Andrew Ford Lyons » Big Ideas

A starting out guide for new teachers

andy — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:19:40 +0000

Over the summer I created a microsite for Teacher Support Network at newteachers.info called The Starting Out Guide. The goal was to tranform the written document into a website that newly qualified and trainee teachers could access from anyway.

I built the site in Wordpress, and based its design on the theme The Unstandard Remix 1.0 by Jon Gos and Derek Punsalan and The Unstandard by Derek Punsalan for 5thirtyone. It also employs a few plugins, including Customize Your Community, Live Comment Preview, Multi-page Toolkit, ShareThis and WP-Polls.

The comments section was edited to promote users to supply additional advice or suggestions of content to add in an attempt to take advantage of the Web as a setting for living documents.

Developer meetups in London

andy — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:59:39 +0000

I’ve joined a couple of web developer meetups in London, one through meetup.org and the other through Google. Both are full of brainy people and free nibbles.

The Minibar is a popular regular meetup in Shoreditch for internet professionals to network and swap ideas and offers monthly face time to people more prone to staring at screens. If you’ve got a marketable idea this is the place to find people with the skills to make it possible, with upwards of around 150 web developers, programmers, designers, etc., from around the city attending at a single go.

The other is the Google London Open Source Jam.These are theme-driven nights at Google’s London HQ at Belgrave House. Marvel at the working environment that keeps people in the office 12 hours or more a day, the open kitchen area and hear ideas that could well be the future of open source and possibly the web itself.

To me this one is pure brain candy. I dig the 7-minute open-to-all presentation period where people trot out what they’re working on in rapid-fire sessions and then face an onslought of suggestsions, questions and critiques in a sort of Dragons Den for smart people.

Cannot say that a good amount isn’t flying well over my php/mysql head at times, but the end result is a clear idea of what’s out there and what’s to come in the coming years.

Welcome to the CV site

andy — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:09:36 +0000

Welcome to my CV site. Suffice to say, if you’re looking at this site around the time I’m writing this post, there’s not much here that’s of use. I’m not promising that there will be much here of use to you later, either, but hopefully there will be something here sooner or later that will be of interest. My more-updated site can be found here.

I created this website to accomplish a couple of things: To be a place to maintain an updated resumé and advertise projects in need of people out there with specialized skills.

Over the course of the next few days I’m planning to populate this site projects past, present and future, turn it into a portal for collaborative opportunities.

Contact me by clicking here.