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

• 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

Presenter: Alex Jones

This month’s meeting is all about clients. Whether you are a freelancer, at an agency or work in-house at a large corporation, you work for and with clients day in and day out. So, the first half of the meeting will discuss common client needs and expectations and how to create the best atmosphere possible for successful projects and relationships. Striking a balance that satisfies both sides of the equation takes a little bit of work up front, but pays huge dividends over time.

The second half of the meeting will be a Client Tip Roundup, which will consist of five to seven Refreshers sharing their tips, and tricks of client management.

Tags: business, event, meeting

We’re going to try something different this meeting to mix up the format and hopefully make it a little easier for those of us who aren’t seasoned presenters. Rather than have one person speak for the entire hour and a half or more, we’re going to have 1-3 micro-presentations that run from 30 mins to an hour (depending on number who present). This should help our presenters to be able to distill their information into a manageable time-chunk while also offering the attendees multiple sources of insight. Each presentation should fit nicely into the overall theme.

Usability, Design & E-commerce, presented by David Lee

Everything Before the Cart, presented by David Nunez

Tags: business, event, meeting