September 2007 Meeting
The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 10th of September, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm at our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St..
Agenda
StaticMatic
Stephen Bartholomew was going to give a talk last month but kindly stepped aside to let Jay Phillips, who was only in the country for a few weeks, do a talk. This month however, there'll be no such chivalry and Stephen is determined to talk to us about his gem StaticMatic and the technologies that it uses.
StaticMatic is a gem for building static websites and it uses the love it or hate it alternate templating language Haml & Sass. The gem is perfect for… well, as Stephen says:
CMS is overrated. A lot of the time, clients want us to do what we do best - well designed pages with structured, accessible and maintainable markup & styling.
CMSs are often sufficient for this, but sometimes they can be restrictive and more cumbersome than just working with good ol' source code. At the same time we want our code to be structured, DRY and flexible.
Slides are available here.
Hpricot, Merb, Net::TOC
Tom Armitage hates crappy websites, more so when he actually wants access to the content they provide. In an effort to save his sanity he's been playing about with some ruby libraries, and he's going to tell us all about it in a talk he's titled "Turning the web on its head: Screen-scraping with Hpricot, DIY-API, and conversational interfaces". He's going to cover:
Pub
After all this we move on from the Skills Matter office to The Crown Tavern just round the corner. Here we sup from the selection of fine beers and wines on offer and continue the discussions. If you can't make it to the presentations then feel free to come along just for this bit.
Registration
As usual, please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come, so they can manage seating and making sure we get the most appropriately sized room. There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring.
Posted by Murray Steele on Aug 27, 2007