Bathcamp Write-Up

So, my first ever BarCamp has passed successfully and I am mostly recovered from the experience!

This weekend was BathCamp 2009. It was a great event and I met a lot of really interesting folks. The talks I attended were all fascinating as were some of the discussions they spawned in and beyond the room. I won’t summarise each talk here, as Anthony Doherty has done a great job of doing so on his blog, Code and Effect, and we mostly attended the same, but instead highlight a few key points that I feel will influence my own work.

Content Duplication and URLs

Someone (I think it was emargee?) gave an enlightening talk about displaying articles in more than one place without unnecessary content duplication, but this line of HTML really caught my attention:
<link rel="canonical" href="the-original-version.html" />
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have all ratified the use of this tag to show the location of the original file (so the HTML file at “/articles/2009/08/02/bathcamp.html” could link to the file at a neutral URL such as “/articles/bathcamp.html”). Using this will prevent your site from being penalised for duplicated content. I can see this being extremely useful, plus as it can only be used in HTML documents it will help to convince clients to put documents online as HTML rather than as a PDF or DOC file.

During this same talk, there was a brief discussion of the plus points of using hyphens versus underscores in URLs. I had already stopped using underscores for a readability reason: when a link is displayed with the customary underline, this will hide the underscore. I had an email address with an underscore and often missed emails from computer-illiterate people who thought that it was a space instead. Apparently there is even a difference in how Google views them: it will treat two words with an_underscore between them as a single entity whereas with a-hyphen it treats them as two separate words. This has the potential to significantly influence a site’s search results.

HTML Emails

Rich Quick’s talk on HTML emails made me laugh and cringe, especially his two rules:

1. Think of how you would code something with standards
2. Do the exact opposite

It was quite frightening to hear just how much information about you a company can get from emails, and how they could use it if they were underhand. Still, it was interesting to learn the extent of CSS usage (only for text styling, plus you must still use inline styling for <a> tags), that Hotmail on Firefox fails to load images unless they are set to style="display:block" and to avoid background images as much as possible as Outlook 2007 doesn’t support them. Also, there is no using colspan – it’s nested tables all the way! Interesting talk, but I’m hoping I don’t find myself having to struggle with HTML emails any time soon!

All in all, I had a really great time, added more projects to my to-do list and learnt about some really interesting aspects of the web. I am really excited for the next one now – roll on BarCamp Cornwall! My one regret (other than wishing I hadn’t hurt my neck!) was that I didn’t give a talk, so I’m starting to plan my Cornish one immediately!

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