The first of these outages was entirely intentional; like many other sites on the web from the huge to the tiny, I blacked out my web presence in protest over the Stop Online Piracy Act which was being voted on in the US Senate on that day. I did this for two reasons. Firstly the internet is a global network and the SOPA legislation, as worded, would have had a massive impact on the global internet and negligible impact on online piracy. Secondly, whilst I live in the UK and SOPA is a piece of US legislaton, past experience shows that the UK government have a rather good history of importing UK versions of poor US legislation. Here’s a helpful infographic which speaks more about SOPA that I ever could.

The second of these outages was also entirely intentional and solely down to me; vicchi.org, garygale.com and vtny.org moved home from their old web host to their new one. It took a while to rebuild these websites and to wait for the nameserver changes to propagate across the internet.

The first of these outages was important. The second was irrelevant and trivial. But if SOPA had passed, the second sort of outage would become commonplace for parts of the internet, but to you and me, it would just look like a change of hosting provider. Except the websites affected would never come back online.

There’s some things that you expect to see when you’re on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic ocean. Firstly you expect to see a map of where you are …

Secondly, if you look out of the window, you expect to see the ocean below, through a gap in the clouds and through the ice crystals on the window …

But what you don’t expect to see, is a mobile phone which isn’t only not in flight safe mode, but is also actively connected to a mobile network.

But that’s what you get these days on Virgin Atlantic. Granted it’s a plain old GSM connection, voice calls and SMS only but it’s great for not feeling so isolated when you’re away from home and from family.

So not only will I maybe only write blog posts on from airplanes these days, but maybe I will only make phone calls from airplanes these days too.

So it’s good to be able to say that as of v2.1.1 of the plugin, you can now do this and v2.1.1 is now live and able to be downloaded from GitHub as well as from within WordPress or via the WordPress plugin repository.

As well as supporting the latest v3.3 version of the WordPress core, the complete list of changes for this latest version of the plugin is …

• Add ability to suppress the Biography Box from being displayed on posts, on pages and on posts and pages on a per user basis
• Add settings link to Settings / WP Biographia admin page from the plugin’s entry on the Dashboard / Plugins page
• Add checks for avatar display in the Biography Box being requested with avatar support not enabled in the Settings / Discussions admin page
• Add Help & Support sidebar box to Settings / WP Biographia admin page
• Handle upgrades to configuration settings gracefully; fixed bug that didn’t persist unused/unchanged configuration settings
• Cleaned up the wording for the Settings / WP Biographia admin page and made terminology consistent across all configurable options
• Tweaked admin CSS to introduce padding between the settings container and sidebar container that changed in WordPress 3.3

As always, the WP Biographia home page has the full details. Consider this, if you will, an early visit from Santa. What’s next for the plugin? Internationalisation is probably on the cards as well as converting the plugin to use classes and not a simple set of WordPress PHP functions; but all of that will have to wait until after the Holiday season.

While sitting in a hotel room about a week or so back, I realised that while vicchi.org has been the home of my blog for years and the current incarnation may have 267 pieces of bloggage tucked away in the bowels of WordPress (that’s 268 with this post), the theme has been pretty much static since sometime in 2007. The same goes for my other web presence over at garygale.com.

But back to this blog for a moment. Like a lot of people I started out with a stock WordPress install and theme. Then I went through the discovery of the WordPress theme repository, installing and uninstalling too many plugins, before finally becoming confident enough to start hacking the PHP and CSS of an existing theme into something vaguely approaching what I wanted. And thereby hangs the problem. My theme, which started out as Chandra Maharzan’s rather wonderful Cleanr, suffered from the problem that each time the theme was updated I needed to go through the changes and manually apply them to my hacked version. Scalable and fun this is not.

Enter the notion of WordPress child themes. These allow you to take an existing WordPress theme and build on top of that theme but without actually modifying or adding to the original theme. You start with just inheriting from the parent theme’s CSS and then you can add, adapt and otherwise hack as much or as little of the parent’s templates and PHP functions as you need. As you’re not actually touching the parent theme at all, any updates to that theme are automagically passed onto the child theme, so the need to keep a hacked theme in line with the original simply goes away.

