Refresh Austin

This week’s Refresh Roundup is a little late because I was in the Houston area over the weekend enjoying time with the family, especially my ridiculously cute niece.

• It’s been a while since we had a good text editor thread. Feel free to chime in if you feel a worthy editor was left out.
• Pat Ramsey asks if you’re going to SXSW Interactive and interested in video on the Web?. He’s leading one of the Core Conversation series and will be covering captioning web video. It should be a great session, so plan on being there Sunday, March 9, at 3:30!
• You may remember that Sam Foster needed to restore his SVN repo after vacating his previous laptop. Well, he was finally able to do so after getting an answer from the evolt list and was kind enough to share his newfound knowledge. Learn how to restore SVN from disk.
• Paul Menard reminds any of us that freelance or accept client work on the side that your money and therefore your living can be at risk if you accept payment from clients via PayPal. Clients may ‘reverse charge’ your account. Like Paul says, “The fact that no questions were ask by the client’s credit card company nor PayPal is quite disturbing.”
• That’s right. Justin Perkins has come out of the wild and renewed his commitment to the blogosphere. Editor’s note: Yeah, I know. I hate that word too.
• Boone Putney helps out if you’ve got a runaway Drupal installation that has been FUBARed by a bad module. You can disabling the Drupal modules directly in your database! This should at least get you to the point where you can get to your admin login again.
• Whurley announced that BarCamp Austin III will be held at GSD&M Idea City. Be sure to follow both Whurley and BarCampAustin for the latest.
• Christian Watson compiles 40+ carousel designs in his Home Page Carousel Showcase post. Check ‘em out.
• Our friends at LaunchPad Coworking released some really neat 3D renderings of the Austin floating room in their atrium. You read that right. Floating. Room.

That’s it for this week.

Tags: accessibility, barcamp, business, coworking, design, tips

• Lots of folks, including many Austin Refreshers, came out for the SXSW Mixer at Mohawk. Short recap here.
• On Tuesday, Grant Hutchins led a presentation titled “Grids in Depth” and David Humphreys led an Introduction to Rails and shared his 10 favorite things about the framework at our February Refresh Austin Meeting. Excellent presentations from both, as well as a great turnout!
• Julie Gomoll finally answered the questions, “When can we start coworking in Austin already?” Turns out we can start coworking in downtown Austin on July 1st. Launchpad Coworking’s space will be located at 800 Brazos Street. Be sure to head over to the Launchpad site to learn more!
• Justin Perkins has announced that he has a new site coming in a week. Or two. His site always takes a creative approach to blogging/bookmarking/lifestreaming/whatever, so it’s exciting to see what’s next.
• On a serious note, Alex Jones takes Pixish to task for fomenting an environment where “clients will view the talent pool as relatively equal, opting for a crap shoot instead of finding the right match for their needs”. As Alex notes in his blog post, this constitutes spec-work and should be guarded against. Derek Powazek did take the time to respond to some of the issues brought up, but only time will tell on this one. Many creatives in in the industry remain unconvinced.
• Christian Watson takes us on a whimisical Journey Through Web Design & Usability Domain Names. Sadly, it appears that the majority of semantically named web/dev/design domains are just parked.
• Do you googlebate? Ryan Joy sure does.
• GeekAustin announced that their May happy hour would be a special Wordpress edition. RSVP here if you enjoy socializing with geeks in a libacious environments.

That’s it for this week, folks!

Tags: coworking, design, geek austin, happy hour, meeting, ruby on rails, SXSW, sxswi

• Michelle Greer asks, Why Do Tech Geeks Want to Punch Zuckerberg in the Face? “With Beacon still in need of a major overhaul and all eyes on him for an IPO date, it looks like Zuckerberg has his hands full with Facebook.” you can see him at SXSW giving this year’s keynote.
• Ryan Joy likes to find his daily paper on the doorstep in the morning. However, that paradigm fails when it’s the electronic version. Check out this PHP/cron job combo that may just bring back the nostalgia of newspaper delivery.
• Andrew DuPont reports great news. Prototype 1.6 officially supports Opera. With it’s lightning fast javascript engine and DOM level 3 support, Opera is finally getting the full support it deserves… from Prototype, at least.
• Whurley posed the question, Who is the best candidate for the open source community?” to the blogosphere, Twittersphere, and Interwebs. Michelle weighs in here as does Four Kitchens. I think we all cringe at the thought that our leaders may understand the Internet as a series of tubes.
• Kevin Koym, with Bootstrap Austin, talks about building business ecosystems in Austin despite a possible recession. He argues that “Austin’s wired technology community has been organizing into … ‘Enterprise Tribes’ helping entrepreneurs build their businesses, recession or not.”
• Boone Putney is excited by the beta release of Microsoft’s HealthVault. Privacy issues aside, Boone sees it as way to “automate a lot of the processes that are notorious originators of error in the medical industry.”
• …and, of course, probably the biggest thing to come out is this week’s Refresh Austin’s SXSWi Party announcement.

That’s it for this week! If I’ve missed anything, post it in the comments.

Tags: Austin, business, Facebook, javascript, Microsoft, party, PHP, SXSW

• With SXSWi just around the corner, Sheila Scarborough discusses the lure of conference-hopping as well as the paradoxical desire to live-blog, tweet, et al. during the speaking sessions. Interestingly, it seems that we spend so much time cultivating our online connections that we fail to take a break even when around those connections in person! Be sure to say ‘hi!’ and put on a good face when you run into Sheila during the 2008 conference circuit.
• Alex Jones, Marla Erwin, Glenda Sims, and other Refreshers attended the 2008 AIR Interactive kickoff and enjoyed pints at Sholz Garten.
• Alex also “shed some light as to why some of your favorite products and services” are designed the way they are.
• Paul Menard is going to WordCamp 2008 Dallas (March 29-30). Word on the street is that he might be willing to vanpool to the event.
• Glenda Sims wrote about the wonderful Pachyderm project, useful to curators and educators looking to publish rich media learning objects. She describes it as “as a tool to help turn visitors into part of the creative process, giving them the keys to unlock a new interpretation that has the potential to transform the work as well as themselves.”

That’s all I’ve got for this week, folks! Of course there could be a lot more posted, but you’ll have to read our group archives and twitter stream to get it all.

Don’t forget about next week’s SXSW Mixer @ Mohawk on February, 11th. and our power-packed February meeting with presentations on Grids and RoR.

Tags: AIR, Pachyderm, SXSW, sxswi, wordcamp

This week we saw a firestorm erupt out of the A List Apart articles on browser version targeting and future-proofing websites. If you’ve not had a chance to read them yet, check out Aaron Gustafson’s Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 and Eric Meyer’s From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey.

Much has been written in the days following these articles, but I want to focus on Refresh Austin’s reactions as part of a new, weekly roundup.

• Alex Jones liked the idea at first glance. Especially if “we can get Firefox, Safari and Opera to implement the same method as recommended in Aaron’s article, the Web development industry … would benefit”. However, Alex revised his thoughts after further consideration because it would allow websites to stick with an IE6 web application for years with no real incentive to upgrade their code.
• Andrew Dupont gives the proposal a “tentative thumbs-up” after breaking down the issues and the flipsides, especially as they concern Javascript support.
• On a lighter note, Alex shared this take on the matter via Twitter.

What are your thoughts?

Tags: javascript, web applications, web development