I managed to rope everyone in, Priscilla, Emma, Mat & Phil along with Bridget on the day and David keeping the dogs happy while we were in conference mode, thanks to all for playing their parts. All in all as a company we’re very proud of what we’ve managed to pull off, all the hard work and planning has paid off, almost universally the feedback has been excellent with many people saying, to us directly, it was the best organised community conference they’d been to for years.

Sitting in the first session, K.I.S.S from Derick Rethans, I was aware of a very surreal feeling – the conference was actually happening, after months of planning, a little heartache and juggling some of the risky elements, it was actually happening right here, right now!

One of the main drivers behind PHPNW08 was to encourage junior developers to take an active path to their continuing professional development, with speakers sessions covering topics like MySQL EXPLAIN Explained and Regular Expression Basics being warmly received by many I think we achieved that objective!

My personal favourite session was Zoe Slattery’s ‘Index and Search, options for PHP programmers’ which was a really interesting comparison of the Lucene search implementations in PHP and Java – not what the title suggested but a well delivered, complex subject delivered in an easy confident manner.

It was also good to have some fun at the socials on the Friday and Saturday night, even if I didn’t quite manage to find any time to play on Mario Kart – with the open bar and food on the Saturday event it seemed to be a great way to round off the event.

While we still have to deal with some of the wrap up elements of the conference, videos, slides, handing out the last remaining prizes – the general aftermath of a very satisfying weekend, we’re already looking forward to early planning for next years’ event, PHPNW09 everyone?!

So let’s cut to the chase, how do I do this? In a nutshell: Create a new twitter account; link that to a twitterfeed.com account (a service that turns RSS feeds into twitter posts) and an RSS feed; then follow in your normal twitter account the new twitter account just created and, if you want text alerts of the data (e.g. when you’re actually travelling round the area), turn on device updates for the following of the new account (assuming you’ve already registered a mobile device for this purpose in your main account).

Then you get new tweets and or text alerts each time there’s a new RSS entry in the source feed. Sweet

If you want to subscribe to the results for that feed simply skip all the setup above and just follow NWUKTrafficAlrt in your twitter account.

My only problem now is deciding which track to follow on the day – choice is sometimes not a good thing! Perhaps the sessions will be videoed and I can see all of it.

While I’m in PHP geek mode (I am every day but that’s what I get paid for), I’ve just discovered the PHP Podcasts web site – I’ve got that linked in the feed reader and am already starting to enjoy the aggregated content.

Whilst Christian’s talk was an introduction to the YUI posing the question Javascript Evolved?, it was fairly basic for anyone who’s used it in anger however it was a good talk, light hearted and well presented, ideally suited to the level of the audience. Christian took a straw poll of who had used the YUI to date and there seemed to be about 10 hands that went up around the room of about 70 attendees. This surprised me quite a bit as I thought it would have had a wider exposure – I’m sure it will after the presentation. For me it’s the enterprise approach to the framework model that is YUI that won out over the other libraries out there. One of Christians’ key points was that YUI is more than a library, in fact a true framework – JavaScript, CSS and widgets all available from a single source. The other thing I like about YUI is that it’s developed by Yahoo! – who set a high standard in terms of cross-browser compatibility as well as understanding the nature of scalable solutions for their own sites. I’m looking forward to getting into the new features of the latest release of YUI version 2.5.0 out today! I hope that the new version doesn’t break too much as I’m just in the testing phase of a project with a client and would like to get the new version in before it goes live – we shall see. If you missed the event, then Christian’s slides are available on-line.

The man from Yahoo! also kindly brought some promotional merchandise along to the event – we all were then invited to put our names in a hat and a draw was then held. To my surprise my name was called out third and better than the t-shirts and beach balls that were won by some, I’d won one of the two copies of Christian’s own book: Web Development Solutions – Ajax, APIs, Libraries, and Hosted Services Made Easy (published by Friends of Ed from Apress). I shall look forward to getting into that once I’ve finished my current read: Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 also from the same stable.