I still rather liked the clean typography and colour scheme of my version of Cleanr so I was able to easily modify my child theme’s CSS to migrate this. I based the child theme on the WordPress Twenty Ten theme but changed the way in which post date formats were displayed, removed the built-in biography display so I could use my own WP Biographia plugin and modified the parent theme’s header image display to use my own imagery and to also rotate the images on page refresh.

Putting together a child theme to give my blog a long overdue facelift has been surprisingly easy; to see just how easy, the source code to the originally named Twenty Ten – Vicchi is over on GitHub to download, fork or otherwise hack around.

One web presence down, one to go. Next it was time to give my personal vanity page some facelift attention. The original design for this site was heavily influenced by Christian Heilmann’s approach to web technologies. Chris and I worked together at Yahoo! and he taught me so much about how web pages worked. The original version of this site was dynamically generated from RSS feeds fed through Yahoo’s YQL. Sadly, the YQL API got ever more flaky over the last few years and I ended up having to transition over to use the SimplePie PHP library just to keep the site up and running. It wasn’t the world’s fastest loading site but it was nice and dynamic and at the time, that was important, to me at least.

But in keeping with the clean and spare layout of my blog, I’d been intrigued by the less-is-more approach that about.me had taken. But despite having my own page on about.me’s site I wanted to host my own under my garygale.com domain.

A random browse through GitHub yielded The Personal Page, a clean, lightweight home page design that appealed to me. One GitHub fork later, plus a photo of me taken at last year’s Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco that I didn’t look too appalling in and the new, Personal Page’d version was up and running. Really, it took all of about half an hour and that’s including testing and finding a social media icon set that integrated nicely with the look and feel of the site. Of course, the web site’s code is also up on GitHub for the aforementioned hacking around.

All of the above verbiage can be boiled down to the simple fact that armed with a little knowledge of CSS, PHP and HTML it’s very, very easy to create a new and, I hope, effective web presence, all of which is powered by open source tools and techniques and that, utterly appeals to the grown up geek in me.

One. The iPhone 3′s glass was scratch resistant but not dropping-onto-a-stone-floor resistant.

Two. I am clumsy.

Three. The iPhone 4′s glass was scratch resistant but not dropping-onto-a-pavement resistant.

Four. I am still clumsy.

But despite the initial teething problems, version 2.0 is out and the list of enhancements and fixes remains unchanged from the beta version, but the official version 2.0 release of this plugin is now both on GitHub and the WordPress plugin repository and while my Codeage page still remains the official home for this plugin, there’s a nicer looking home on GitHub for WP Biographia courtesy of GitHub’s pages feature.

The vast majority of those 1100 odd WordPress downloads are thanks to the WordPress community itself, who’ve had some nice things to say about WP Biographia, such as Kevin Muldoon on wpmods.com  …

As you will have established by now, I think WP Biographia is a great little plugin. Being able to insert the author box directly into an RSS feed will benefit anyone who runs a multi-author blog or website (or those who accept guest posts regularly). The plugin also adds new social media profile fields to users profile and displays them in the author box automatically.

I encourage you to try it out yourselves and see what the plugin can do.

… and on Smashing Magazine’s noupe.com …

Arguably the best looking author bio plugin available for WordPress, WP Biographia gives you complete control over what is shown in the bio area and adds Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ profile fields to every users profile. You can choose whether the box is shown on posts, pages, archives and/or the home page and you can customise the colour scheme and border too.

Without a doubt the plugins best feature is the ability to display author bios in the RSS feed. 99% of blogs don’t include a link to the authors posts or website through their RSS feed therefore the guest poster loses a lot of potential traffic from RSS readers. WP Biographia corrects this by displaying a beautiful looking bio at the end of every post in the RSS feed.

… and Rick Bjarnason …

Authors like credit. Make sure you are using this plugin so everybody knows who the writer is. Adds Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus profiles, but the real killer feature is that it works in RSS feeds.

A next version of WP Biographia, which will probably end up as v2.1 is now in the works, which includes some of the additional feature requests that people have asked for on the WordPress forums as well as directly by email. Trying to keep the usual home life, work life, coding life balance in check means that quite when v2.1 will see the light of day is unclear and as the Christmas Holiday season is fast approaching it may well be sometime in early 2012, but only time will tell.

