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What programming conferences are in Romania in 2011?

How To Web looked like an excellent conference last year. They haven’t announced dates for 2011 yet but I’d keep an eye on their Twitter account:

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Is there a way of tracking shortened URLs with Twitter streaming API?

Think about it like this: the whole point of the Twitter streaming API is to get you the tweets as soon after they are posted as possible. If the API were to provide access to the lengthened URLs, it would have to delay emitting a Tweet on to the stream until a resolver had gone through each shortened URL in the tweet and checked to find what it redirects to. This would mean that the speed with which the streaming API could deal out tweets would be dependent on the speed of the third party servers that serve up the redirects. I doubt Twitter would ever want to implement this.

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How do you find conferences that interest you?

We had this exact same problem, which is why we created http://lanyrd.com/—it’s a wiki-style conference listing site (currently listing over 1,000 upcoming events) which lets you sign in with Twitter and uses the people you follow on Twitter to suggest events you might want to go to.

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What are some other conferences/expos similar to BlogWorld and Internet Retailer?

SOBCon Chicago has four speakers this year who spoke at BlogWorld last year: http://www.sobevent.com/chicago-... / http://lanyrd.com/2011/sobcon-ch...

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Simon Willison: What are new interesting technologies in your radar as of January 2011?

I’ve been head down building Lanyrd for the past 4 months, so not much time to check out new stuff. I’m still very excited by Node.js and Redis, but I was excited about those last year. ElasticSearch looks very interesting (we’re currently using Solr but I’d contemplate a switch). I’m looking forward to giving CoffeeScript another go now that it’s matured a bit. Other than those I’m too busy learning operations software (syslog-ng is next on my list) to play with much other new stuff.

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Why do so many web developers hate Microsoft?

It’s because by far the least enjoyable part of web development is dealing with bugs in IE.

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What conferences should a programmer working in the industry follow?

If I had to pick just one programming-related conference a year, it would probably be OSCON. The maintainers of pretty much every piece of software I use on a daily basis go there.

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What are some recommendations for good social media and/or digital marketing conferences to attend in 2011?

Our list of social media conferences on Lanyrd currently shows 46 upcoming events: http://lanyrd.com/topics/social-...

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What is the best way to debug a Django app?

The Django Debug Toolbar is essential: http://robhudson.github.com/djan...

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Is there an online calendar for all the Ruby / Rails conferences to be held in 2011?

Have you tried both our Ruby and our Rails topic pages?

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Public Speaking: Where is a good place to get started as a speaker?

Start small. There are plenty of small local events around that accept (and even encourage) first-time speakers. The single most valuable thing you can do to improve as a speaker is to get as much experience as possible.

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Is there any fairly easy way to travel internationally without taking a corporate airline, cruise, bus etc?

Apparently there is—I haven’t tried it myself, but it’s not impossible to hitch hike on someone’s yacht. It helps if you know how to sail, but if you know how to cook that can get you on board as well.

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What is a good business model for open source projects?

Consulting.

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What boardgame is the best to play for a scheming rat bastard?

Junta is a lot of fun: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardga...

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The science of the hashtag. Interesting analysis of how the #lessambitiousmovies hash tag took off thanks to retweets from a couple of key users with very creative followers. # 14th January 2011, 4:02 am

Display your events on your own website with Lanyrd Badges. We’ve launched badges for Lanyrd—JavaScript that lets you embed a top bar or a content “splat” showing events you plan to attend, talks you’ve given in the past and other various combinations. I’m quite pleased with the implementation—the badges are configured using classes on a link to your Lanyrd profile, and the badges themselves are served through a combination of Amazon CloudFront for the initial script and a Varnish cache for the badge data itself to keep things nice and snappy. # 13th January 2011, 8:38 pm

What is the best way to find about the upcoming startup events in India?

There are quite a few events of interest to entrepreneurs showing up on Lanyrd: http://lanyrd.com/places/india/—you can also subscribe to our Atom feed for that page to hear about future events.

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The Virtues of Monitoring. Fantastic guide to the various levels of monitoring required for a modern web application. # 13th January 2011, 4:26 am

The First Few Weeks—ep.io. Another take on managed Python Django/WSGI hosting, from Andrew Godwin and Ben Firshman. # 13th January 2011, 4:25 am

Hello from Gondor. “Effortless production Django hosting” from the Eldarion team. # 13th January 2011, 4:24 am

Introducing the FluidDB Explorer. Every good API deserves a dedicated API browser. # 13th January 2011, 4:19 am

US iPhone Data for International Visitors: A Guide. AT&T will swear blind that their pay-as-you-go data plan doesn’t work with iPhones or other smart phones. Here’s how to prove them wrong. # 13th January 2011, 3:51 am

Desk Depot. We picked up some chairs from here the other day—it’s a fascinating place, essentially an entire history of Silicon Valley told through second-hand furniture. # 13th January 2011, 3:50 am

Getting Started—Google URL Shortener API. The API for the goo.gl URL shortener is really nice—no API key required, easy to create a short URL and you can retrieve detailed stats breakdowns (similar to bit.ly) as JSON for any URL. # 13th January 2011, 3:49 am

Who are the best female speakers on the topic of social media who are equal parts knowledgeable and engaging?

Meg Pickard from the Guardian
Suw Charman-Anderson

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Are there any tech conferences in Miami around the time that WMC takes place (March 8-12)?

There’s SuperConf on the 25th-26th of February: http://lanyrd.com/2011/superconf/ / http://superconf.net/

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How do Twitter apps handle username changes?

Twitter assigns each user a unique numeric ID which does NOT change when the user’s Twitter name changes, so triic number one is to key off that, not the username itself.

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What’s a good web dev platform if I work in Python, but want something faster to set up than Django?

Sounds like the perfect use case for Google App Engine, with its offline task queues and one-click deployment.

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What are the most easy-to-use, effective event calendar websites?

Our site Lanyrd.com is shaping up quite nicely (in my opinion)—if you sign in with Twitter we’ll show you events your Twitter contacts are attending, tracking or speaking at. We also have a pretty powerful search interface, and you can browse the site by location and topic as well. Some examples:

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Are there any large tech conferences in Sydney, Australia?

We have a list of conferences (tech and non-tech) in Sydney here:

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