DUUGfest 2019

The story of the web is a story about freedom. It's a story about information, about breaking down barriers, about creating new ways for people to communicate, to collaborate, and to share their ideas. It’s also a story that has as much do with marketing, money and meetings as it does with research and innovation. It’s a story of mediocre ideas that succeeded where brilliant ideas failed, a story of compromises, rushed deadlines and last-minute decisions. And it could so easily have been very, very different.

What if IBM had hired Digital Research instead of Microsoft to develop the operating system for their first PC, way back in 1980? What if Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark had gone to work for Nintendo in 1993 and never founded Netscape? What if one of the team at CERN had said “Tim, won’t it sound a bit silly if everyone spends the next fifty years saying double-you-double-you-double-you all the time”?

In this talk, Dylan Beattie will explore alternative history of the world wide web - a web with no Microsoft, no Windows; no Firefox, no Google and no JavaScript. A software industry from another timeline, a world of platforms, protocols and programming languages that are unmistakably alien - and yet strangely familiar.

So strap in, hold tight, and join us as take you on a journey through... the web that never was.

As the web has grown over the years, the demands on hosting for a site have also increased significantly. What once could easily be hosted on a shared hosting account, now needs to do so much more, from dynamic site generation, to load balancing and scaling on demand, and protection against cyber attacks. The hosting landscape is now more complex than ever. 

But what if we could go back? back to a simpler time when web pages were just plain old HTML files and hosting was cheap and simple? Well, that's what a growing number of developer communities are doing via static site generation. 

In this talk I will look at what is static site generation, what benefits it can bring over traditionally dynamic site generation and also present a proof of concept demo for how this could work in Umbraco to give us a best of both worlds approach.

Do you want use Umbraco as a real digital marketing platform? Or are you already doing that? Big chance you've been using several external platforms and tried to integrate those into Umbraco. Maybe those platforms aren't really working together and they aren't really integrated into Umbraco. Is that the best we can do? What if Umbraco would be the digital marketing platform?

At Perplex we've decided to start developing a digital marketing platform called uMarketingSuite. Our goal is to create a full marketing suite, including Analytics, A/B-testing, personalization & marketing automation! In this session we will look into the approach we're taking, share our own expectations of the platform, show you the progress in the last couple of months, and maybe even do some live demo'ing!

If you need Marketing, and you love Umbraco, then you should see this talk!