Last Friday I attended a CSS3 Wizardry Workshop run by local front-end web development company Clearleft. The workshop aimed to "blow our minds" with a day long set of lectures and exercises teaching myself and a few other front-end web developers the powerful new additions to the latest iteration of CSS.

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is the language used to determine the presentation of a HTML page. If you've ever viewed a website with CSS disabled then you'll know just how integral this language has become in laying out modern webpages. Browsers today support CSS2 across the board (though ask a developer about IE6's CSS support and you'll be met with a groan and a grimace), but it's the very latest browser releases that support CSS3 that are pushing the limits of how we can design and display webpages. To put this in context, have a look at Chris's personal website with CSS enabled, and then without it, below:

We started off with a look at the new selectors that can be used to grab any section of the HTML markup. Previously restricted to relatively simple selectors forcing us to target elements by their IDs and class names, we can now use these new selectors to attach styles to (naming but a few here) siblings, children and adjacent elements. These additions will allow developers to produce cleaner HTML without as many classes and ID names cluttering up every div, p and span declaration.

The award nominations are in, and we've been nominated in the Freshest Not for Profit category of the Fresh Digital awards for the Kidney Patient Guide website.

The KPG is a project that we here at Cogapp continue to be proud to have created and to still maintain pro bono ten years after it first went live. It is an information sharing hub and forum for people who suffer from kidney disease and those affected by it. The site has an interactive social media aspect that has been continually active since it was launched - visited by sufferers, their support networks and healthcare professionals alike. We recently revamped the site to give it a sleaker, more modern appearance and better navigation, to even further improve its usefulness for those who use it. Eleanor and I, who both worked on the recent redesign, jet-setted off to Manchester on the train to attend the Fresh Awards ceremony with high hopes for the KPG. While walking through the train, we noticed that the only real difference between the first class carriages and our regular seats was the inclusion of a nice little reading lamp, so we made our own.

So, this weekend saw Brighton's fourth BarCamp, at the Old Library in the centre of town. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, BarCamp is a special type of conference where there is no published schedule: instead, each participant must themself fill a half-hour slot with a talk, demo, discussion or some other event, and so the attendees themselves become the speakers. I love all this ad-hocery, and have managed to turn up at all the Brighton BarCamps so far. I've talked about QR codes, AVR microchips and Scratch to date and this yearI gave an introduction to programming applications for phones that run the Android operating system. You can see my slides on Slideshare.

On Wednesday I attended a one-day seminar at the excellent Dana Centre. Organised by Museum ID, it focused on the cultural sector's use of social media, broadcasting and the web, with lots of concrete examples from UK museums and heritage organisations. The day started with a presentation from John Stack, Head of Tate Online. In it, he emphasised the need for a two-way dialogue between museums and their audiences, and provided several concrete examples of when the Tate has done exactly that with regard to tying in with physical exhibitions. These projects included: How We Are Now, where visitors were asked to contribute photos to a Flickr pool, the best of which were exhibited in the gallery; Tate Tracks, with visitors contributing their own artwork-inspired audio; Street or Studio, where the best contributed photos were made into a limited edition book; and finally a short-story competition to tie in with the TH.2058 exhibition in the Turbine Hall, with the best entries made into an audio podcast narrated by ex-Dr. Who Christopher Eccleston. Next up was a presentation by Adrian Arthur, the Head of Web Services of the British Library. He outlined some of the BL's experiments with social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and podcasts, as well as their experience in opening up their sound recording archives to user generated content such as tags and annotations. Then he emphasised the need for cross-departmental cooperation in achieving the goal of disseminating the two key strengths of the library: its enormous amount of content, and the expertise of its curators. His colleague Clive Izard, Head of Creative Services, then took over to discuss the changes in both technology and user expectation which will be instrumental in shaping services in the future. As part of this he demonstrated some innovative and exciting ideas for researcher tools, including a rich multi-tiered interface that can provide for both lay and specialist audiences, and which could incorporate cutting-edge visualisation techniques alongside original source material (e.g. a 3D terrain view, synchronised with historical maps).