The best executive summary of Ruby Manor I can give is to quote Kerry Buckley:

How cool is a conference that only costs £12, has excellent talks, and still has enough left over to put £500 behind the bar afterwards?

Very cool, in fact. James Adam and Murray Steele took their idea for a conference in which the content and schedule was shaped by the community, and made it happen. Not only that, they made it a huge success and sold out all the available tickets.

Graham Ashton did an outstanding job as unofficial scribe of the conference, and wrote a comprehensive summary of the day’s events (part two).

I really enjoyed doing my talk on opening up the iPlayer, and I received plenty of positive feedback. I was up first, which was good and bad. I was able to relax for the rest of the day, and give all my concentration to later speakers. However, a few people who wanted to see my talk didn’t manage to get there in time.

There’s an audio recording, and a video with possibly as much as half my face on it, and I’m sure those will become available soon. In the meantime, I’ve put my presentation online: I’m an evil iPlayer hacker. I hope it makes at least some sense without the voiceover. I used Eric Meyer’s S5 for the presentation, but my stylesheet has only even been tested in Firefox and may look skewy in other browsers. I apologise for any inconvenience.

I’ll have to write in a bit more detail at some point about the Ruby + Redcloth + Syntax + Rake + S5 workflow that I use to turn plain text into a presentation without having to get into the hellish pointing and clicking of WYSIWYG presentation software. It may be simple, but it works well for me and lets me focus on the content without getting distracted by the visuals. Simplicity is good.