March Meetup

Share a pint or two with local web designers and developers! Discuss what’s happening in the industry, swap tips and tricks and generally enthuse about all things web! Likely topics of conversation include HTML5, CSS3, interaction design, PHP, Python, recent projects and writing web copy.

If you’re new, keep an eye on @multipack for last minute updates. More event info at Upcoming

Green Thanks

Thanks to everybody who turned up to ‘Hack the Planet’. There was a great atmosphere and some realy neat ideas. Two decent hacks were put together by the end of play. Write-up and live app demos to be confirmed shortly, but there’s a flickr pool of photos to be going on with.

Theatrics

The inimitable Matthew Somerville got in contact to mention his latest project - Theatricalia - a database of past, present and future theatre productions. Of interest to anybody who likes to tread the boards or see a good theatre played…

Jobs Galore!

Over at the forum there are several folks desperate to hire webby types! Jobs on offer include PHP Developers in Leamington and the Jewellery Quarter - and a Frontend Developer role too! So if you’re looking for something and match those skills, pop over to the forums for more info.

Brum Twestival

25th March at Poppy Red is Birmingham’s Twitter Festival thing, your chance to meet some virtual acquaintances in the flesh and raise some money for charity.

Launch 48

Launch48 aims to bring together participants from different backgrounds and levels of experience in the web industry to think/plan/develop and launch one or multiple web apps in one weekend.

Caffeinated Data

Paul Bradshaw, who runs the MA Online Journalism at BCU, is organising the first Brum #data Coffee on 11th March. For people who like their open data, mashups and a good roasted blend.

Multipack Hacks… The Planet

Saturday 20th of February, 10am - 6pm
Offices of One Black Bear, Fazeley Studios

A hackday event about building things to reduce our industry’s environmental impact. Just bring some ideas and a willingness to design, write copy or code!

Can we reduce the landfill-destined swag at conferences with a web app? Can we lower our carbon footprint by highlighting local conferences? These and other ideas to be explored!

There’ll be food and drink courtesy of our kind sponsors Campaign Monitor.

For more information see a.green:focus and upcoming for event signup.

Kicking Off the F1

Si has been busy again with his Microformat-enriched series of sports sites. So if you’re a fan of Rugby or Formula One you should check out Six Nations Kickoff and F1 Calendar to keep up-to-date with all the important dates.

Government Data a Go-Go

You probably heard about the launch of Data.gov.uk earlier in the month, but there’s a Birmingham connection to this new site. Local company Talis provided the semantic web platform which hosts lots of the data. Read more on their Nodalities Blog.

Evolution of a Python Programmer

Funny if you do code, plus bonus linguistic jape for those who don’t.

November Meetup

Old Joint Stock - Saturday 14th Nov, 2pm-7pm

As usual, we’ll meet for a few beers and a chat about creating web stuff. We’ll have some discussion from the Build conference in Belfast and likely talk about Google’s new Javascript toolkit.

More on Upcoming

Advance Christmas Meal Warning

Want to join us for a meal and festive seasonal web discussion? Drop by the forum.

Presents Videos

Missed last month’s Multipack Presents? Worry not, you can watch Bruce on HTML 5 and Nick on Silverlight from the comfort of your own laptop at the Multipack Vimeo Channel. Now also with bonus Geek in the Park videos!

Football Calendar Crazy

Remember Si’s various World Cup and Footie Kickoff sites? They caught the eye of UEFA, who then got him to help them with their own calendars. Read about it on his blog.

For a Usable World

12th November is World Usability Day. Celebrate by toasting St Jakob! Alternatively, why not pop along to Userlab’s drop-in sessions? You get a free half hour’s usability consultation too.

Opening Types

Looking for open source fonts for use with your funky new web fonts? You need the League of Moveable Type!

Poetry in Motion

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you pooled the world’s twitter streams and pulled together random rhyming ones? You’d get the Longest Poem in the World.

Multipack Present : Rich Internet Apps

Join us for a presents event looking at the state of rich
internet application platforms. Nick Harewood talks Microsoft
Silverlight and Bruce Lawson gives us the lowdown on HTML 5.

As usual, we’ll meet in the Old Crown in Digbeth beforehand for
a pint and lunch (from about 2pm). Then move on to the offices
of One Black Bear in Fazeley Studios for the presentations.

More about Presents at Upcoming

NOTE: there’s no meeting on the 2nd Saturday (10th) this month!