But thanks to Travis Smith getting in touch with me via Twitter and taking the time to make his changes and bug fixes on a GitHub fork there’s now a new beta version of WP Biographia up on GitHub for testing or for those who like to live on the bleeding edge.

In addition to Travis’ changes I’ve also reworked the plugin structure to reflect the recommended WordPress plugin file and directory layout and this, coupled with 6 other new features and big fixes is sufficient, I think, to up the version number straight to v2.0.0. Here’s what’s new.

• You can now set the size of the author’s Gravatar image
• The plugin now supports the [wp_biographia] shortcode
• You can now exclude the Biography Box from specific posts based on the post’s ID
• You can now place the Biography Box at the top of the post as well as the bottom of the post
• You can now further customise the behaviour of the plugin through a short circuit filter
• The issues with CSS on some WordPress installations have been fixed.

Once the beta’s been tested out and given the general community nod of approval I’ll push the new version to the WordPress Subversion repository so people who are using the plugin and don’t want to manually update the plugin or test the new version out will get the automagic update notification in their WordPress dashboard.

Firstly there’s the UK audience at GeoCommunity, the Association For Geographic Information’s annual get-together and all round geo shindig. GeoCommunity is probably the closest the UK has to California’s Where 2.0, but with a very different audience and a very different accent. The AGI still draws the bulk of its membership from the GIS heartlands of the GI community, although in recent years the association has dramatically expanded its reach into the web, mobile and neogeography domains.

The Location Business Summit, on the other hand is firstly in San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley and secondly has a very pronounced American accent and draws the bulk of the audience from the Bay Area where web and mobile, both from a developer and from a business perspective, hold sway.

One deck, two audiences.

The slide deck is above, plus there’s a PDF version with the talk notes.

As previously mentioned, the GeoCommunity audience hails, in the main, from the GIS heartland. A talk which deals with context, with search, with relevance, with LBS and with maps and mobile got a great reaction and fitted well with the other closing keynote from the British Library’s Kimberley Kowal who put together a gorgeous deck full of beautiful maps, ancient, old and not so old. Steven Feldman has put together a list of these cartographical wonders, if you’re interested. Following up old maps with new, digital maps seemed to be a good segue and bridge between printed maps and digital maps. After the talk, people came up to me and said nice words and overall, the reaction seemed to be that this was an area of geo and location that didn’t normally appear on their professional radar. That’s a sweeping generalisation of course but it was also immensely gratifying.

Fast forward to today; not in the UK but slap bang in the middle of San Jose. Same talk. Same deck. Same sentiments. But a vastly different, though equally good, reaction from the audience. This time the questions and comments focused not on the map, not on LBS but on what the next major step in sensors would be after GPS and on what sources of data LB(M)S needs and lacks.

One deck, two audiences. Even in the same industry, albeit the vague and nebulously fuzzy grouping that we call the location industry, two very different audiences can give two very different reactions. One day, reaction will probably be the same, but today, geo and location really is a very broad church indeed.

Last week, flying from London Heathrow to Berlin’s Tegel airport I found a new addition to the increasingly detached-from-reality world of airline security … the electronic boarding pass. In principle, the electronic boarding pass is a great idea. First introduced in 1999 by Alaska Airways, checking into your flight online and putting a QR code on a graphic of your boarding pass cuts down queueing and waiting at the airport. Some airlines either send you the boarding pass as an SMS message, as an email attachment or as a time limited web URL. Some airlines provide an app on your phone; British Airways falls into this category and their app covers Windows Phone 7, iOS, Android and Blackberry.

With this in mind, consider the following electronic boarding pass, taken from last week’s flight.

This boarding pass gets checked three times between the time I arrive at the airport and the time my posterior makes contact with seat 11C. The first time is at security when the QR code gets scanned; if the QR code is valid, I’m granted access to the airside part of the terminal at Heathrow, but my passport isn’t checked so as long as the QR code says it’s valid, I’m through. The second time is at the gate. Again, the QR code is scanned and this time it’s cross checked with my passport; so not only is the boarding pass valid, but I can prove that the name on my passport and the name on the boarding pass matches. The third and final time, is when I actually board the plane and the cabin crew visually check that the boarding pass is actually for that flight.

