Today is the day the code and the design have to come together. We’ve made great progress this week in figuring out some of the more annoying glitches, not all of which are due to the application code. In particular I have to admit that WordPress is breaking our hearts with its bloody content sanitization. class inside abbr is not dangerous so why strip it out? We’re having a lot more success with MT and LJ.

Usually this is quoted as a negative but in our case it is entirely positive. The TechCrunch coverage lit a little fire underneath us and pushed me to finally get some lovin’ applied to the design of the prototype. We have engaged a superb designer who I met at BarCamp Ireland to just do something quick and simple for next week. The timeline is crazy but his first proposal was absolutely spot-on and we’re running with it. It is a clean, uncluttered, intelligent design to match the *cough*, clean, uncluttered, intelligent application. Now we just have to try and tie everything together for Friday.

Sam Sethi over at TechCrunch UK&I has done a blog post about LouderVoice, saying

LouderVoice one to catch at Le Web 3

I’m blushing just writing it. There goes all our expectation setting out the window! We’re thrilled to get the coverage and I hope we can live up to it.

Due to the oddness of flight times from Ireland to France, the Cork contingent will actually be arriving early afternoon on Sunday 10th Dec. If anyone else is around on Sunday, I’d love to meet up. Catch me on +353-87-9790297 or email me in advance at conor@loudervoice.com. We might even try to organise a dinner on the Sunday night.

After a short delay, we had our prototype Alpha walkthrough today and it really is a humdinger. It’s now at the “show it to someone and they’ll get it instantly” stage. Sure there are a few small bugs and it hasn’t had a Trinny and Susannah makeover for the design but it just feels right.

We bounced a few ideas back and forth on expected user behavior but you could spend from now until eternity doing that. We’ll just have to get it into the hands of some users to see what they do.

I had a chat yesterday with another Irish entrepreneur about some dev shops I had investigated. Afterwards I sent him on a list of outsourcing vendors that impressed me during my research (but I haven’t used). It struck me this morning that it might be useful to create some sort of wiki or group blog where those involved in software development in Ireland could list vendors they have used and like or who have been recommended to them or who look good. Basically a very simplistic dev-niche variation on HandyMan.ie.

Damien, he of 1000 ideas, all of them good, asked a bunch of us for our top 5 business tips. Here are mine re-published with some extra context. Nothing too deep, just solid practical stuff I’ve learned in 14 years of working in tech, many of those in start-ups.

Talk to as many people who can advise you as possible both in and out of your business area. Most people are happy to help and advise.

Just a re-direct to loudervoice.com but no harm in having it there as most of the Alpha testers are likely to be Irish. Now to get the email harvester up and running.

As I’ve said before, we are building our prototype using the TurboGears Web Application framework. Kevin Dangoor (the leader of the project), Mark Ramm and Gigi Sayfan have just released the first book about this great framework. It is currently the #20 tech book on Amazon. In addition to the paper copy, a Rough Cuts PDF version is available over at Safari Books and this is the version I have been using.

Documentation has always been TG’s biggest weakness and I believe it has hampered its growth. With this book and the current big push by the community to get all the docs in order, that criticism will soon go away. If you are a fan of rapid development for web applications, you should check out turbogears.org and consider purchasing the book.

Registration has just opened for the next Future of Web Apps conference in London on Feb 20-22. I’ve just signed up to attend. I should have PLENTY to talk about at that stage. Anyone else thinking of heading over from Ireland? It’s a great line-up of speakers including Mike Arrington, Bradley Horowitz, Tara Hunt and Jeremy Keith.

I just love buzzwords and acronyms. I’m still deeply disappointed that my Tim Bray derived PECK (People Contributed Experience and Knowledge) as a replacement for UGC never caught on. Now we have an attempt to get Web 3.0 used to describe what’s coming next.

There has been enormous reaction to John Markoff’s article in The NYT about Web 3.0 and the “Grand Semantic Web”. As anyone who has read the Argolon blog will know, we belong to the lower-case “upright semantic web” faction. And yes that was a dreadful attempt at a piano metaphor. Of all the commentary, the one I’m most aligned with is Ross Mayfield’s and in particular his statement