Appfire’s Firestarter – Confluence wiki on a stick

At Atlassian Summit a couple of weeks ago, Appfire handed out some early releases of their new product. It’s called Firestarter, a portable wiki appliance. Basically, it’s a Confluence wiki on a USB stick! I was lucky enough to get one, so I’ve been trying it out.

Friendly warning: This is an early adoption release of Firestarter. It’s interesting and exciting to experiment with and to plan what uses you can put it to. It’s not yet ready for use with production systems or data.

Why would you want a Firestarter portable wiki appliance?

I’ve often heard people say that they’d love to be able to work on Confluence while they’re away from their desks. There’s a very useful iPhone app, with an enterprise edition for iPhone, Blackberry, Palm and Android too. But what about those times when you’re offline? Firestarter to the rescue.

Appfire also point out another use case that is particularly interesting for us technical writers: Distributing documentation on a stick. OK, pretty cool videos. Appfire suggests that you can package the Firestarter USB sticks with your product, containing the latest version of the documentation at the time the product is shipped. In addition, you can configure Firestarter to sync automatically with your server-based Confluence documentation whenever the customer is online. That way, they can get the very latest documentation even after the date of shipping.

I decided it would be interesting to give Firestarter a whirl. The first thing was to get hold of a Mac machine, since the early release of Firestarter is for Macs only. Appfire intends to produce a Windows version soon. Now I’m working on a MacBook Pro, borrowed for a few days. If there are any fumbles in this blog post, or any weirdness in the screenshots, please put it down to the combination of me and Apple!

What does Firestarter look like?

Here’s a photo of the Firestarter USB stick inserted into a MacBook Pro:

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

“Hottt!” Here it is with its protective cap and the box it comes in:

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

What does it do?

The Firestarter USB stick contains a fully-functional installation of Confluence. You can, of course, have more than one Firestarter. Each one has its own installation of Confluence.

In a nutshell, Firestarter offers:

• A Confluence wiki, running off the USB stick, that supports up to 10 users.
• Easy start of Confluence (no installation necessary).
• Syncing with an “enterprise” Confluence server. This means that you can synchronise the content of a Firestarter with the content of a Confluence wiki on a server machine. To do that, you need to install the Appfire Enterprise Sync plugin on your enterprise Confluence site. The plugin will soon be available on the Atlassian Plugin Exchange. I’m lucky – I got a special edition to try.
• Syncing from one Firestarter Confluence to another (peer to peer).

Getting Firestarter up and running

It’s very easy, even for me as a Mac noob. The Windows version will probably be just as simple. There’s a useful quick installation guide, printed on a card, that comes inside the box with the Firestarter USB stick.

I loved these bits of the installation guide:

“Firestarter will not function if you install it backwards.”

“Caution: The indicator light flashes rapidly during data transfer… Firestarter is hot! (Not so much burn your hand hot. It’s more ‘you’re going to love this thing’ hot.)”

Talk about a user guide with a sense of humour!

Following the instructions on the printed installation guide, I inserted the USB stick (taking care not to have it backwards, of course) and saw the Firestarter icon arrive on the Mac desktop:

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

I double-clicked the icon to see the “firestarter-start-stop.jar” file, and then double-clicked the JAR file to start:

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

Firestarter fired up (heh) Confluence on the stick. This took a short while. When it was ready, it gave me a “localhost” URL to click:

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

I clicked the link to see Confluence in my browser, running off the Firestarter stick:

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

My Firestarter came preconfigured with an administrator username (“firestarter”) and password. I’m not sure if that’s because it’s an early adoption version, or what will happen in the final 1.0 version.

Next, Confluence asked me for a licence key. You will need to get a Confluence licence from Atlassian. Firestarter is designed for the Atlassian 10-user licences, also called “starter licences”: $10 for 10 users. Firestarter also works with an evaluation licence – that’s what I used. To get an evaluation licence, go to http://my.atlassian.com. Sign up for an account if you don’t already have one. That will give you a username and account for the web site. Then follow the links to generate an evaluation licence, choosing “Confluence” as the product. You will receive a licence key (a big block of meaningless text). Copy it and paste it into the text box on your Firestarter’s Confluence screen.

Once I had applied my licence key and logged in, I saw the Confluence dashboard:

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

Cool, that’s the Connie I know and love, albeit of a more fiery hue.