Curry in Solihull

Leevi Graham was a Multipack regular, until he headed back to his native Australia and http://newism.com.au/

He’s in Europe for the Expression Engine Conference and decided to pop across the channel to catch up. Join us answering the eternal question of how far you’d go for a good curry. 27th October - 7pm onwards

More about the curry at Upcoming

Doing it Yourself

You’ve probably been watching the, er, interesting reaction to the new Birmingham City Council site across the blogsphere. Some enterprising folks got together to build an alternative in a wiki style:

BCC DIY

Dive into HTML 5

Google’s Mark Pilgrim delivers a great (if not yet complete) introduction to HTML 5 on this niftily designed site, following the grand tradition of diveintoaccessibility.org and
 diveintopython.org

8 Bit Adventures in Canvas

Remember those point n click adventures like King’s Quest and Leisure Suit Larry? Now you can play them online through the magic of HTML 5’s Canvas element.

September Meetup

Saturday September 12th 2pm, Old Joint Stock, Birmingham

Come and discuss the latest in the web design and development worlds. This month we’ll be discussing what happened at dConstruct and our plans for a Hack Day event.

More on Upcoming

Geek Redux

If you missed Geek in the Park, Simon’s talk on Nailing your own projects is up on Slideshare:

Friendbinder is a go go

If you’ve been at recent events, Richard has probably collared you to talk about his project, the social network aggregation tool, FriendBinder. Well, he’s officially launched it!

Apptember

There’s no business model like no business model! A project by Elliot Kember to get people creating cool web stuff in September and thereby deal with app-athy. Oh, and you can log in via Twitter, which is kind of handy. Apptember

UX Bookmarks

A place to find all kinds of useful user experience, HCI and usability bookmarks. Whether that’s strategy articles or analytics advice. Browse the categories or post your own links.

Information is Beautiful

Yes, another blog listing cool data visualisations. What can I say? I’m a sucker for this stuff. Information if Beautiful

Geek in the Park

Our annual out of Brum event, featuring a daytime picnic and an evening of talks. Bring food and drink and Frisbee for the day in Jephson Gardens. Family also welcome.

The Evening features talks by Simon Collison on “Nailing your own projects” and Remi Sharp on “HTML 5 & Friends”. Saturday 15th August, 12pm-11pm

This free event is kindly sponsored by Campaign Monitor, Friendbinder, The Design Frontier and Phurix.

More on the Geek in the Park website.

For a Beautiful Web - Birmingham Workshop

Andy Clarke comes to Brum to teach you all kinds of funky new tricks with the newest CSS. All day event on the 25th September. Owen has some promo codes for the event, e-mail him at fabweb.promo (at) fullcreammilk.co.uk and he’ll send you details.

PHP West Midlands

We’re not the only geeks meeting in pubs. If you’re interested in PHP, PHP West Midlands are having a meetup. Topics probably covered: php5.3, employing/getting employed as a php developer, testing: Shakespeare Pub, 7.30, 11th August 2009.

The Developer Evangelism Handbook

The fine art of getting developers and other alpha adopter folks interested in you product, nailed down on virtual paper by Chris Heilmann

Fonts on Tees

Show your typographic allegiance with these T-Shirts with a sample and attribution. Real type geeks will of course argue that DIN was not designed in 1995, but only redrawn…

July Gathering: Multipack Social

Saturday 11th July in the Old Joint Stock pub from 2pm until we get bored. Come and chat about all things web design and development, industry trends and local projects.

Read more about this meeting on Upcoming.

Geek in the Park 2009

It’s coming! This year’s geek day out in Leamington Spa is on the 15th August from Midday. As always an afternoon of picnic followed by an evening of talks from web industry bods. Bods to be announced shortly!

Read more about Geek in the Park 2009 on Upcoming.

Weeknight Socials

We know not everybody has time free on a Saturday to come to a Multipack event, so we’re having some weeknight socials. The first was in Warwickshire last week, but there’s more to come! Keep an eye on the Forum and Upcoming for more info.

HTML 5 Doctor is In

Are you worried about HTML5, what it means and whether you can use it? Problems with irritating new elements and attributes? Good news! The HTML 5 Doctor is in!

Moseley Exchange

Moseley exchange is a co-working space in Moseley. It launches officially on Saturday. A place to have an office if you’re a freelancer and want to be part of a community atmosphere.

Interaction Design Association in Brum

Kevin Rapley has been busy trying to get a Brum branch of the IXDA off the ground. You can get involved at: IXDA Blog

Be Vocal About It

Be Vocal is a site about “using social media for social good” and a place to find interesting mashups of local Birmingham data. If you’ve done some mashing, let ‘em know.

It can be a little difficult for some of us to give up a day of the weekend every month in order to travel over to Birmingham. Saturday afternoons are a premium, especially for those of us with families and other weekend commitments.

