So Saturday (30th June 2007) was the first Perth BarCamp held at Central TAFE in East Perth.

You can get a full list of the topics and what not from the official BarCamp web site. I imagine from looking around the room at times there are a million twits and just as many blog posts for the event.

Then there is also the BarCamp wiki which will probably be your best place for information on the event.

Hijax

The first presentation of the day for me was Hijax by Mr Myles Eftos. All of the slides and information can be seen at http://myles.eftos.id.au/presentations/crazy_hijax/.

As the slide says, Hijax is about linking HTML and JavaScript, using a similar style to what we are all familiar with CSS. This makes editing easier and all of that good stuff. Interesting presentation, have a read of the slides to get a better understanding.

Silverlight

Next up was Scott Barnes from Microsoft talking about Silverlight. This is one that I was really interested in because of what we do here at WestOne.

I was hoping for a little bit more of a product demo though. We got more of an outline about how the web has come along in terms of rich internet applications and how Microsoft was entering this market. Which was interesting but I was just hoping for more of a look at Silverlight itself.

Scott said that he would be doing a more in-depth presentation later, but I didn’t see it on the list and had to leave early. Apart from that I think the quote of the day definately goes to Scott for saying that Transformers the movie was "A religious experience"

Second Life in Education

Next up was What’s the use of Second Life in Education presented by Kathryn Greenhill. I was interested in this because of the Education work I’ve been doing at the moment and the demo Kathryn gave was certainly interesting prospect for Second Life.

You can have a look at Kathryn’s presentation on the wiki. There are some nice videos from universities in the United States that have used Second Life in libraries and mini versions of their campus grounds.

Mobile Web

Nick Cowie was up next with Problems with the Mobile Web. This one almost started into an iPhone lover’s vs iPhone haters’ war but we just managed to keep on track.

This was an interesting presentation which brought about a lot of discussion from the attendees even after the mini iPhone war and Nick did a good job of showing some of the things about the mobile web, screen sizes, resolution, interfaces and just standards compliance.

Again more details can be found on the wiki and this has a link to the PDF of Nick’s presentation.

Lunch!

I think everyone enjoyed this presentation…

Have a look at this photo from Miles and you’ll see why.

There were also the providers of energy:
Red Bull
Coffee

There were also various fizzy beverages throughout the day which helped keep everyone going.

The WordPress Loop

If you ever wanted to know what a database and a php script talking sounded like, then this was a pretty interesting presentation given by Gary.

This was a great and comical talk about how you can customise your wordpress themes and make all sorts of crazy happen and how it all comes together in ‘the loop’. As mentioned earlier the amount of people all sitting on twitter and wordpress admin pages would’ve been taking notes.

As usual the slide information can be found on the BarCamp wiki

This was the last one I saw but I definitely have to give Gary points for his expression and voice work during this presentation.

So, that was about where I left due to prior commitments. Overall the day was great, I got myself a couple of t-shirts which can be seen here and here. There were a lot of Macs at the event, thought that was funny given the flack they seem to cop.

Have a look at the BarCamp Wiki for most of the information I’ve spoken about, there is also a Flickr Group and a heap of blogs listed on the wiki where you can read more about the day.