Working in Confluence on Firestarter

I decided to create a documentation space on my Firestarter wiki. So I downloaded the XML backup of one of our documentation spaces, in this case the SharePoint Connector documentation backup. Then I used Confluence’s “Back up and restore” administration option (see our guide) to upload the XML file to my Firestarter Confluence site. Ta da ♫ ♪ here’s the documentation space, complete with the Documentation theme, running on the stick:

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

Setting up a desktop version of Confluence

I decided to try syncing my Firestarter Confluence with a server-based, standalone installation of Confluence. First I installed a standalone version of Confluence on my Windows-based desktop. I’m using Confluence 3.2.1_01. You can get an evaluation version from the Atlassian web site.

Next I installed Appfire’s Enterprise Sync plugin onto my desktop Confluence. This is a pre-release version 0.2.0 of the plugin, made available especially to me after I cajoled and promised not to put the plugin anywhere it shouldn’t go!

To start off with, I did some configuration of both Confluence sites. I’m not sure how much of this is necessary, but I did it just to be sure:

• On my desktop Confluence, I configured the base URL to use my machine name rather than “localhost”. You’ll need to do this if you want Firestarter to access your desktop, unless you decide to use an IP address instead of the machine name. I ended up using an IP address anyway.
• On my desktop Confluence, I turned on the remote API. (You can configure this setting in the “General Configuration” setting of the Confluence Administration Console.)
• On my desktop Confluence, I granted my username access to the Firestarter sync functionality, using the new “Enterprise Sync Permissions” option on the Confluence Administration Console. This option appears when you install the Enterprise Sync plugin. I also made sure my username has Confluence global permissions to create a space.
• Now on my Firestarter Confluence, I granted my username access to the Firestarter sync functionality, using the ‘Enterprise Sync Permissions’ option on the Confluence Administration Console.

Preparing to Sync Firestarter with my desktop Confluence

As you can see on the screenshot of the Firestarter Confluence dashboard up above, my Firestarter Confluence came with a wiki space called “Getting Started”. I clicked through to the page called “Firestarter – Getting Started Guide“, which has instructions on how to sync with other Confluence sites.

Running through the steps in that guide, this is what I did.

There’s a new menu option in the Firestarter Confluence user menu, called “WikiSync Settings“. To get to this option, I clicked my username at top right of the Confluence screen (my username in this case is “Firestarter”, but it could have been “SarahM” or whatever) and then selected “WikiSync Settings”:

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

Firestarter’s “WikiSync Settings” screen appeared, where I can manage my sync spots. A “sync spot” is another Confluence site that you want to sync with:

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

Adding a sync spot is pretty simple. I clicked “Add a Sync Spot” to get this screen:

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

Hint: If you have problems with your Sync Spot URL, try using an IP address as I’ve done.

Syncing a documentation space

As described above, I’d created a documentation space in my Firestarter Confluence by importing a real documentation space from our documentation wiki. Now I decided to sync my Firestarter Confluence with my desktop Confluence, to see if I could copy the documentation space to my desktop Confluence.

Here’s the dashboard of my desktop Confluence before the sync, showing that it has only one space, the “Demonstration Space” that you get when you install Confluence:

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

Now I went to the Firestarter “WikiSync Settings” screen and clicked “Prepare to Sync” next to my new sync spot:

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

Firestarter asked me for a username and password. I entered the username that has access to my desktop Confluence. I’d also given this username wiki sync permissions on the desktop Confluence and permission to create a space on the desktop Confluence. Now Firestarter presented this screen, showing the new content on my Firestarter Confluence that was not on my desktop Confluence. Cool, this is looking very exciting!

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

On the above screen, the first space listed is the Confluence SharePoint Connector documentation space that I’d created on the Firestarter Confluence. That’s the one I want to copy to my desktop Confluence. The second space is the Getting Started guide provided by Firestarter. I don’t need that one on my desktop Confluence.

I selected the space I want. Firestarter automatically selected all the pages, and allowed me to change the selection if I wanted to:

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

I clicked “Sync (Push Selected Content)” and sat back to watch the update. Woohoo:

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

Success!

