Out into the big, wide world

My Cyfle training scheme in interactive media has come to an end. It has been a fantastic year, crammed full of new experiences, great tuition and guidance, and brilliant work placements.

I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to be on this scheme. It has given me the chance to develop my new media skills and gain invaluable training and experience. I've also had great opportunities to meet people working in the industry and formed a lot of new friendships over the year. It really couldn't have been more perfect. I just hope I manage to get a job doing this stuff that I love so much (any offers - please get in touch!)

Massive thanks to Cyfle - especially Gareth and Iona, The European Social Fund, S4C, Boomerang, Green Bay, Cube Interactive, BBC Wales New Media, Unique Media, Limkokwing University College of Creative Technology, MYGO, Steve Jones, Nick Butler, Sarah Goodey and everyone who funds Cyfle. Diolch o galon.

Geting Interactive at the BBC

I finished my work placement with the Interactive Team at the BBC in Cardiff last week. Both Jo Pearce (Senior Producer) and Claire Jones (Assistant Producer) have been fantastic; briefing me on their work, inviting me to meetings and giving me the chance to get involved in the research and development of new projects. Their work includes developing interactive applications for mobile, web and eTV (enhanced TV / red button) platforms.

Andy Davies kindly showed me round Flip Factory. It's video encoding software that allows you to set up 'watch folders' so that as soon as a new video is put into the folder, Flip Factory will automatically start encoding it for web/mobile devices. It seems to work really well and the encoding times are impressively quick.

I've also been in the edit suite, editing clips of adudicators at the BBC National Eisteddfod site and interviews with sports celebrities for the Raise Your Game site using Adobe Premiere Pro.

I've been offered some more work for the Raise Your Game site for the next two weeks which I'm really pleased about as I'll have the chance to get some more valuable experience with the New Media department.

End of my placement at Green Bay

My placement at Green Bay seems to have completely flown by and it was my last day there yesterday. With a lot of hard work I managed to finish the re-design of the Green Bay website and it is now live at www.green-bay.tv.

Although aesthetically it does not look that different from the old site, technically it is now far easier to update and expand in the future. Their previous site had been built using HTML tables. Now all the design for the site is CSS-based making it easy to make changes and adhering to W3C accessibility guidelines. All the content for the commissions and news sections now comes from a MySQL database using PHP so it is easier to manage and update.

I also finished editing some promo clips of Green Bay programmes for the UK Indies Pavilion at Mipcom 2006 next month.

I've really enjoyed my time at Green Bay and will miss all the lovely people there but hope to stay in touch with them in the future.

dConstruct06

Last weekend Ian, Mei, Sions and me enjoyed our last glimpse of summer by going down to the seaside in Brighton for the dConstruct Web 2.0 conference. It was a great excuse to catch up with each other before the end of our course and the conference was excellent.

Almost all the speakers were fantastic, delivering informative and entertaining presentations. 'Mashups' was definitely the running theme of the day, with plenty of examples on the web at the moment and advice on how to develop your own using APIs. A web 'mashup' is basically an online application that pulls in existing information from two or more other web services (e.g. Flickr and Google Maps info). Here are a couple of interesting examples:

• Flickr/Yahoo Maps mashup - the link shows you all the photos that have been geotagged on Flickr as having been taken in Cardiff, not many so far but it was only launched a few weeks ago so is sure to gain popularity and gives you a different way of exploring photos.
• Chicago Crime Map - Here a mashup of crime statistics and Google Maps allows you to identify the locations of criminals and reported crimes in Chicago!
  

What I found particularly interesting is how much the likes of Yahoo, Google and Amazon are now encouraging the development of mashups and other applications that use their APIs even for commercial use (although you usually still need to get permission).

Another hot topic of the day was 'microformats' with Jeremy Keith very passionately encouraging their use.

It was a really great day and I left with a greater insight into the current trends in the web industry and some new ideas for future projects.

Where Did The Summer Go?

Everything has been so hectic over the past few weeks that I haven't had a chance to blog at all. So here's my attempt to catch up on the last month of my Cyfle course.