Meeting: Final reminder for Open Coffee Coleraine tonight.

What: Open Coffee Coleraine, informal business, tech, startup and creative business networking but without the pressure and the name badges.

Where: Starbucks, Kingsgate, Coleraine.

When: Wednesday 19th August from 7pm to 9pm.

Cost: Nothing but you'll have to pay for your own coffee/tea.

Jam and the joys of music distribution in today's world.

My first piece for the Belfast Telegraph appears today in the Web Watch column.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/business/opinion/watching-web/jam-and-the-joys-of-music-distribution-in-todayrsquos-world-14456679.html

Upcoming on the tech radar in NI.

The good news is that Open Coffee's are crawling out of the woodwork, so if you want to network you have no real excuse for saying that things aren't going on. The reason I started Open Coffee Coleraine and not Open Coffee Limavady was simple, everyone in Limavady practically knows each other and in Coleraine it seems to be the opposite.

So crack open your diaries and get this lot noted down.

Wednesday 19th August - Open Coffee Coleraine: 7pm-9pm @ Starbucks (www.opencoffeecoleraine.com)

Thursday 27th August - Open Coffee Derry: 6pm @ Waterfoot Hotel (www.opencoffeederry.com)

Wednesday 9th September - Open Coffee Mid Ulster: 6.30pm venue TBC (www.ocmidulster.com)

The Belfast Open Coffee meetings happen every fortnight on a Thursday, the dates are listed on the their website: www.opencoffeebelfast.com

The open coffee meetings are no pressure, no name badge affairs. You get what you put in basically, if you want to talk to someone then introduce yourself to them and there's a high chance they'll talk back and then get you talking to someone else. It's not all techie businesses that turn up to these events so don't think it's just for dull programmers with nothing else to do. It's far from that.

If you are a dull techie with nothing else to do you'll be interested in these bits as well:

Monday 17th August - Refresh Belfast: 6.30pm @ Black Box all about iPhone development this time. You will need to register to get in.

Saturday 19th September - Bizcamp Dublin: All Day - Too much going on to list here.... (www.bizcamp.ie)

Saturday 10th October - Barcamp Derry: All Day - Too much going on to list here.... (www.barcampderry.com)

Thursday 4th - Friday 6th November - Buildconf: you will have to pay for this one but the schedule looks great. (www.buildconference.com)

BarCampDerry, interesting notes from the PHP front.

It was nice to see the BarCampDerry site come together quickly. Between Mark Nagurski, Greg Wallace, myself and a some others in the background that I may never know about... well it came together good. As small favours go, I liked this one a lot.

A few things to keep in mind for anyone putting that sort of site together in WordPress, from a geeky dev perspective.

1. Have a clear vision of how you want your code to work before you try and weave it into WordPress. For me I had the attending/speaker thing written when Mark first talked about the Barcamp site. I knew it would be in Wordpress so PHP was the obvious choice.

2. The route of least resistance is the best. I used the ExecPHP with Wordpress, it has advantages and disadvantages. Main disadvantage is that any errors or warnings don't show up, it's got to be some pretty bad for it to do so.

3. Make sure you have decent PHP code ready in advance. Mainly because trying to edit in Wordpress editor is like painting art through a letterbox.

4. Ensure that all the team know what the score is. Wordpress WYSIWYG editor is disable with ExecPHP installed otherwise the html prettying screws up the code. So don't expect to make too many friends on the team if you don't tell them not to use it.