When anyone goes on a trip for more than a few days, it's customary upon return, to say things like "this time last week..." Well, this time last week, Andy and I were busy packing for our flight back to Blighty.

_{Photo by Robbie Beak}

And where were we? South by South West, of course! Along with a contingent from the West Midlands, Andy and I repped Substrakt at the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, attending panels and keynotes, making great new contacts and of course attending the many parties that help make SXSW the legendary event it is.

Ryan Carson, in the most recent Think Vitamin Radio podcast, described the panel-based content at SXSW as "stupid", suggesting that, at least some panels are cobbled together at the last minute. Now naturally this has nothing to do with Carsonified (the company for which Think Vitamin is a popular blog) organising potentially competing events ;) But in fairness, Ryan isn't that far off the mark in some cases. Some panels, like the Accessibility for the Visually Impaired talk that I attended, was pretty poorly put together and presented by Creative Director Genevieve Wilkins, but was redeemed in part by Michael Cooper of the W3C. The HTML5 panel Andy and I sat in on also felt woefully mistitled and had only one redeeming speaker, the refreshingly sensible Emily Lewis.

Sunday's keynote by Christopher Poole of 4chan also fell flat, and also entertaining, Bruce Sterling's closing speech was a tad bizarre. However what many of the people I spoke to thought to be a valuable presentation (which to my mind should have been a keynote), was Gary Vaynerchuk's. Feulled with energy, fierce rhetoric and a mouth that would make a sailor blush, his talk on the "thank you economy" (which, by complete coincidence also forms the title of his latest book) was engaging, fun, and peppered with more than a few sensible and applicable ideas. We also checked out some useful presentations on geotemporal visualisation, personal data in the cloud, product design and more.

The Trade Show shone some light on a few UK and US startups like DAD and Twonky, which both provide media streaming for the home, and Solvate, a website that matches freelancers with potential clients (think Jobplot US, but not as cool ;)). The parties also brought new faces and new business cards to exchange, but any attempt at listing the people I shook hands with would end in me inevitably missing someone out.

I would however like to thank everyone from the West Mids who flew out with us, shared a house with us or joined us at periodic moments, for making my and Andy's first SX a massive blast.

And if you want to see some of the notes and images we gathered, they're still available on our Substrakt @ SxSWi blog.

The latest incarnation of WordPress is out, bringing some cool features from WordPress.com that have existed for a while, over to self-hosted users.

We'll be upgrading our clients' websites very soon, but as this is not a security release, some of the urgency is lost. We're really excited about our clients getting their hands on some of the great new features, like internal linking (which makes linking to content within the site easier, as you can search for it and don't need to remember the address you want to link to), an admin bar which gives simple two-click access to the New Post page from anywhere within the frontend site, and big improvements to the CMS-like features which were introduced in earlier 3.x releases.

If you've got questions or concerns about this latest release of WordPress, please get in touch.

Today Andy and I schlepped down to the City as a Platform conference, which was hosted by Screen West Midlands and held at Aston University Business School. It featured panels and breakout sessions by a number of great minds from the likes of Digital Birmingham, Mudlark, In Cahoots, the Library of Birmingham and loads more. Oh, and um, me!

I gave a talk on Urban Lens, our massively exciting new geodata project, tying it in with our exploration of open data, as part of a breakout session of that name. Nick Booth of Podnosh chaired the panel which included Adam McGreggor from Rewired State, and Rattle's James Boardwell. We talked about the value of open data - culturally and financially - and explored some of the challenges around helping people fall in love with data.

Other discussions included procurement, the NESTA Make it Local fund and a resulting project, and new developments with the Library and its archive. There's more info and a live blog on a Posterous site setup by Chris at Meshed Media, and Alex Jones of Meshed also took a whole bunch of photos:

[flickr_slideshow tag="cityasaplatform2011" user_id="33811709@N03"]

Thanks to everyone who emptied their brains throughout the day, and asked me questions on my panel.

If you have to move a large site witha number of hierarchical categories from one WordPress installation to another, you may come across a problem we at Substrakt have faced quite a few times.

WordPress deals with hierarchical taxonomies like categories in a strange way. It not only stores the categories in the relevant taxonomy tables, along with parent IDs, it also stores an array of those parent-child relationships in the wp_options table.

The upshot of this is that, if you import a blog and you find that not all of the categories you've imported are appearing, fear not, chances are they've imported just fine, it's just that the category_children option within wp_options hasn't been updated.

When you setup a new site, you'll probably find the value of this option is something like “a:0:{}”. Problem with that is that WordPress recognises that it's an array of options, so doesn't bother to correct it. If however, you clear that value out of your database - using something like phpMyAdmin or the below SQL statement - you should find the next time you get a list of categories, the hierarchy will be displayed correct.

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = '' WHERE option_name = 'category_children';

This happens because WordPress first checks to see if that value is an array. If it is, as I've mentioned, it'll take the value as read. If not - ie: if the value of that option is blank - it will rebuild the tree and resave the value. The next time you look at that value in your database, you should find something a bit more verbose.