Going back to look at my desktop Confluence, I saw that the new documentation space (Confluence SharePoint Connector 1.2) had appeared:

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

I clicked through to the pages in the new space. They looked great. All images and attachments had come across, as well as the text:

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

The platforms and versions in my setup

This is the setup on the laptop where I inserted the Firestarter USB stick:

• My laptop (the borrowed one) is a MacBook Pro, running Mac OS X version 10.6.3.
• I have the Firestarter early adoption release (EAR), given to me at Atlassian Summit 2010.
• My version of Firestarter is running Confluence 3.2.1_01, on a MySQL database.

I also have a desktop machine running a standalone installation of Confluence:

• My desktop is running Windows 7 Professional, version 6.1.
• I have installed Confluence 3.2.1_01, standalone distribution, using the built-in HSQL database and Tomcat server.
• I’ve also installed Appfire’s Enterprise Sync plugin, version 0.2.0. This is a pre-release version, made available especially to me, after I cajoled and promised not to put the plugin anywhere it shouldn’t go!

Notes:

• Firestarter is currently available only for a Mac. In other words, the USB stick will work only on a Mac. The Windows version will be available soon.
• You can’t use the same Firestarter on a Windows and on a Mac. You need separate USB sticks. This is because they run on the supported Confluence platforms, which do not support cross-platform installations.
• For more information on supported platforms and features, see the Appfire Firestarter FAQ.

Some feedback from me

Here’s a collection of ideas and feedback. I’ve passed these notes on to the Appfire team too.

• It would be handy to be able to mark the USB stick easily on the outside, especially if you have more than one of them. Would it be easy to put a small, flat, writeable portion on the casing?
• When syncing pages, it would be useful to give the option of retaining the author information (usernames of the people who created/updated the pages) and the page history.
• When syncing an entirely new space, Firestarter created a new space with a flat page hierarchy. Instead, it should retain the page tree of the original space.
• When creating a new space, it would be awesome if the theme of the original space was transferred too, and the configured home page for the space.

I really like the popup hints that appear when you hover over a question mark or an information icon on the Firestarter screens. Here’s an example:

Appfire's Firestarter - Confluence wiki on a stick

What’s left for you to try?

I’ve only tried one part of Firestarter’s functionality, the push of content from Firestarter to an enterprise Confluence site. There’s a lot more to try, such as pulling content from an enterprise Confluence site to a Firestarter Confluence, and syncing from one Firestarter to another (peer to peer). Let me know if you try them out.

Since this is an early adoption release, it doesn’t yet have the full functionality that will be in the 1.0 release. The Appfire Firestarter FAQ show a list of planned features. I’m especially interested in the automatic upgrade offered by the planned “Auto Update” plugin. It would be cool to upgrade Confluence by just clicking a couple of buttons.

What do you think?

Will you find a wiki on a stick useful? Especially from the point of view of technical documentation, I’d love to know what you think.

Thank you to the Appfire team for letting me experiment with this early adoption release. I’m excited about the possibilities it offers, and interested to see what other people think. Playing with Firestarter is fun.

Hints and tips via Twitter

Twitter is ubiquitous. People will read tweets because they’re short and punchy and because they go where we go. Rumour has it that, in contrast, people don’t read manuals.   We’ve been trying a few different ways of using Twitter’s sweetness in and around our documentation. Our latest experiment is called “Tips via Twitter”. I’m interested to see how it will work out.

We’re encouraging people to tweet hints and tips about our products. What’s more, we publish a live Twitter stream on a page in the documentation. This is what it looks like:

Hints and tips via Twitter

Kicking off the project

We’ve started with one of our products called Confluence wiki. On the screenshot above, the blue section labelled “ConfluenceTips” is actually a constantly-rolling stream of tweets. You can see it in action on the “Tips via Twitter” page in the Confluence documentation.

The idea is that people will enjoy sharing their hints and tips in an interactive Twitter stream, and will enjoy seeing their tips appear in the documentation. We’re trying the experiment for Confluence first – so we’re inviting people to tweet tips about the wiki. If it works out, then we’ll do it for another of our products, an issue tracker called JIRA.

Tweet tweet

If you like, you could tweet a hint about Confluence right now, and see it appear on the documentation page. Log in to Twitter, then click this Twitter link to get you started. Replace the words “My tip” with your hint. Be nice now!

