement with voters in the country, a lack of faith in Irish based web developers, and no imagination in the excuse making department either!”
I’m still disappointed and quite annoyed with how the party have handled the incident. FG don’t realise that they’ve missed the boat completely in terms of communication with voters & getting their message out there ahead of the local elections and in time, maybe even a general election before long. Their attitude towards the Internet and the online community (from bloggers to developers) is archaic and worryingly ignorant. I’d normally wish someone luck at this juncture (considering the mountain that they have to climb) but the feeling of disrespect is now a mutual one so they won’t be getting any best wishes (or votes) from this citizen.
Would love to have been there but Cork will have its’ claim over me next weekend instead for the International Choral Festival which I will be posting about later on. 
