It’s free! But please book a ticket first from Eventwax first.

Since the Web got its 2.0 badge, there’s been a lot of stuff about social things, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc. We’ll ask questions like; How significant is the Social Web now? How does one build websites and applications for it? And where is it all going?

We’re hoping to provide a, somewhat controversial, underlying theme throughout that the disparate and ‘walled garden’ Social Web of today is similar to the early unorganised days of email and that open formats, standards and protocols will soon unify our social experience on the Internet.

Current speakers are;

Thomas Buckley-Houston
Facebook application developer and Open Social Web advocate. tombh.co.uk

Richard Dennys
Digital Marketeer, Principal Consultant at Digital Divinity. Currently helping some big brands with their Facebook strategies.

Tom Holder
Web developer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Simpleweb. Open standards enthusiast, likes PubSubHubBub and Activity Streams.

I’ve learnt so much, there must be a dozen or more blog posts I could write about my adventures; Facebook/Twitter/Mysapce Connect authentication, the Symfony framework, Nginx, Linux logging and statistics graphing, GIT versioning, user-testing, branding, business planning, Image Magick, print fulfilment, Service Level Agreements,  time management, global patenting, self-discipline, creativity and patience! I thought about writing about things as they happened but time had the better of me (well apart from the last couple of posts about the Myspace SDK and Nginx).

So in some ways I feel like a new man, having been through the furnace of such an involved process. My skills have been stretched and my confidence increased, I’ve a different perspective on the depth of my resources and what they can be put to achieve. And I’m still hungry for more!

It’s currently priced at £7.09, but post and packaging comes to about £4, so it’s yours for about £11. I don’t make any profit from that, it’s all printing costs to Lulu and posting costs to Royal Mail, but the plus side is that it’s available to the world and I don’t have to take care of any admin (taking payments, sticking it in an envelope, etc).

I never knew how much time and effort went into making a book, of course the actual writing is a significant task, but then the editing, re-editing, notes, bibliography, typesetting, cover/art work and all the rest of it has taken me just as much time. All in all, from when I jotted down the first word to its availability on the intertubes, over three years have passed. And it’s only a moderately sized book, maybe 16,000  words, that’s 80 or so pages.

So what’s it about? Well, there’s a nice little description on the back cover which you can read on Lulu.com, but basically it’s a collection of six essays exploring spiritual and philosophical topics often pitched from an autobiographical perspective — so no computer programming I’m afraid! The idea to write a collection of essays, rather than the more typical, series of chapters, was influenced by a few things; firstly I think the fact that, only months previously, I had completed a degree, played a part, but I was also inspired by the ostensibly narrative-less structure of The Faith To Doubt by Stephen Batchelor and the series of collected essays by Chris Arthur (Irish Nocturnes, Irish Willow and Irish Elegies), the acclaimed writer who also happened to be one of tutors.

And is it any good? Well you’ll have to find out for yourself!

However, you can still download it from here (a gigantic thank you to Eric, he’s caneri on the Puppy forums) — you will need to provide the username “puppy” and the password “linux”.

And my old wNOP pages can still be viewed over in my archives.

Thanks for all your positive feedback, I hope wNOP continues to bring pleasure for years to come :)

Some links don’t work yet or they send you to funny looking places. But I can write blog entries and you can enter memories into the colour memory database — which I’m quite excited about. The database just started off as a something to practice my programming skills on, but now that it’s up there, live on the world wide web thing, I can’t wait to see what everyone will make of it.