Embedding the Twitter stream

I’ve used the Confluence Widget Connector (that’s a wiki macro) to embed the stream of tweets into the page. The stream of tweets is the result of a Twitter search: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=ConfluenceTips

This is the wiki markup for the Widget Connector, as I’ve used it on the “Tips via Twitter” documentation page:

{widget:url=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=ConfluenceTips|width=500|height=1000}

Things that may go wrong

There are a few things that may go wonky with this experiment.

The most obvious is that maybe nobody will tweet. If that happens, the stream will dry up and we’ll have a big empty box on the documentation page. Luckily, we have a keen tweeter called @ConfluenceTips whose tweets show up in the search results too. Thank you @ConfluenceTips! I’ve also created a set of tweets that I used to seed the stream when I announced the experiment to the world. I’m hoping this will help to encourage other tweeters and give them an idea of what a tweeted tip may look like.

Another problem may be that people start tweeting weird or bothersome messages. I’ll be monitoring the stream. If necessary, I’ll remove it from the documentation page.

Anyone else tweeting hints and tips?

Let me know if you’re using Twitter for hints and tips, maybe publishing them in the documentation too, or doing something else totally cool.

Technical writer’s pick of presentations from Atlassian Summit 2010

Technical writer's pick of presentations from Atlassian Summit 2010

Last week I attended Atlassian Summit 2010 in San Francisco. Summit is a conference hosted by Atlassian (the company where I work, though I’m in the Sydney office) for our customers. Because I was “on duty”, I didn’t get to attend as many of the sessions as I would have liked. The conference was awesome, and the sessions were of a very high standard. Luckily, they’re available on video.

There are a number of videos on the Atlassian Summit 2010 site – one for every single session. I’m sure you’d love to watch them all, but that will take a bit of time. Someone told me they amount to 40 hours of viewing!

So I’ve had a look at the videos and picked out a few that I enjoyed and that are particularly relevant to technical writers:

• Confluence at NASA: Where No Wiki Has Gone Before, by Nick Smith of Freedom Information Systems. Nick has two aims: Firstly to inspire us, by letting us know that NASA uses the same tools as we are using. In particular, Confluence wiki. And secondly to let us in on the things they’ve learned from using the NASA wiki. Nick’s talk is a case study of the Ares Preliminary Design Review that took place in 2008. They created the “Ares Reviews Wiki” using Confluence. Thousands of people used the wiki to review a set of 75 documents (large, complex documents) over a period of two weeks. The documents were the design specifications for Ares I Rocket, a replacement for the Space Shuttle. Nick tells of the success of the project and runs through the lessons they learned from the project. Very useful, and an engaging presentation style. Good work Nick!
• Building a kick-ass Confluence page in 10 minutes, by Matt Hodges of Atlassian. This is an awesome lightning talk where Matt shows us how to use some advanced Confluence features to build a complex page in 10 minutes. I attended this session in real life, so I know it was great. A definite must-see.
• Felt the earth move when I read your docs, by Sarah Maddox of Atlassian. Rumour has it that I attended this one too. This was my presentation, taking up the first 22 minutes of the video. It’s all about using social media to engage your readers in the documentation. I’ve also written a summary blog post with links to the download files and video.
• Confluence as a Support Knowledge Base, by Jeremy Largman of Atlassian. Jeremy and I shared a session. Jeremy’s presentation is in the second half of the video, starting around the 22 minute mark. He talks about using Confluence as a support knowledge base and the tools the support team have built to extend Confluence. His presentation is awesome and packed with information. Well worth a watch.
• Labels Magic – Using Labels in Confluence to Manage Information for a Release Cycle, by Anthony Pelosi from the San Francisco User Group. One often-cited problem is how to find content and information in the wiki. Anthony gives a great demonstration of using labels and the content-by-label macro as a flexible approach to organising and finding information.
• No Coding Necessary – Building User Macros and Dynamic Reports Inside Confluence, by Charles Hall of Astrium. This session is for more advanced and technically-oriented Confluence users. Charles Hall starts with a great introduction to user macros, what they are and what you can do with them. No coding necessary… well, except a bit of jQuery and… ! Now Charles rolls up his sleeves and gets serious. This is an excellent session for people who want to do more with their wiki.
• Building Awesome Dashboards with Confluence, by Jim Severino of Atlassian. In the second half of this session shared with Charles, Jim Severino describes how to build awesome dashboards with Confluence. He starts off by showing some of the Confluence pages we use at Atlassian, showing graphical reports and data in a dashboard-like format. Examples are product revenue dashboard, a build and infrastructure dashboard, customer services graphs and so on. Next Jim tells us about the free plugins available that you can use to manipulate data, all created by customers and available on the Atlassian Plugin Exchange. Jim goes on to tell us how to use the plugins to create graphical data dashboards on Confluence. A very interesting and informative session, again for people who want to do extra magic on their wiki.
• Mastering JIRA Workflow, by Christina Bang of Atlassian. This is an awesome in-depth look at JIRA workflow, by someone who really knows her stuff. JIRA is a web-based tool for project management and issue tracking, developed by Atlassian. Watch the video then download Christina’s expert guide to JIRA workflow. The PDF file is linked above the video. Essential viewing if you want to change the basic, default workflow to suit your team and your procedures. In particular this is relevant to technical writers who may need to adapt the default, software-development-based JIRA workflow to create a different set of steps and statuses, issues and tasks more suited to documentation development, review and publication.

