NorthCast: The Web Podcast By Northern Folk!

BarCamp Manchester Final - NorthCrew, NorthPack, NorthCast

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:14:12 GMT

We've finally reached the end of our BarCamp Manchester series of videos. We wrap up with the our presentation, and an outro of the day.

BarCamp Manchester Part 4 - Facebook API and The Future of BarCamp

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:34:17 GMT

Part 4 of our BarCamp Manchester series of presentations brings you Tom Scotts talk on the Facebook API and Ian Forresters discussion on the Future of BarCamp

BarCamp Manchester Part 3 - 10 Mistakes and Unconventional Traffic

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:10:28 GMT

Part 3 of our BarCamp Manchester series gives you the 10 Mistakes To Avoid For Startups and Unconventional Ways to Build Traffic.

003: New Gear, No Beer!

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:42:10 GMT

Welcome and Introduction

Sound Quality

We introduce the first Northcast with a brand new recording system, having just bought it 20 minutes before the show.

Local News

Christian Heillman At Geekup

Our video of Christian Heillman was downloaded over a thousand times and northcast as a whole has done over 1TB of bandwidth over the past week and a bit

The End Open Coffee Manchester

We discuss the end of open coffee manchester, the different crowds and attendace figures, Dom's love of the pastiries at OC Leeds, OC Sheffiled, Ryan's love of pushing knobs (on our northcrew equiptment),

Local Social Recipe Site

NoshNinja's is by a Leeds based designer, bringing food creation to the web 2.0 world, with tagging, comments, rss AND shineyness... all it needs is some AJAX!!

Barcamp Manchester

After taking home an xbox from barcamp manchester, we were left with almost 8 hours of footage to get out.. we go over our highlights and our "controversial" talk.

Also We Mention "Gravy In Yer Servers", PeterC's Header dedicated to northpack and the northpack header.

Northpacks New Features

Where to begin, Archives, Search, Twitter Updates, Detaile Statistics On NorthPack Traffic to your website, all for free and usable now

Global News

Google Buys Doubleclick

The team discuss the implecations of google owning...well pretty much everything, the ongoing Yahoo! and! Microsoft! deal! and say goodbye to Ask.com

IE8, FF3 and other "smaller" browsers

It's all going on this summer with the browser wars back in action.

Events

We wrap up the event's coming soon, no point writing this really most of them will have gone if you don't listen as soon as we release it :)...

northpack.co.uk has a nice list of events..

BarCamp Manchester Part 2 - Drupal and Data Portability

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:58:38 GMT

Part 2 of our BarCamp Manchester coverage sees the presentation from the Menus & Blocks lads on Drupal and Ian Forresters talk on Data Portability.

BarCamp Manchester Intro

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:14:33 GMT

So, you've been wondering were all this BarCamp Manchester footage we recorded over the weekend has gotten too? Well here it is, the intro, and first presentation.

Christian Heilmann - YUI javaScript Evolved

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 10:00:14 GMT

We were at the Old Broadcasting House on Wednesday 20th February to see Christian Heilmann's presentation on the YUI. If you missed it, you're in luck, we recorded the whole thing!

We've Been Packing For A Month (And A Day)

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 11:24:09 GMT

On the 13th of January, we launched NorthPack into the wide world of the internet, with the aim to have 50 feeds added and sync'ed within the first month...

Well we did it... almost, today (about 2 hours ago) our 50th feed was added,

Ross Dargan, the proud owner and his blog http://blog.the-dargans.co.uk, published the blog .net 2/.net 3 asp.net sql and all sorts of other goodies!..

We are proud have reached the goal of 50 feeds and you can be sure that a few ales will be drunk at our next meeting on monday, but this milestone marks the beginning of the next update to NorthPack, we have received an increadible amount of feedback, comments and feature suggestions and we are working hard to make sure your ideas and suggestions for NorthPack go into the site...

Tell your friends about Northpack and keep blogging, we've indexed around 800 posts (and soon they will be searchable and archived!), we are aiming for an additional 1000 in month 2 (there could be a prize for the 1000th blog post... who knows!!)

Thanks a lot for reading and have a happy valentines day.

Dom, Ryan & Paul

(On Another Note :: Happy Birthday Heather)

002: BarCamps, BarCamps, Everywhere

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:17:39 GMT

Local News

Brightbox reduce their prices

Rails hosting company and friends of NorthCast have reduced their prices, we give a brief overview of ther new plans, but visit www.brightbox.co.uk for the latest details.

Dom tries Ruby

After attending the "Leeds Ruby Thing", Dom has been inspired to give Ruby a whirl and has been playing with tryruby.hobix.com which lets you play with teh ruby command prompt in your browser.
Stanton also recommends the Learning Rails Podcast (www.buildingwebapps.com/podcasts) if anyone wants to listen to a podcast taking you on a guided tour of the ruby world

Introduction to Drupal

James Panton and Chris Mayden from menusandblocks.co.uk are running a Drupal introduction on April 9th. If you book before March 2nd you get 10% discount on the normal £250 ticket price.

