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This weekend Edinburgh was graced with Scotland’s first “proper” web conference: The Highland Fling. The speakers were all excellent, and gave me loads of ideas for things I’d like to implement in both my day job and night job. Stand-out talks were Mark Norman Francis on Graded Browser Support and Andy Budd on some of the best features we should be trying out from CSS3. Olly has a good write-up of the day.

The next day the tables were turned, and some of the speakers from The Highland Fling saw what Scotland had to offer at the Refresh Edinburgh conference. Matt Riggott and John Sutherland were the hosts, and Matt’s employers, Line had kindly offered up a fantastic venue. The room promoted a laid-back feel with Tennent’s artwork and a Tuk-tuk in the corner.

Alex and I were the first speakers on, talking about Google Sightseeing and how we’ve tried to promote it. We enjoyed giving the talk, and most of the feedback described it as “entertaining” so I think it was a success.

We were followed by the much more useful Meri Williams, who explained the key points of Project Management and her essential toolkit for a web developer.

After the break there was a run of shorter talks starting with Tony Farndon, explaining why we should try out social web browser Flock. I’d previously seen Tony talk at BarCamp but this time he demoed a Web Snippets sidebar, which seemed very handy. I’m currently running one of the Nightly Builds which (so far) is working well.

Next up was Andy Cavers’ entertaining demo of Edinburgh Menus. I was very impressed by his manual Geocoding, which sounds like a lot of effort but allows for very natural search terms such as “Indian restaurants near the New Town”. Andy recently broke his arm so the release has been delayed, but it’ll certainly be a great service when launched.

Brian Suda gave a quick explanation of Microformats, which unfortunately got overtaken by a heated debate on if the abbr tag should be used for geo location. I could see the argument that the microformat was not really a correct usage of the tag, but the alternative method, putting the lat/lng in plain text and then setting display:none on the surrounding div, is just as messy. I’m still debating which method to use when I (finally) implement Microformats on Google Sightseeing.

John Sutherland then planned to give a talk on “The Business Argument for Web Standards”, but based on what he heard the previous day had since decided there was no such thing. His very short talk was entertaining none-the-less when he admitted “It’s all shit”.

Another break and we were into the final full length talks for the day. Firstly Dan Champion talked about his community book review website Revish, which he recently launched. There’s only a couple of reviews on the site at the moment, but he’s built a great platform so I expect it will take off quickly.

Lastly we heard from Tom Griffiths who, along with his team, have created Groopit: a social organisation website. The idea is a simple one but I think it could certainly be a big hit, especially with the younger internet crowed. I was also very glad to hear that the development is being supported by the University of Edinburgh (where I studied).

The whole Refresh event was recorded, but unfortunately there was only one lapel mic. And I kept dropping it. Therefore I doubt they’ll be much to hear from us on the final Podcast, but I would recommend having a listen to the other speakers.

If you too are a Web Professional working in Scotland then make sure you join the Google Group to hear about future events.

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