There are some other really great sessions that I haven’t mentioned here, with lots of useful technical and procedural tips. In particular, if you’re interested in agile software development, you may find some useful sessions on the Summit site. I hope my selections give you lots of happy viewing.

Social media in technical documentation – a presentation

Last week I attended Atlassian Summit 2010. This was a conference in San Francisco focusing on Atlassian products such as Confluence wiki, JIRA issue tracker and more. At Summit, I presented a session on using social media in technical documentation. We also got a bit emotional about the docs.

This was pretty cool. It’s the first time I’ve given a talk at an Atlassian conference. I was totally stoked and very nervous. Apart from a technical glitch or two (basically, Twitter was borked and my presentation was supposed to use Twitter) all went well. The audience was great. Thank you guys!

Downloading the presentation and watching the video

If you like, you can watch the video of me doing the talk (yes, they filmed me!) or download the slides:

• Watch the video of me giving the presentation on the Atlassian Summit 2010 site. You’ll see two big picture boxes in the right-hand half of the screen. The top one is the video. The first 22 minutes are my part of the session. In the second half of the video, Jeremy Largman talks about using Confluence as a support knowledge base and the tools the support team have built to extend Confluence. His presentation is awesome and packed with information. Well worth a watch. If you’d like to bump up our ratings, click the “Like” button just above the video. Let me know what you think of it too. I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out. I was expecting far worse! I was quite nervous, and my mouth got very dry. They’ve done a really great job of compiling the video with me and the presentation slides in one single view.
• See the slides on Slideshare: Felt the earth move when I read your docs (Slideshare)
• Download the slides in PDF form (1,901 KB) from this blog post that you’re reading now: Felt the earth move when I read your docs (slides only)
• Download the slides with notes in PDF form (1,907 KB) from this blog post: Felt the earth move when I read your docs (slides with notes)

Summary of the presentation

My talk was called “Felt the earth move when I read your docs“. Actually, it was originally called “Felt the earth move when I read your docs, mate” but someone with a fair bit of influence suggested that I remove the word “mate” from the title. You may notice that the word sneaked into the presentation itself anyway! Here’s a still image that I grabbed from the video:

Social media in technical documentation - a presentation

It’s all about using social media to engage readers in the documentation. It’s also about fun and games and a bit of emotion in the docs. We looked at these tools:

• Confluence wiki
• Twitter
• Flickr
• Wufoo

And we saw how we can use them in technical documentation:

• Using comments and forms to get actionable feedback from readers and customers.
• Linking to external blogs from within the documentation.
• How you can set up and manage your documentation while allowing external people to edit it.
• Using Twitter as a medium for release notes.
• Encouraging customers and readers to tweet hints and tips, and publishing the Twitter stream in your documentation.
• Holding a doc sprint.

To round it off, we looked at the Atlassian Dragon Slayer documentation, which combines a game, social interaction and a laugh with good solid well-tested technical writing.

More

The Atlassian Summit presentation is related to one I gave at AODC recently. If you’re interested in a lot more detail about each of the topics covered here, then take a look at my earlier post: AODC 2010 day 2: Engaging your readers in the documentation.

Craig Smith snapped a cool picture of me giving the presentation. He also wrote some great summaries in his Atlassian Summit 2010 Day 1 Wrapup.  Thanks Craig!