Buy.at gets bought.at AOL

Premium (originally Northern) affiliate company Buy.at has been bought out by AOL, will this be a good move for the company, or will it cause problems? Dom gives an in-depth explanation and analysis using a fishcake analogy. yes. a fishcake analogy.

World Wide News

Microsoft! Attempts! To! Buy! Yahoo!

So it's already been talked bout for a whole week, but it's still a will they/won't they game.

Amazon buys Audible

In a master stroke, Amazon has purchased the definitive audiobook site on the web. We fawn over the audible service while discussing the virtues of audiobooks vs. "real" books. We agree that

Events

BarCamp Manchester
1sth March - MEN Media HQ
It's getting close, and the tickets sold out very quickly, the NorthCrew will be there recording coverage, so make sure to head back to NorthCast to catch up on what happened!

BarCamp Sheffied 2
Marth 16th > 17th - PlusNet offices
The dates have been confirmed!

BarCamp North East
Date and Venue TBC
Still in the early stages, but keep an eye on the wiki!

An Evening with Clive Grinyer
Old Broadcasting House
Due to Clive breaking his leg, this event has been cancelled :(

GeekUp : Yahoo! UI, javascript evolved
20th Febuary - Old Broadcasting House

Drupal North West User Group
20th February - Manchester Digital Development Agency

Open Coffee & Co-working
4th March - Old Broadcasting House

NorthCrew Developments

We give a brief overview of what we've been working on over the past couple of weeks for NorthCast and NorthPack.

Avatars, Favicons and your experiences

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 10:04:42 GMT

So NorthPack has been running for 2 weeks now, and the quality of your content passing through the site is amazing! But enough about what we think.... what do *you* think?

If you have added your blog to NorthPack, has it affected your stats in any way? more visits? more comments? we've had a couple of people say that because of the increased exposure through NP, it's encouraged them to blog more, which is fantastic, the main goal of the site is to unite and encourage the Northern community.

One thing i'd personally like to see, is for everyone to have avatars! it's a shame to see the default "?" picture next to a featured blog, don't be shy, get your face up there!

We'd rather that avatars were all faces, as we're a largely social community, we meet at GeekUp's, OpenCoffee's and BarCamps, but can't always put a face to the name... this is where your avatar comes in! The option to add your avatar is in your user profile :)

A quick note about resizing

I've had a couple of people come back to me regarding your photo's being cropped, or looking pixellated, i just thought i'd take a minute to explain why, and how to avoid this.

When uploaded, your avatars will be resized to be a 90 x 90px image, and greyscaled. to get the best results, the image you choose to be uploaded should have the same width-to-height ratio (1:1), or to put it simply, "it's hip to be square, innit".

You can, of course, send images that are't square, the upload script will simply resize your image to 90px (on the shortest edge), then crop off the rest. This will either result in a nice arty shot of you, or chop off your head.

If you're too shy, then you don't *have* to upload a picture of yourself, but please try find a picture which suits you, and can be associated with your profile.

Favicons, favicons everywhere...

As you've no doubt spotted, we make use of Favicons to personalise your blog on NorthPack, there's quite a lot coming through with no favicons, which is a shame.

If you don't know how to create a favicon, there's plenty of sites that will help you make one just a google away, my favourite is http://www.favicon.co.uk/ and lets you upload any picture to be resized and sent back to you in the .ico format, simply upload this to your site root, and we'll find it :)

At the moment, we're kinda cheating at how we retrieve them, by simply attempting to load them from http://yourdomain.com/favicon.ico, now we know that not everyone puts them in the site root, or even uses the default filename, so at some point we'll be getting smarter and retrieving the real location from your server, but for now, they'll have to sit in your site root to be picked up by us. We'll also support PNG favicons down the line too ;)

Comments?

So we'd like to hear your views, make use of the handy comment form below :) We've got plenty of new features in the pipeline too, so stay tuned!

NorthPack Beta 2.0 with RSS!

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 16:31:50 GMT

NorthPack is a fantastic resource which aims to shine a spotlight on what's happening across the Northern Web Community, our RSS feed makes it even easier to access this information.

Head on over to NorthPack.co.uk and click on the new shiny "subscribe" button in the navigation, and you can add our feed to your favourite reader :)

We're still working on even more great new features, but rather than sit on them and release them all at once, we'll be rolling them out as soon as they're ready!

Please feel free to leave any feedback, comments or suggestions below.

NorthCrew officially launches NorthCast!

