Some more thoughts on coworking in Hebden Bridge

Posted on May 31, 2009

Spent this weekend at Bar Camp Leeds 2009, it was great. There were some good presentations and talks and I really enjoyed getting out and talking to other people in the digital and creative industries.

I’ve been working from home now for a couple of years and it’s sometimes easy to get caught up in a routine and to forget that part of things. It’s easy, despite all the blogs and twitter messages we – or at least I, constantly read- to forget that there are people nearby doing very similar things. In the case of Hebden Bridge, quite a few.

Getting out there and meeting people has really hit home the idea that I would find a coworking space in Hebden Bridge  immensely useful. I’ve been in touch with some of the people involved with the Town Hall project and the whole idea for the creative quarter they’ve got planned looks great. It’s probably a couple of years off though and what interests me most isn’t the building; it’s the community, collaboration and sharing of ideas.That’s something that can start without any funding, so I’ve been wondering what can be accomplished in the meantime.  Starting now also gives the Town Hall project the best social proof and traction for the concept possible.

So what’s next? I’m going to try and organise an open coffee, try to guage interest in making it regular, coworking and maybe even somewhere down the line try to start our own Hebden Bridge BarCamp or unconference, with it’s diverse make up I bet it would be something unique.

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Does older browser support matter anymore?

Posted on May 29, 2009

I’ve run into a few problems with some of the web apps I’ve been building lately as I’m sure others have. The explosion of the cloud is only going to lead more and more people down the exact same path. Let me just briefly explain the architecture which will help you understand why it’s a problem.

Basically I have a site which is all too commonly static html, css, images and javascript. The magic all happens through the XMLHttpRequest.

Ideally what I want to be able to do is to push all this static stuff somewhere fast and as close to the user as possible. CloudFront is an obvious choice, but then I get hit by the same origin policy. To work around the issue and because I want to publish the API for developers to use I’ve implemented JSONP callbacks.

Though I did come across the W3C access control work and noted that we may be close to a solution, at least for the newest browsers. That brought up a whole new question that’s been plaguing web designers and developers for years – how old does a browser need to be before you take it out back and shoot it?

Look through browser market share and my tiny sample set I’m also seeing that browsers are more or less up to date. Which is great news. There are a few IE6 hold outs showing up my visitor stats but for the most part everyone appears to be more or less up to date. Has software update actually solved the issue, probably not by I for one, welcome any progress.

So that brings us to the real question, with the vast majority of the browsers out there running at or beyond the most current release do we need to care about those that don’t? Do we even want to deal with the train wreck that is IE6 compatibility anymore?

Coworking in Heben Bridge or my office is soon going to be a bedroom!

Posted on May 17, 2009

My partner is mid way through her pregnancy, we’re expecting number two, so within the next year I’m going to need to find somewhere else to work. Even if we end up with two girls and they can share a room, I’m just not not sure it’s going to be practical to work from home with two young children. Even with just one I’ve been finding myself in the library more and more for the piece and quiet. Which got me to thinking about coworking and reaching out to see if there is anything in town or any interest in setting something up.

For a town of it’s size Hebden Bridge has a great artistic and creative community and more than it’s fair share of creative professionals; creatives, technologists, artists, designers, writer, journalists and programmers like me. It’s a great family town but a lot of the houses are fairly small. Perfect it would seem for a co-working setup.

I’ve sent some emails and posted on the HebWeb forums and so far there has been enough positive feedback that I’ll pursue it some more.