The back story

We’re big fans of conferences — both Elliot and I attend a wide range each year. The one-to-many format is tried and tested and it’s always good to meet new people and hear from those at the forefront of our industry.

However, we often find that the really valuable conversations are had off-stage, in the bar, at the after party, and over hangover-curing breakfast ‘meetings’. We believe we need more of these conversations! If you agree you’ll definitely want to join us in London UK on Friday 5th July.

Putting you centre stage

Unlike traditional conferences, at Insites: ConfShop we want to put everyone centre stage. There’s no speakers to entice you along, no tracks to choose from and certainly no “them and us”.

As we said before our Insites projects (The Tour, The Book, Xmas Special) are all about sharing stories, being open, and learning from each other — and ConfShop is certainly no different in that respect.

We want to hear your stories, your experiences, and your ideas. Whether you are new to the industry or a seasoned professional we encourage you to join us.

Let’s learn from each other, tackle the difficult issues affecting our businesses, discuss the problems we all share, and  above all celebrate the industry we all love and work in. There’s been far too much negativity of late and it’s time to embrace our community and our craft in a positive and affirmative way.

The format

Insites: ConfShop will focus around four groups, each containing around 25 people. During the day your group will discuss a number of loosely-themed topics (subject to change):

• Client work and products (how can we move from client focussed businesses to product focussed companies)
• Business issues (VAT, tax, accounting, pitching, contracts, finding work and beyond)
• Side projects (how to find the time and create income streams)
• Working in the industry (work/life balance, keeping up, learning and more)

For each topic, one of our carefully-chosen group ‘curators’ (who we’ll announce soon) will keep things on track and ensure every voice is heard. After you’ve attended all four group sessions we’ll convene en-masse to round up the big themes of the day.

We are also planning some “show and tell” sessions (it’s just like going back to school) so if you have something you’d like to share with everyone let us know. We have a few other fun things planned – you won’t be disappointed.

The venue

We’ve managed to bag an amazing space for the day. The search wasn’t easy as we need four independent rooms, one for each group. Altitude 360 provides all we need as well as amazing views across the capital. Food and drink will be provided so we can maximise the time we have.

What’s with the name?

We always envisaged the event to be half way between a conference and a workshop. ConfShop sounded better than WorkFrence so it became our beta name for the project. We grew to love it and so we stuck with it!

Tickets

ConfShop is going to be an intimate affair: only 110 spaces will be available. Tickets will cost £125 + VAT and as mentioned this will include refreshments throughout the day and lunch.

Sign up to our newsletter to be the first to hear about it or keep an eye on Twitter next week. We both hope to see you there.

ConfShop is different — perhaps a first of its kind! We describe it as an intimate day of sharing, learning, openness, and discussion focused on working in the web industry. We want to hear your stories, your experiences, and your ideas. Let’s learn from each other, tackle the difficult issues affecting our businesses, discuss the problems we all share, and celebrate the industry we all love.

Unlike traditional conferences, at ConfShop we want to put you centre stage. Our Insites projects (The Tour, The Book, Xmas Special) are all about sharing stories, being open, and learning from each other — and ConfShop is no different. There’s been far too much negativity of late and it’s time to embrace our community and our craft in a positive and affirmative way.

ConfShop is going to be an intimate affair: only 110 spaces will be available. Tickets will cost £125 + VAT and this will include refreshments throughout the day and lunch.

If you’ve attended an Insites or Viewport Industries event previously, or subscribed to our newsletter, you’ll be getting priority access to the tickets before they go on general sale. We’ll be dropping you an email with more info very shortly.

Everyone else: watch this space! The tickets will go on general sale soon. It’s going to be an amazing, different, and rewarding day. We hope you can join us.

There are a few more details about my personal history with the typeface over on my personal blog if you’re interested.

Happy font-buying / font-winning!

(Photo by Marc Thiele)

Some talks were so personal, they prompted a few watery eyes in the room. Sarah’s in particular set the bar extremely high for what can be shared ‘on stage’, with most of us concluding that her talk was the best we’d ever seen. But I’m not going to talk about it here, because we promised that ‘what’s said in The School of Life, stays in The School of Life.’

The overriding theme that came out from every single talk was that personal happiness is not necessarily found in working day in and day out, and that time — particularly time spent with loved ones, or time spent doing what we really want to be doing — is the most valuable commodity. This is not ground-breaking news, perhaps, but it did illustrate that we all go through the same problems, trying to find what makes us genuinely happy. In a way, the afternoon session became a kind of support group for web professionals! In a good way, though. Chatting to everyone in the evening, it seemed that everyone felt remarkably close as a group, having collectively broken the ice with such personal stories.

