Had a good meeting at the Auckland Web Design and Development Meetup last night.

There were some new but well-known faces and quite a buzz about future meetings. Bitter-sweet for Nathan , I should think, who presided over his last meeting for a while (he’s off to work in London, shortly). Nathan started the group back in 2003 and he’s stuck at it to the point where there are now over a hundred members and regular turn-outs of 15-30. Well done, Nathan, and good luck with the London stint. The reins have been handed over to Paul Gutch with John Ballinger helping out.

Yesterday, Nathan did a quick presentation on CSS, which lead to some good discussion of best practise and tools and plug-ins that ease the process.

Glen Barnes gave an overview of the Subversion (SVN) version control system and, despite the lack of Internet access to his SVN repository, gave us a good idea of the benefits of version control even when working on small, personal projects.

Finally, Matt Broad spoke about NZ Webmasters, which is a community site he’s developing for anyone who is in New Zealand, or New Zealanders abroad, doing stuff with the Web. The site aims to be a community portal to encourage people into the industry, to further their knowledge through contacts and to provide a platform for “webmasters” to offer their services to charity and not-for-profit organisations.

During the course of the evening Karl from Cactus Lab put in plenty of plugs for Charles his, as he puts it, “HTTP proxy/HTTP monitor/Reverse proxy”. It’s very impressive and a huge boon if you’re developing with Ajax or database-driven Flash or just to see the amount of traffic and data that’s passing between you and the sites you visit/develop. Excellent.