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:48:31 GMT

Welcome to the all new, officially launched, NorthCast website. For those of you who have heard our pre-shows you'll have a rough idea of what we're all about, however for those of you new to the site let me give you a run down.

What is NorthCast?

NorthCast is a northern focused podcast covering local news about web related professionals, people probably like yourself if you're reading this blog. In addition we conduct interviews, and provide event coverage "up north" and our basic aim is too provide a much needed voice to the North of England.

Who runs NorthCast?

NorthCast is brought to you by the NorthCrew. At time of launch the NorthCrew consists of Ryan Taylor, Deb Bassett, Paul Stanton and Dom "The Hodge" Hodgson. You can find more information about us on the link below:

http://www.northcrew.co.uk

May I draw your attention for a moment?

NorthCast is a community podcast powered by community content. Without the community we have nothing. We're just three blokes sat around, tinkering with our laptops and admiring Dom's latest Nintendo T-Shirt... playing on the Wii... and occasionally surfing the web. Basically what I'm trying to say is we need you. That's right you!

You'll find on the navigation menu a link to submissions, this is where you, a community member, have the opportunity to submit content or suggest podcast topics. Are you launching a product? Have you started a new business? Anything you can think of that might be interesting to the community get in touch. We may even want to interview you for the show.

Also don't forget to subscribe to the podcast, we have a selection of RSS feeds providing you with the content you're most interested in.

Where are we going with all this?

Well that's up to the community. We hope we'll be well received, so far our feedback has been excellent, and there are many features and directions we would like to go in, the main feature being video, but no-one wants to flog a dead horse so let us know what you want to see and hear about. This is just the beginning!

001: Official Launch

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 11:51:03 GMT

Welcome and Introductions

Proud to present our first official podcast!
Ryan introduces himself and his co-hosts Paul and Dom.
Apologies for the sound quality, which will be improving very soon.

Local News

Brightbox

Brightbox provides Rails hosting (in case you didn't know, like Ryan) and Jeremy Javis got in touch to tell us that they have started a partnership with Fiveruns which is:

"FiveRuns' RM-Manage is the first and only Rails application monitoring product to instrument and monitor all aspects of the Rails framework and its supporting infrastructure resources." - Brightbox

App In A Box

Tom Scott has released "App In A Box" which is a facebook application that allows you to quickly and easily make your own facebook applications.

World Wide News

We skim over the death of Netscape and the report that Internet Explorer 8 passes the ACID2 test.

End of Support for Netscape Web Browsers

IE8 Passes ACID2

We rant about the Opera complaint to the European Commission and how we think it's pointless and merely a publicity stunt on Opera's part.

Site Promotion

NorthCrew

We talk about our new team the NorthCrew, comprising of Ryan Taylor, Dom Hodgson, Paul Stanton and Deb Bassett.

http://www.northcrew.co.uk

NorthCast

We talk about NorthCast which you probably already know about. We also talk about Richard Garside's work on the podcast player which will be appearing on the site soon, allowing time comments on the podcast. We also have a new video camera so expect video content soon.

NorthPack

We talk about our ambitious new project NorthPack, introducing our main feature, the meta-blog. Register your RSS feed and join the community.

http://www.northpack.co.uk

Events

Flickr Meetup - Manchester
January 17th - One Piccadilly Gardens
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/396280/

NW Start-Up 2.0 - Manchester
January 17th - KPMG
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/268519/

Kooji Creative

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 09:42:45 GMT

Interview

We interview the founders of Kooji Creative, Katherine Moss and Johnathan Gallagher, who tell us about there experience in the industry and the success they've had since starting.

NorthCast PreShow 002: Christmas Special

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 09:41:02 GMT

Welcome and Introductions

Our second (beta) podcast, our final podcast of the year, and our christmas special all rolled into one!
We're glad that we made it to 2 episodes, and we have international listeners!
Paul introduces the hosts for the cast, Ryan, Dom, and himself
Dom introduces our fourth member, Deb, who's busy locked in a room coding Ruby (well someone's got to i suppose) for some other things we have planned in our bid for world domination.

News

Rails 2.0 milestone release

Deb sends us her notable news story of the week, and gives us a "top 5 list" covering the important points in this release, which we all vaguely try to understand.

Summer Migrations
Happier Fixtures
More REST
Cleaner Rails Environment
Security Improvements

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/12/7/rails-2-0-it-s-done

Drew Curtis of Fark.com attempts to trademark "Not Safe For Work"

Frivolous? very. Publicity stunt? quite possibly... but it gives Stanton the cracking idea to trademark "The Hodge" for the 50p's worth of licencing fees.

http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=77338491

Apple Store coming to Leeds?

Not confirmed, but the Headrow Shopping Center is showing an Apple Store on their remoddeling mockups. What does this mean for the current city-based reseller (KRCS)?

We may do a video cast for the opening... stay tuned.

