So, after yesterday’s great start, today delivered another interesting collection of talks:

Application development with Lotus Notes, by Tania Melnyczuk, who showed us how easy it is to utilise this platform to create dynamic web applications.

Drupal, by Adrian Rossouw, one of the developers of this content management system and involved with Bryght, showed us how user friendly and intuitive it is. He went into more details of how Ajax is leveraged, as well as how taxonomies and vocabularies combine with content to better classify and organise it. Although, just as Murphy predicts, he had a few “issues” with his Powerbook at the most inopportune moments

XHTML and CSS, by Raoul Snyman, who gave an overview of good web design practices and making standards-compliant websites. He also demonstrated a few nice Firefox extensions that help with this: Web Developer Extension and Aardvark. Rafiq Phillips continued the presentation, explaining about semantic markup and how sites who layout their information smarter, usually also fare better at SEO.

Divmod Axiom, by Moe Aboulkheir, which is a python object database built on SQLite and tightly integrated with twisted. He showed a number of code snippets to illustrate the ease of use of the module.

Divmod Nevow, by Jeremy Thurgood, who continued on the talk by Moe previously. Nevow is a web application construction kit, and he showed off how to dive into the HTML tree and modify specific tags.

The Open Project, by Edd de Lange, which is a newly-launched initiative to aggregate “open” projects — covering both hardware and software — in a fashion similar to SourceForge or GNU’s Savannah. They promise to be releasing an open thin client, which will support new technologies like NX, during the coming week.

Agile development, by Peter Flynn, who quickly did an impromptu overview of the Agile Manifesto and the advantages that this development methodology can offer to development houses wishing to embrace modern — and sometimes controversial — techniques.

Spam, by Laurence Baldwin, who works for a medium-size Cape Town ISP, and he quickly covered methods and means to combat spam. The discussion was quite lively for this one — must be because of the ubiquity of spam and everyone being affected by it — and quickly covered other types of spam, such as those received through SMS and fax.

Microformats, by Conrad Strydom himself, which covers the evolution of social interaction on the web. He also briefly covered XFN, which is a method of directly encoding your social network in links.

Jabber, by Norman Rasmussen, who showed a number of features the server, protocol and client offer.

Finally, Asterisk, by Daniel Avinir, who showed us how they are using VoIP for their internal telephony, as well as least-cost routing on international calls. Also covered was Rocketboom, a wacky 3-minute vlog covering random technology topics every day, and other podcasts such as Steve Gibson’s Security Now!, This Week in Tech, In The Trenches and Robert X. Cringely’s NerdTV. We quickly glossed over Skype’s opening up of their API for external entities to start providing content via your Skype client, possibly for profit — the case in point here was an adult chat line. Finally, we wandered off the track and speculated as to what the future of the internet will bring; with its current implicit trust model and the growing threat of hostile content (spam, spyware, socially and morally unacceptable material like paedophilia, etc.), how social networking and referrals will probably shape the acceptable bounds of the internet of the future.

It was a great two days; very informative for me at least. I only hope we can do this again soon — I’m thinking 3-6 months should be a good time to repeat this exercise. Now that the first “trial run” has been completed relatively successfully, we should start marketing this to a wider audience.