Hope that helps. And if you're having any WordPress issues at all, get in touch with us and we'll see if we can help.

Stetsons at the ready people! I'm pleased to announce that Andy and I are jetting off for SXSW Interactive 2011, in March. Though Andy's a seasoned South-Byer, it'll be my first time, so I am, as the young people would say, stoked.

Last year, location-based services like Foursquare ruled the roost, and the year before saw Twitter begin to burst into the mainstream. But with geosocial stuff still very much on the horizon, and services like Facebook Places merging checkins with voucher-code sites like Groupon, we're hoping we can still join in the conversations around place and space.

Watch the sxswi tag on our blog for more updates, and find Andy and myself on the SXSW Directory, should you want to say hi!

I was turned onto this by Jim, our Creative Director, and thought I'd flag it up as it's quite a neat little time saver.

If you need to convey a web concept quickly and simply to a client, download and install Dropbox - the free and really easy way to sync files between computers and access them on your mobile - and put your web files (HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images) into the Public folder of your new Dropbox. Right-click your HTML file, go to the Dropbox menu and click Copy Public Link. Paste the URL into an email, and you're done.

You can also create a folder inside your Public directory and move yoru files there, thus giving you the ability to stage multiple mockups. For example, any files in your Public folder are accessed via a URL like http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12345/foo.html. Create a subfolder inside Public, and it becomes http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12345/bar/foo.html.

Great if you're working on a few mockups and you need to show a client an idea quickly, as there's no FTPing, no logging in with passwords, and vertually nil possibility of others stumbling across it, as those addresses aren't published anywhere except in your account.

Last year I organised and took part in a socially-aware hackathon called Hackitude, with the idea of building something cool in 48 hours. Last weekend I competed in Django Dash, a 2-day contest for Django developers.

I didn't have the best of starts.

The rules of the contest say developers can plan and mockup, but can't put any pixels on-screen until 12am CDT. When converting this into GMT, I read that as 6pm on Friday evening, and it wasn't until I got to about 20 minutes to 6 without hearing anything from the organisers' Twitter account, that I realised I'd made something of an error.

So I got a good night's sleep, and started proper, at 6am the following morning.

Then things started to pick up a bit.

I chatted with fellow Djangonauts on IRC (an old and well-established Internet chat system used frequently by developers), and got my head down into some serious code. The next thing I knew, it was 6pm and I'd been working almost straight, for 12 hours. I turned in at about midnight, got a full eight hours of sleep and cracked on again for the final stretch on Sunday, after refactoring whole swathes of code.

My final hunk of code, with around 2,600 lines of Python was submitted with minutes to spare before the final 6am Monday deadline, at which point the energy that had taken me through around 18 hours of solid work, evaporated and I poured myself into bed just before 7.

So what had I made?

Transphorm, a site that helps members "make one change" in their lives, track and share their progress. It could be used for anything from losing weight, to stopping smoking, to spending more time with the family. Members can create goals, then setup actions that they can log each day (like "walked the kids to work" or "substituted a cigarette for a nicotine patch") and ascribe points to each action. The more positive things you do, the more points you gain. You can then reward yourself, set milestones and get comments of encouragement and support from other members, and your friends and family. Each plan has its own page, so people can get in touch easily, and share what they're doing on Twitter and Facebook.

There's loads more that I'd like to do, and ways to make it fun and competitive. Because members can take part in goals other people have set, there's potential for a leaderboard for those who want to take part. I'd also like to build in support forums, and give each goal its own page, full of blog posts, tips, articles and maybe sponsored rewards, whereby if you can't think of anything to reward yourself with, you're given suggestions and perhaps a discount.

I'm proud of what I've managed in 48 hours, and will await the judges' decision with baited breath. The winners are announced at the end of the month, and while Transphorm isn't a project that pushes Django to its limits, I think it's something worthwhile.

It were a reet good laff too.

Here's a simple plugin produced in record time, and implementing our best practices, which prevents users from registering for an account on a WordPress site without first accepting a set of Terms and Conditions, which can be defined on a standard WordPress page.

This easy-to-implement plugin adds a tickbox to the registration form. If that box is not ticked, the registration won't go ahead. And the great news is, it works with plugins like Customize your Community, which can completely reformat the standard registration form.

It's in its absolute infancy, so please take note of the notice at the bottom. If you like it, find it useful or have any suggestions on how we can improve it, drop us a comment.

Download the plugin

This source code is provided "as is", with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Substrakt's latest social took us to Star City for some chicken food and some bowling fun. Thanks Claire for setting it up and for the pics below. The video is by me, the fat lad who bolls like a strange person.

Enjoy our skills. We'll take you all on ;)

Claire has put in some stunning work to ensure Substrakt wins Best Pumpkin at Fazeley Studios' halloween bash tonight. Surely the champers is ours? See for yourself!