As discussed in the forums, Mark James, Anthony Williams and a few of the other regulars have decided to meet up on a more regular basis in the week, and Tuesday evening saw Leamington’s first weeknight social, organised by a few of us from the Warwickshire area.

Weeknight Socials

It’s often a lot easier to meet up for a quick beer or two straight after work so, with that in mind, we’re going to meet up, regularly, on a weeknight to complement the larger Birmingham-based meet-ups. With a burgeoning web design/development community in Warwick, Leamington and the surrounding areas, Si and Tim helped spread the word about our little meet-up on Tuesday.

The White Horse in Leamington Spa served as a great venue for what turned out to be a relatively successful first meet: a number of new faces from the area joined us for a few beers to discuss local community groups and efforts, such as PHP West Midlands and WXWM; the weather was fantastic and The White Horse’s courtyard worked really well, with a few of us staying a little later to sample the food.

Getting Involved

Many people, especially those who are attending on their own, can find it difficult to make the jump into attending an event such as this. Meeting up with a bunch of like-minded individuals you’ve never met before can often be difficult for first-timers - a valid point that Richard brought up - which means it’s all the more important to talk to your friends, colleagues and local contacts who are interested in the web and encourage them to join in, wherever possible.

We’d like more Warwickshire-based geeks to meet up with us and, occasionally, join up with us at the larger Saturday Birmingham-based Multipack meetings. If you’re interested in coming along to our next one - likely to be the last Tuesday of the month, back at the White Horse in Leamington - then please keep your eyes peeled on the Multipack website, follow us on Twitter, and get involved by joining the discussions over at the forums.

The only thing we’ll need next time is something to draw newcomers’ attention to us!

June Event : Multipack Presents - Coding Standards

13th June 4pm at the offices of One Black Bear.

This month’s presents is on coding standards, with a hint of ASP.NET. Looking at how to get decent standards-based markup with Microsoft’s tools and the dark art of bringing standards to a .Net team.

We’ll also have a sneak peak at the PHP WAX framework.

As always, meet beforehand in the Old Crown in Digbeth for a swift half.

More details on upcoming.

Digital Brum

Following hot on the heels of discussion about Birmingham as a digital City, Josh Hart has put together Digitalbrum a wonderful aggregator of all things web going on in Birmingham.

From Social Media Cafe to the Multipack itself, it’s all here! It’s also HTML 5 and based on the same framework as the more general Livebrum listings site. Full of good stuff from your web geek calendar!

Flash in Brum

If you’re into Adobe plugin shenanigans, then this free event on the 16th of June will be right up your street. A variety of speakers on Flash and Flex. Flashcamp.

What not to do?

The Do’s & Don’ts of Modern Web Design is a fun site where you can submit links to articles on web design do’s and don’ts. Then everybody else can rank them.

TEDx Birmingham

We’ve all enjoyed videos from TED on a variety of fascinating topics on “Ideas worth spreading”. But TED has now franchised out small local events, and there’s one being organised in Birmingham. Still early days, but definitely one to watch.

The Best USB Drive?

And finally, too good not to share with any child of the 80s (although a bit pricy). A transformers USB Drive

Meeting

Following last month’s Being Green event, this time we’re back for more of the normal informal web chatter, ideas exchange and discussion of when we can expect to see a new iPhone. Grab a pint and put your thinking cap on for the next Presents event!

2pm onwards at the Old Joint Stock on Saturday the 9th May.

Meeting on Upcoming

Does Birmingham have a Web Scene?

Over in our forum there’s been some interesting discussion of
the web scene in the city, how it compares with London and Brighton, what can be done to link up the diverse groups that exist around the west midlands and how to make the area more “web geek friendly”.

More Moseley Barcamp

As part of the Moseley festival enterprising blogging types are planning an unconference on June 28th. They’ve organising along a panels concept, and we think it’d be neat to have a Multipack
presence. So if you’re interested, head over to the forums and suggest some ideas and sign up to be involved:

Tapping Patterns

We all like a good CSS gallery, but sometimes it’s useful to see how different designers have approached a common web design problem. Patterntap is a nicely organised visual dictionary of
web design elements.

Digitally British?

The government produced something called the Digital Britain Interim Report, it covers stuff we’re interested in like investment in UK Digitial content, online government and access for all. Unfortuantely it’s all from a government perspective. There’s an event in Brum on May 12th to discuss the concept and feed back from actual people about how to “secure Britain’s place at the forefront of the global digital economy.”

Done Something Worth Shouting About?

If you have anything that you’d like included next time, whether it’s a new project or event to announce or a blog you think we should all be reading, drop us a line at multipackadmin at gmail.com