Now consider this version of the boarding pass. The QR code is able to be scanned and it contains exactly the same information as the previous one. It will get me through the first two boarding pass checks but apparently it won’t allow me onto the aircraft. Why? When boarding last week’s flight the member of the cabin crew who checked my boarding pass told me she needed to “scroll your phone” and “check that your boarding pass isn’t a photo“. the underlying assertion here being that if I wasn’t using a boarding pass on BA’s own mobile app, I couldn’t board the flight.

If your eyes are crossing from concentration at this point, you’re not alone. I still haven’t been able to comprehend what the difference is between a valid QR code, which is itself a graphic image, in BA’s mobile app and a screen shot of the QR code, which is, err, a graphic image. I have an even harder time comprehending how this makes the theatre of airline security any safer for me or for my fellow passengers.

After last year’s inaugural geo-festivities in Stratford-upon-Avon, this year W3G grabbed firmly onto the shirt-tails of its big brother, in the shape of GeoCommunity, and relocated to the East Midlands Conference Centre on the grounds of Nottingham University, which is aptly located in, err, Nottingham.

Benefitting from a purpose built conference centre with great in-house catering, great sized conference rooms with massive projection screens, industrial sized quantities of coffee and working wifi, W3G 2011 was a very different beast from 2010′s. Except for the bit about the working wifi as half of the time it didn’t. Work, that is.

Some things remained the same. A couple of invited guest speakers to kick the morning and afternoon sessions off. The unconference wall, which fellow organiser Rollo Home and myself fretted over filling with sessions but which miraculously was filled with offers of talks before the morning coffee break was over. The inevitable geobeers and geocurry to wrap the day’s proceedings up. The aforementioned conference wifi dropping out on a regular basis. The irreverent session titles, which always turned out to be fascinating when you listened to them;  ”Dinosaurs, Concorde & the Wedge of Geo” anyone?

But some things were different. Firstly the venue. Despite the inevitable wifi issues W3G was for the first time in a purpose built conference venue rather than in a hotel than happened to host conferences and events and the EMCC was a big hit with everyone. Also the ties with the AGI were made much clearer this year with W3G featuring on the reverse of the GeoCommunity swag bag and also meriting a double page spread on the printed GeoCommunity proceedings. It also didn’t go unnoticed that a far greater proportion of the W3G audience were spotted at GeoCommunity the following two days. This is no bad thing and merely reaffirms the desire of the W3G organisers to use W3G as a channel into the wider scope of GeoCommunity and to increase awareness of the existence of and relevance that the AGI has to offer.

The second difference was, to put it bluntly, the number of attendees. I’m lucky enough to attend a lot of conferences and across the board numbers are down and sponsors are harder to attract. This year’s W3G was no exception to the general trend but despite this there was an upside; the level of interaction, engagement and closeness between speakers, both invited and unconference and audience were simply unprecedented in my somewhat chequered conference experience. But this didn’t only happen in the sessions themselves, this spilled over into between-session coffee breaks, across lunch and into the obligatory geobeers and geocurry.

The third difference was the strap line for the event. Last year we used the 3 W’s of Geo as a theme and, for a first conference, it worked well. This year we used Because There’s More To Geo Than Just Maps And Checkins as a theme and it worked, but only halfway. Checkins were pretty much nowhere to be seen other than the inevitable fight over the Mayorship of the conference and the venue on Foursquare. Maps on the other hand were pretty much everywhere, from Steven Feldman’s abridged History of Web Mapping talk (run, don’t walk over to SlideShare to see the whole slide deck) through to all of the other unconference sessions. Despite the much predicted death of the map, the map, it would seem, is very much alive, well and positively thriving.

So will W3G be back next year? All the signs are that it will be. Will it be bigger and better than W3G 2011? Only time and the economy will tell if it will be bigger but after this year’s event I think it’s safe to say it will be better, thanks to the time, effort and overall geo enthusiasm that everyone put into the event.