For anyone who wants to see them, I’ve finally managed to upload the slides from my SXSWi talk “Taking over the World: the Flickr way”, a broad-sweep view of some of the issues and solutions we encountered whilst taking Flickr from an English-only site to supporting multiple languages.

You can find them over at the talks page, along with the details of my next scheduled talk at XTech in Dublin on May 5th 2008.

(Photo of me by Gareth on Flickr, used by permission)

I’m trying to keep photos up to date on Flickr – the Collection will give you a good overview of the weird and wonderful experiences we’re having out here.

In the past week, I’ve…

• …attended 2 Flickr launch parties.
• …given a talk to Korean developers.
• …luxuriated in the second best hotel room I’ve ever stayed in.
• …been to a Crazy Bar.
• …visited to the Korean DMZ
• …frequented a bar where all the waiters are dwarves… with a guy who’s dwarf-phobic.
• …eaten Balut.

A quick bit of site update news – I’ve added a Talks page in the uber-optimistic hope that I’ll be giving more presentations on Flickr, Internationalisation and related topics in the near future. For now, it just contains one set of slides from the Korean talk, notable for the fact that the lovely folks at Yahoo! Korea translated all the text into Korean, to make things easier for those developers who didn’t have perfect English.

The talks page is here:

http://hitherto.net/talks/

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to fly to Kuala Lumpur…

So, this site fell a bit quiet again over the last… oooh, I dunno, nearly 8 months. Partly, that’s because I didn’t have much to write about, and (stubborn as I am), I refuse to contribute to the ever-expanding web of wiffle just so that my RSS feed contains some more entries.

But it’s also telling that the last blog post just about coincides with the time that I started planning the infrastructure needed to take Flickr from a 1-language interface to 8, a roller-coaster ride of a project which swallowed a lot of my thought-space and eventually time (I was working 16-18 hour days for the last 3 weeks), but which is finally done, and has been live to the world for a whole month now.

I’m proud to have done that, the minor glitches and post-launch issues (which won’t be discussed here, because this is my personal site) aside.

Immediately post-launch I was whisked away on a whirlwind tour (Paris for 24 hours, London for 5 days, Montreal for 3) during which I lost my luggage, had my camera and credit-card stolen, and spent a great deal of the scant “downtime” in interminable conference calls.

I wound up back in the Bay Area about 3 weeks ago seriously exhausted and disoriented, and have been slowly pulling my life back together since then. Which is where we come to this l’il update, and the (undoubtedly sporadic and random) resumption of me posting here.

In short, I’m back, baby!

Coming up, in no particular order (but noted so that you can ridicule me if the posts don’t appear):

• iPhone – yes, I have one. Yes, it’s amazing. Yes, it has a few UI niggles.
• Mojito cupcakes – a recipe from last weekend.
• A couple of quick travelogue-type things:
  • San Diego – the lighter side of SoCal, with diversions into Californian history.
  • Montreal – cute town, cuter people, Joe Beef, Poutine and my reacquaintance with the French language.
• Web Internationalisation 101 (being a rough draft of a talk I’m putting together).
• Cheese – a rant/ramble on one of my favourite foods.
• The Bastard Son of GTD – How I’m getting things done, without exactly Getting Things Done.
• An update on how I’m faring after 2 1/2 years as a British Californian.
• Sustainable eating in the Bay Area – more thoughts on an old topic.
• Plus, possibly, an extra special bonus item I’m deeply unsure of until I finish writing it.

I’m going for a mix of things I like writing about – food, tech and life as a Brit abroad. Hopefully there will be fewer 8-month gaps in future…

Habitual visitors will notice that, as of today, there’s been a bit of a rebuild. It seemed like it was long overdue, for a mixed bag of reasons…

Most importantly, I realised round about March time that the structure of the existing site really didn’t reflect what I wanted to write about any more. “Moving to the US” was a great core topic for a while, but I’m getting to the point where it’s… done (for the most part). Here I am. This is day-to-day life.

I was also maintaining two separate online presences, one here, and one on Yahoo! 360.

On top of all that, the design was getting a little long in the tooth – I built the page templates way back in August 2003 (I know that, because I’d just finished them when the iBook I was using was taken by burglars).

So rather than keep writing, I’ve been pouring my erratic free time into migrating the site to a new (easier to manage) system – WordPress – and rebuilding the templates. There’s a bit of whizz-bang in this new incarnation, as much “because I can” (and because I felt like I should get my head around Ajax-type site functions in the interests of career development) as anything else. And (whizz-bang aside) it’s just a bit fresher, to my eyes at least.

In addition, I’m doing away with the Yahoo! 360 blog – all the posts have been ported over and recategorised. And the category structure in general has been altered to contain everything in one place.

I’m going to attempt to write something at least twice a week from now on. Some pieces will be on long-established topics (life in America, sustainability), some will be new topics that I’ve wanted to tackle, but didn’t have a home for.

Anyway, all that is to come. Welcome to the new site.