Back from Leiden

I have spent the last 3 days in The Netherlands, or to be more precise, the lovely Leiden. Here I attended the EECI2009 (Expression Engine Code Igniter conference) where I met like-minded fools who roam this web development industry.

Expression Engine 2.0 will be released on 1st December 2009, a new wave of beta invites are on the way and hopefully my inbox will be tickled by one soon. EE 2.0 looks and feels great, I'll be presenting the new features to the Design by FRONT team and will probably put my slides up here too.

FOWD Belfast 2009

Had a fun day at Future of Web Design amongst the quiet audience in the Odyssey's W5. We were treated to live edits from Andy Clarke at StuffandNonsense.co.uk and Drew McLellan from Edgeofmyseat.com.

I was blown away by the thinking of Morgan McKeagney and his talk on the meeting of creative and logical minds, his delivery alone had me on board from slide 1. The Standardistas also impressed with a talk about good copy, I'm biased of course - I had the privilege of being taught by Chris and Nik. The age old IE6 debate raised it's head again, we'll be talking about it for another half a decade or so. Not looking forward to that.

Andy ended the day by putting forward the interesting concept of designing in the browser (instead of Photoshop and/or Fireworks). I'd love to try this, but you really need a client on board with this idea to pull it off in my opinion. Good day, good people, good night.