otrops: jeff van campen’s personal blog

Right now, on Twitter, the number one trending topic is #moonfruit. I have contributed to this.

Moonfruit are running a twitter campaing. If you tweet the #moonfruit hashtag and the link to the campaign, you can win a MacBook Pro. So far, the campaign has been fairly successful. This isn’t entierly new, since Squarespace started a similar campaign in early June.

However, David Whittle decided it was WRONG, and claimed that it will eventually make twitter less useful. Others obviously agree, as he’s been widely retweeted.

My initial reaction was definensive (I’d love to have a MacBook Pro), but I’m starting to think he’s right.

Much of what I do on twitter involves filtering and scanning tweets to find the informaiton I find useful or interesting. Nevertheless, two or three of these campaigns running consecutively would make twitter very hard to use.

I’m not presuming to tell companies whether or not they should run this type of campaign. I think it’s probably too late for that now.

What I’m trying to decide is whether or not to take part in these campaings. I try not to worry about whether or not my tweets will appeal to everyone who follows me. If I did that I’d quickly find myself paralyzed, and I wouldn’t use twitter at all.

Nevertheless, I’ve come to the conclusion that participating in these hashtags campaigns is bad twitter etiquite. This is not because of my tweets might be annoying to some people, but because my tweets add to an accumlated effect that make twitter much less enjoyable for everyone.

In the immortal words of George Castanza: “We’re living in a society here!”

I’d be interested to hear what you think. Leave a comment below or reply to me on twitter.

It’s that time of the month again. London Web Standards will be meeting on Monday, 11 May.

This time, Justin Cormack of Squiz UK will be leading a discussion on Structuring CSS.

He’ll be covering techniques for creating modular, maintainable CSS. Along the way, he’ll be talking about Squiz’s mashable design, Nicole Sullivan’s Object Oriented CSS and dynamic CSS generation techniques, such as SASS.

It sounds like it’s going to be a fantastic presentation and should lead to the usual lively discussion.

If you’d like to join us, please RSVP on the meetup site.

Saturday was a fantastic day. Sunshine. Not too hot. Not too cold. The perfect day for a bike ride. In fact, the ride had been planned for some time. Charlie, James and I cycled from London down to Brighton.

What a ride

It was a fantastic ride. My favorite part was Slugwash Lane, which is a typical English country lane. Hedgerow alternated with small woods, where the bluebells were in bloom. It was lovely.

But the most rewarding part of the ride is the ride down to Brighton after climbing Ditchling Beacon. I stopped very briefly (~10 seconds) on the way up, but I pretty much managed to climb the whole thing. And it seemed much less grueling than last year.

It seems that Charlie enjoyed the ride to Brighton, as well. So much so, that he cycled back on his own.

Braver than me

For me, this was just a ride to Brighton on a lovely sunny day. For both Charlie and James, this was a preparation for a much longer ride. Both of them are going to be riding from London to Paris in the Big Issue London to Paris Bike Ride. That’s 240 miles in 3 days. Impressive.

James has a great post on why the Big Issue is worthy of your support, and Charlie has a similar post on why the London to Paris event is important for the Big Issue.

They invited me along, but I declined. I didn’t feel that I would be able to raise the money. What a wimp!

Show your support

So, to make up for my wimpiness, I’m going to urge you to support James and Charlie, even it’s just for a couple of pounds / dollars. Both of them deserve your support, both are very near their target and it’s for a great cause. Here’s how to support them:

• James’ Just Giving page
• Charlie’s Just Giving page

I know both of them (and the Big Issue) will appreciate any support you can give.

This month’s London Web Standards meetup is fast approaching.

We’ll meet on Tuesday the 14th and discuss Joshua Porter’s Designing for the Social Web.

I’ve started reading the book over the long Easter weekend, and I’m impressed. I’ll be posting a full review after the meetup. I’m halfway through the book, and it already feels like another Don’t Make Me Think: one of those books that I want to give to anyone that has anything to do with a website. It’s about more than just design, and his advice applies to every website. After all, like it or not, we’re all a part of the social web now. We always were.

If you’d like to join us, please RSVP on the meetup page.

I’ll see you there.

I’ve been fairly busy (and preoccupied) over the last couple of months, so I haven’t had a lot of time for blogging or for helping out with the preparations for WordCamp UK 2009 (in Cardiff on 18-19 July).

Fortunately, a number of dedicated people have spent a considerable amount of time to make the event happen.

I’m quite excited about this year’s WordCamp UK, as a number of announcements have been made in the past week or so:

• Most importantly, Tickets are on sale (organized by Joe Quinlan). I’ve booked mine already.
• The WordCamp UK 2009 blog has been launched, thanks to the efforts of Simon Wheatley and Laura Kalbag.
• It has recently been announced that Matt Mullenweg, WordPress founding developer, will be attending. (I’m assuming this came about because Tony Scott was working his magic behind the scenes, as always.)

Last year’s conference was superb, and I’d highly recommend it. It was great to get a chance to meet and learn from people that are using and developing for WordPress on a daily basis. If you do decide to attend, I’ll see you there!