We don't have anything against Mac's, just Mac Evangelists.

http://www.homeofmuppets.com/muppets/moblog_view2.php?file=1197211848_dsc02126.jpg

https://www.krcs.co.uk/pages/applecentre_leeds

Google "Android" OS

Will it take off? Is Symbian scared? Should they be?

We discuss how the Google OS may change the current mobile landscape, and wonder if the mobile providers will embrace the OS, or lock it down to maintain their revenue streams.

Could an advertising based mobile phone service, with location-aware services result in the abolition of contract/handset/call charges?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7082414.stm

http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/28/google-is-working-on-a-mobile-os-and-its-due-out-shortly/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(mobile_phone_platform)

Why Dom Hates the iPhone

Dom rants against the current trend of sites providing "iPhone only" pages, while Paul counters that it was Apple's fault for restricting third party apps for so long.

Google Charts

Google open up their new Charts API, letting developers generate nice looking charts for their own applications.

Will it last? or will Google pull the plug at some point? and how can then monetize the service?

http://code.google.com/apis/chart/

Past Events

Dom attended (and recorded) the "Evening with Rory McLeish" at Old Broadcasting House, an interactive designer who's worked on a number of high profile projects in the movie world.

We were invited to the "North West Startup" due to our *celeb* status, but unfortunatley couldn't attend due to a double booking, but please feel free to invite us to your future events! press@northcast.co.uk

Upcoming Events

Geekup Christmas Meal - Manchester
December 18th - Velvet Bar & Restaurant
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/290569/

Geekup Pub Crawl - Leeds
December 19th - Start at The Lounge
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/322577/

Christmas Day - Everywhere
December 25th - Your House
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/384763

Comments, RSS, Here Comes Another Bubble and Bloopers (keep listening!)

NorthCast PreShow 001: Welcome to NorthCast

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 09:51:35 GMT

Welcome and Introductions

What is NorthCast?
Ryan's Introduction
- Ryan works as a designer for a Leeds College, and also dabbles in development
Paul's Introduction
- Paul is a designerSLASHdeveloper for a large Leeds University
Dom's Introduction
- Dom is an SEO specialist, with the largest collection of Nintendo T-Shirts known to man
Northcast will be bi-weekly (once a fortnight, not twice a week) unless we become popular
We will be covering the northern gatherings, GeekUp, OpenCoffee, BarCamps etc
Interviews with people in the community, as long as they have something interesting to talk about!

News

LogMeIn Revamp

LogMeIn have revamped their interface and remote working service, it's gone all 'Vistafied', Ryan gives us a quick rundown of some of their new features and performance improvements.

http://www.logmein.com

UltraVNC

Dom recommends UltraVNC as a completely free alternative to LogMeIn

http://www.uvnc.com

Facebook faces UK data probe.

Dom refers to an interesting GeekUp mailing list post which made Channel4 and theregister, where it's discovered that it's damn near impossible to *really* delete your private data from facebook. We also point out that Facebook now has a UK office, so is required to comply with UK data protection laws.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/20/facebook_uk_data_protection/

Is privacy dead?

We also discuss the privacy implications of the Beacon code for Facebook Applications, just how annoying facebook applications can be, and does your facebook profile affect your employability?

http://www.facebook.com/business/?beacon

The 'Friends Off'

The guys compare the length of their Facebook friends lists...

Upcoming (and others) moving data overseas

A big no-no for us!

http://upcoming.org

MoooooonPiiiiiiggggggg!

We (somehow) segue into talking about this hilarious piece of TV advertising, and wonder wether the company will recoup the costs of the advert?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=MEBy67ZUrxQ

Firefox 3 Beta 1

Paul and Ryan argue with Dom about why this is an important step in browser development, also discussing the new features such as memory leak fixes, full page zoom, moving to the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine (which now passes the Acid2 test), and wether these steps will force Microsoft to make any changes to the IE rendering engine instead of just giving the interface a coat of paint.

Dom also describes how the increased security through stopbadware.org in FF3 caused problems after his server was compromised recently.

http:// www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/

http://www.stopbadware.org

Asus EEE PC

After playing with one at the last GeekUp, we all agree that these are a fantastic little device, but might wait until the 2nd gen (rumoured to be 8gig HD & 10" screen) machines to appear before investing.

http://eeepc.asus.com

Evil Knievel is dead

Ok, so nothing to do with Northern Tech, but we find out while we're recording the podcast.

http://www.evelknievel.com/

Events

OpenCoffee Leeds
Tuesday 4th December @ 10am
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/310850/

Leeds Group Flickr Shoot
Saturday 8th December
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/317634/

GeekUp
Christmas Meal Manchester
Tuesday 18th December
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/290569/

GeekUp Pub
Crawl Leeds
Wednesday 19th December
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/322577/