At the end of my slides are a number of references and links that I hope you’ll find useful. They include links to blog posts by other technical writers who are experimenting with social media and other adventures in the docs.

The Atlassian web site has a lot more Summit presentations, including a number about Confluence and how people are using it.

Attending this conference was a great experience. I’m really lucky to have had the chance to be there and to meet all those great people. Thank you to all the attendees for the ideas you brought and the fun we had.

AODC 2010 wrapup

A couple of weeks ago I was in Darwin – ya know, that place where evolution started. It’s a bit warm up there. The insects are the size of Sydney’s birds. The spiders are the size of Sydney’s fruit bats. Crocodiles lunge out of the drains and grab your ankles. Technical writers lurk under banyans swapping tales of DITA, dragons and eggcorns.

I was attending and presenting at AODC 2010, the 13th Australasian Online Documentation and Content conference. This is the third AODC conference I’ve attended, and all have been awesome. Tony Self, the organiser, has the knack of selecting interesting topics. More than a knack, I suspect it comes down to lots of hard work. The speakers and attendees alike are knowledgeable and enthusiastic technical writers, making for a great all-round experience.

The sessions

This year’s conference spanned three days and eighteen sessions. I attended every single session, even the one that started at 8am on Thursday! I’ve written summaries of most of them, as linked below:

• AODC day 1: Turning Search into Find
• AODC day 1: The Power of Controlled Language
• AODC day 1: An Update on DITA Features, Tools and Best Practices
• AODC day 1: UA Design and Implementation for iPhone App
• AODC Day 2: Managing a Documentation Project
• AODC day 2: A Beginner’s Introduction to DITA
• AODC day 2: Engaging your readers in the documentation
• AODC day 2: What Kind of Assistance do Users Really Need?
• AODC day 2: Optimising your Content for Google Search
• AODC Day 3: Converting to Structured Content
• AODC Day 3: Introduction to DITA Conditional Publishing
• AODC Day 3: Help Authoring Tool Comparison
• AODC day 3: I can’t spell Ambliance

These were the sessions I didn’t write notes for, or where my notes are too disorganised to compile a blog post from:

• Networking. This happened on the first day, and was a lot of fun. We divided into groups, based on random criteria devised by Tony, had a quick chat with our group then hustled to form the next groupings based on even more random criteria.
• The Wonders of SVG, by Tony Self.
• WinANT Echidna – The DITA Open Toolkit Made Easy, by Tony Self.
• A Walk through Google Apps, an interactive session led by a panel of experts.
• Creating Auto-Magic TOCs with XSLT, by Dave Gash.

Fun and networking

The conference is infused with fun and liberally sprinkled with grains of Tony’s inimitable humour. At one stage early in the proceedings, when Tony was introducing a session, a ribald and fairly loud comment came from the back of the room. Tony’s response was instant:

“For the new people: That’s Choco. Please ignore him.”

Of course, in real life Choco is a professional and dedicated technical writer and author. He’s also entrusted with the important task of presenting the final AODC session.

Here we’re looking uncharacteristically studious, waiting for one of the sessions to begin:

AODC 2010 wrapup

At one stage Tony announced, “There’s gold class seating at the back. We bring you your tea and coffee if you sit there.”  True enough! Here’s Dave in said gold class seating. I don’t think the tea or coffee ever materialised though:

AODC 2010 wrapup

On Thursday night we all trooped down to the famous Mindil Market. The market is one of Darwin’s not-to-be-missed attractions, happening every Thursday and Sunday evening during the dry season. The thing to do is to grab a meal and a smoothie from the market stalls, then mosey on down to Mindil Beach to watch the sunset. You may recognise a few AODCers in these silhouettes:

AODC 2010 wrapup

If you’d like to see more pictures and words about Mindil Market and Darwin, take a look at what the Travelling Worm has to say. He was there at AODC too, strictly under cover of course. He did valiantly stand between me and a crocodile or two.

Uncle Dave’s Trivia Night

No AODC conference is complete without it. I’ve devoted a whole blog post to Uncle Dave’s Trivia Night.

More photos on Flickr

I’ve uploaded a set of AODC photos on Flickr. If anyone has any more photos, please add a comment to this post, linking to your photos. I’d love to see them!

See you at AODC 2011

I’m looking forward to next year’s conference already!