John Beynon

Website launched to bring together the Guildford web community

We’ve launched a new website for Web Meet Guildford, aka WMG today, webmeetguildford.co.uk to serve as a directory of anyone involved with the web in and around Guildford and also for notifying the community of future events that we will be holding.

Built using the tool we love, Ruby on Rails we’ve incorporated sign up via Devise and Omniauth for Twitter authentication and the Twitter gem for retrieving Tweets. Agencies signing up are geocoded from their postcode using the Google Geocoding service, the rest of their details are then populated by magic.

The site is delivered via Heroku using a range of addons from New Relic for server and front end performance monitoring, Hoptoad, Logging to Memcached thrown in for good measure.

WMG Screenshot

Working with the Twitter API can certainly be fun, for instance did you know that a Twitter user has two unique identifiers? Their REST API uses one of these IDs and the search API uses another, it’s been an ‘accepted’ issue now since December 2008! Also, dealing with hash tags has it’s own pit falls since they are a free for all. The #WMG tag we use is used elsewhere so we simply can’t just show any tweet using the hashtag #wmg so we have to make sure that we only show #wmg tweets from our members.

We plan on adding additional functionality in coming months – so if you’re involved with the web in and around Guildford make sure you come and join to keep up to date with the goings on and hopefully we’ll see you at the next event confirmed now for June 23rd from 6pm (3 Pigeons, top of Guildford high street) and let us know if you’ve got any ideas on how we can further develop the site.

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Tags: event, surrey, guildford, beer, launch, wmg

Paul Sturgess

Web Meet Guildford Spring Edition

Wow so it’s already been 2 months since our last meet up. The sunshine is here and we’re well overdue a good catch up and a refreshing drink or two.

Please do come along this Thursday, March 31st. As usual we’ll be a running a tab behind the bar upstairs, from 6pm, in the 3 Pigeon’s pub on Guildford High Street.

The turnout at our first two events has certainly exceeded our expectations. It really has been great to meet and socialise with such a wide range of web professionals in the local area. Thanks to everyone that’s come along and made it a success.

As always we’d love to see some new faces though. So if you haven’t been before please come and introduce yourself.

You can let us know if you’ll be dropping in by leaving a comment here or on Twitter via @kyanmedia

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Tags: guildford, wmg

Paul Sturgess

Web Meet Guildford is back

After the resounding success of the first Web Meet Guildford (WMG) we’re excited to announce that we’ll be hosting another meetup later this month.

So if you make websites and you live or work in the Guildford area, please do join us in the 3 Pigeon’s pub on Guildford High Street for a drink on the 27th January from 6pm.

People at WMG 01

As per last time, we have hired out the upstairs of the pub and will have a tab behind the bar to start the evening off.

The turnout back in November was excellent and with the fresh new year and renewed enthusiasm after the Christmas break we’re already looking forward to meeting everyone.

Please spread the word and you can let us know if you’ll be popping along by leaving a comment here on our blog or on Twitter via @kyanmedia.

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Tags: twitter, guildford, meetup, wmg