This is the essence of our ‘Insites’ brand, distilled to its simplest form: gathering a good bunch of people together, and opening up to each other and offering advice by sharing what’s gone well and what’s gone not-so-well.

Valuable lessons were learned and we’ll be doing it again next year. Thank you so much to everyone who came. Personally, I’m still on a massive high.

(My apologies to Keir, whose body in the photo above has been oddly distorted as a result of my dodgy iPhone Panorama-ing skills!)

Update

Laura and Tom both wrote about the day on their personal sites, well worth a read.

This week we added our good friend Kieran Masterton to the list of Starkers core comitters. He’s been dealing with issues for the last couple of months and has added a bunch of great additions to the theme.

We’ve got some exciting projects planned for 2013 which Kieran will be helping out with. We’re also hoping he’ll be contributing to our blog on all matters code, especially WordPress over the coming months.

Co-founded by Martha Rotter (MR) and Stewart Curry (SC) Woopie do a lot more than produce digital books. Their innovative platform is designed to allow publishing across multiple platforms from one source.

I recently chatted with Martha and Stewart about their company, their ambitions and the problem they are solving with Woopie.

Firstly, tell us a bit about Woopie - both the app and the company

SC: Woopie is short for Write Only Once, Publish It Everywhere. Woopie lets people create beautiful digital publications and publish them to many different devices, without compromising on design. We’re located in Dublin, Ireland.

We’ve been bootstrapping since late January 2012 but just this month joined an accelerator programme called Wayra, which is an international programme. We’ve gotten funding and amazing offices right on the Liffey River in Dublin.

The team consists of me Stewart Curry and Martha Rotter. I do the design and front-end stuff, and Martha does the back-end stuff.

What were you and the team doing prior to starting Woopie?

SC: Before Woopie I was working as a designer in a digital media agency, doing web design stuff for a variety of clients. Things like marketing websites, banner ads (I’m so sorry internet!) and web apps. It was great work but the time came to try and go out on my own.

MR: I moved to Dublin from Seattle in 2007 as a job transfer with Microsoft. In 2010 I left to go and do freelance development work and build some of my own projects.

One of those projects was Idea Magazine, which I roped Stewart in to helping me with, and that’s where we discovered the need for a digital publishing tool.

What problem are you solving with Woopie?

SC: The big one is that it’s too difficult and time-consuming to create a digital magazine, and getting it onto different platforms (like e-readers) is a total pain.

Most current solutions assume you already have a print version (and you may not) and then try and force that into an app or a page-turning web view – neither of which are great in my honest opinion.

We think trying to recreate the printed page for digital devices isn’t the best way to get magazines online. There’s so many devices and platforms out there, with so many different capabilities, and trying to shoe-horn a replica page onto them is a sisyphean task.

What we do with Woopie is abstract the content from the presentation and then send it to templates especially formatted for a responsive web view, eReaders, etc.

MR: I noticed with one of my clients that the digital publishing solutions that are there are difficult to learn and not intuitive. Watching people’s frustration in trying to use these tools made me want to create something that was tailored to them and focused on the experience. Publishing is stressful enough without having to learn new tools and processes constantly.

What are the barriers to entry and how does Woopie reduce them?

MR: For many would-be publishers, the barrier is cost. Tools are expensive to license and time-consuming to learn.

SC: If you’ve been working a lot in web you don’t have to go back and learn InDesign and all that goes with it – we want to make creating a magazine as easy as Tumblr is for websites. Then there’s ePub. To say the spec is strict is an understatement. So many hair-pulling moments with that monster.

You are publishers yourself too, tell us a bit about “Idea” and how the process of creating and publishing it influences your product.

SC: When we started making Idea Magazine, there was no really appropriate solution for what we wanted to build. That’s where Woopie came from  - we couldn’t find what worked for us, so we decided to build it ourselves!

What’s been great is that we can add a bit to each issue as we build upon what we have – social sharing, navigation shortcuts via swipe or keypress, better contents etc. Plus the feedback has been great for telling us what people want from a digital magazine.

Ultimately what we’ve been able to do is go from 90% graft (the boring stuff – linking pages etc) / 10% craft (cool designer stuff) to the reverse – now all the heavy lifting is done and we can focus on making the magazine look good, spend time doing custom illustrations, etc.

We want designers to spend their time doing interesting things and pushing boundaries instead of trying to mash their product into a bad format.

MR: Now that we are able to build on top of our own product, we have learned a lot about digital publishing, the various formats and tricky pieces. We are lucky in that we can try new things all the time and if it works, build it in to the platform for others to use.

You are very much part of the Start Up culture in Dublin which appears to be thriving. Why do you think it’s such a hotbed at the moment?

