So if you know me which you don’t you’ll know that I ended up getting involved with the OSSBarCamp last year. Open Source Software BarCamp in case you weren’t sure what the whole OSS bit stood for. I’m the WebGuy! ( please note I’m now the Web Person in the interests of equality and all that I like to keep the capitals for it though )

So its back on .. Yeahhhh … but what the hell is it ( in case you didn’t know )

BarCamps are meetups of people more than likely of a similar mind interested in sharing what they know. An Open Source Software Barcamp is obviously about a meetup of people talking about open source software.

In March 2009 I ended up giving a talk on BluePrint an Open Source CSS Framework last year http://www.blueprintcss.org/ .

A What??? I hear you say. Well simply put … basically someone took the elements of a webpage and decided to put them in a grid. That grid is 24 columns wide. And you can decide to break you page up into rows that are made up of those 24 columns.

Before grids people hummed and hawed over widths and sizes and spent ages trying to figure out widths / padding / margins / sizes and so on. With a grid based css framework it takes a lot of the figuring out and makes it very simple. Of course you’re limited in flexibilty to a certain extent but its amazing what you can do with one.

Anyways that was what I spoke about in March … in April if I get the chance to head over I’m hoping to speak about CMSMS an open source Content Management System ( Made Simple ) CMSMS. Not positive I’ll be able to make it over though but for the moment its my plan.

So any interest in a talk on CMSMS or would people prefer one on WordPress or a demo on getting WordPress up and running fast?
Obviously if I am talking about something I am going to be talking about web based things. (Hence CSS frameworks and CMS systems )

I’ve experience with graphics systems (Gimp and Inkscape as well ultimately though I use photoshop a closed source commercial package I admit freely cus damn its good but its also damn expensive) so that could be cool to do. Again it’ll end up depending on what people are interested in. A lot of the community are more hard core (lets face it .. kernel hacking is a big part of the fun with linux) but more and more people are interested in using open source software in their business environment. Whether its to replace Office which costs what a couple of hundred with OpenOffice or Gimp which one can use as an alternative to Photoshop and again if you’ve a website hosted somewhere for example you’ve no doubt its running an Apache webserver or IIS (A Microsoft product) there are more but probably 95%+ of the time its one of these)

So just a heads up on whats in store in April see www.ossbarcamp.com for more details and there is now a facebook page as well so you can keep up to date on things