SC: For me it’s pretty simple – it’s thriving because Twitter let people find others with similar interests, and regular meetups & talks help develop a sense of community. Then there’s the people – we’ve some incredibly smart, interesting & friendly people who share what they know, organise get togethers, and sponsor free beer!

MR: People in Dublin are just nice! Well that’s been my experience in my five years of living here. They love to connect and the community is fantastic and incredibly supportive.

Tell us a little more about how you create the .epub and .mobi versions – what’s the process?

MR: You can see some screenshots covering a bit of what our process looks like at http://Woopie. Our process is essentially design the templates, input the content, style it and export to the formats we need. It’s a lot like a Tumblr or WordPress workflow.

Text and images go in, styled publications come out. Then we do a lot of testing to make sure things look as we expect on various devices, apps and browsers.

Were there any major challenges taking our content and turning it into digital formats?

MR: Well the first challenge with this and with any of our projects is getting our templates right. We wanted to make sure we matched the feeling and style of the book as closely as possible.

Once the template works, then it’s a matter of checking features on various platforms. One of the interesting pieces for us on Insites: The Book was footnotes actually! Since we’ve been working almost exclusively on magazines so far, we hadn’t gotten to do footnotes before and getting them right in all the platforms was interesting. But I think they turned out quite nicely in the end!

Are there inconsistencies across devices that cause problems

MR: Short answer: YES!

It actually reminds me a lot of the browser wars. In the browser wars you had differences depending on both operating system and browser. In publishing, we have the same thing except it’s with the hardware or device or app plus the format.

All of the different versions require slightly different content and formatting. .mobi takes html, epub takes xhtml for example, Then there are CSS differences as well as HTML attributes which are accepted in some formats, ignored in others, and actually break the page in others.

It’s time-consuming and difficult to learn all of these idiosyncrasies, and they change too. If that isn’t confusing enough, we now have vendors adding in their own formats too: Amazon, for example, just announced a new format they’ll be using in Kindles called KF8. And you’ve probably heard of iBooks Author from Apple. It’s confusing today, so it’s no wonder many tools have a difficult time keeping up.

What’s the roadmap for Woopie looking like?

SC: Right now we’re working with our alpha customers to make sure we’ve the right product fit and are focussing on the right features. From there it’s opening it out to the public, refining and enhancing what we have to offer so people can make beautiful things.

How can people find out more about what you are up to?

SC: They can visit our website at Woopie and follow us on twitter – @makewoopie, @irishstu, and @martharotter.

All you have to do is visit the page, enter the promotion code blackfriday, and our Shopify store will deduct 50% from the cost of the book!

Hey, it’s almost Christmas, so why not have some fun? We were originally planning to host a workshop on Monday 3rd December, but we decided to throw a party instead! Here’s what we have in store for the first ever Insites: The Xmas Special:

• The day starts at 12.30 — we’re taking everyone out for a nice local lunch.
• Between 2 and 5, enjoy some informal, slide-less, BarCamp-esque talks about everyone’s useful techniques, favourite tools, and personal highs — and lows — of 2012. Participation is encouraged, although not mandatory (but we’d really love to hear your stories, too)!
• At 5pm we all go for beers and the first round is on us — possibly more!

So, if you fancy a pre-Christmas wind-down with some fun folks and a large helping of inspiration (oh, and free food and beer), come and join us! We only have 15 places available!

Book your ticket for £29 + VAT

Jon had assembled a great line up of speakers which we were honoured to be part of. We were on just before lunch and despite running over slightly shared the story behind Insites: The Book, the challenges of online selling, and our version of success. We were slightly thrown half way through as one of the attendees fell ill, thankfully he was well looked after and made a full recovery.

(Photo by @laurakalbag)

I attend “a lot” of web related events and I have to say that Jon did a great job of bringing together different topics and stories that all managed to meet at the intersection of web, business and technology.

It was also pleasing to see a large number of school children attending. I for one wish I’d had the opportunity to attend similar events when I was at school.  To top it all off there was free Hasbean coffee on tap, a great lunch and plenty of good chat to make the breaks fly.

Thanks again to Jon and his team for making the experience so enjoyable. I am not sure it will happen in 2013 but if it does I’ll be making the long treck from the South West once again.

Finally if you are interested there’s a great write up of the day at http://singlespan.com/dwblog/2012/11/01/hdlive-2012-live-blog/.

Now that the book’s production is complete, it’s started shipping, you’ll be pleased to know. And if you haven’t ordered one yet, now’s your chance! Everyone we spoke to last night said that once they held it in their hands, they realised just how special it is. And heavy! It’s practically a weapon.

If you’ve got any photos from last night, please upload them to Flickr, as we’d love to see them!