Refresh Austin

I’ll skip the top ten lists and rehashing last year – it’s time to look forward and I’m psyched about what January and the rest of 2010 has in store for Refresh. So let’s hit it.

Event Details

7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, January 12th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
Texas Coworking 200 E. 6th Street (3rd Floor of the Hannig Row Building)

IMPORTANT UPDATE The location has changed to Texas Coworking, which is across the street from Buffalo Billiards and directly above B.D. Riley’s Pub.

RSVP on Facebook

weLost™: A Case Study/Discussion of a Hybrid iPhone/Web/REST App

Presented by Andrew W. Donoho

Our team released weLost™, our iPhone app, and its accompanying social weight loss network to the iTunes App Store in late December 2009. This hybrid app is both a native code and web application. I’ll be describing the high level choices we made in creating the app and social network.

What’s in Store for Refresh Austin in 2010

Presented by Alex Jones

We’re a dynamic group that has built a solid foundation that allows us to help each other improve on many levels, which is the only way we can truly judge our success. While our membership has grown significantly and attendance has steadily increased over the last few years, we’re not going to rest. Just like you, Refresh Austin is constantly improving and 2010 is shaping up to be a pivotal year. I’ll review the plans that we have for the next year and we’ll open up the majority of the time for discussion for what you would like to see out of the group.

RSVP on Facebook

Tags: development, iphone, meeting, web development

7:00 p.m. April 14th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos

Productive Creativity: How to Boost Your Creativity, Your Business
and Your Life

Presented by Olivia Wakeman

Many believe that either you’re born creative or you aren’t. And, some creative abilities may well be biological. Even so, research offers information and techniques to improve anyone’s creativity. This
presentation will help you nurture your inner Edison, Picasso, Oprah or Bill Gates. Presenter Olivia Wakeman, has decades of experience in creative fields, including work with Burson-Marsteller New York, the largest PR firm in the world and McCann-Erickson, one of the top ten advertising agencies.

ExpressionEngine Road Test

Presented by Judd Lyon and Steve Stedman

Why is it that many top design firms choose a CMS with a paid license, when there are plenty of high-quality free alternatives? Let us introduce you to ExpressionEngine.

In this get-our-hands-dirty demo we’ll take an in-depth look at ExpressionEngine’s feature set, compare it to other popular CMSs, and even build-out a quick application. By the end of the show, you’ll see why EE is the preferred tool for the web designer.

INTRO (20 min)
What’s ExpressionEngine?
What are its strengths/weaknesses?
How does it compare to WordPress/Joomla/Drupal/etc.?

DEMO (20 min)
Installation and set-up
Approaching a project
Building templates with weblogs
Pushing the envelope with plugins, extensions, and modules

Q & A (20 min)

Tags: cms, creativity, ee, expression engine, PHP, web development

Nate Aune will be the instructor for this three day session covering Plone 3, which has received a lot of interest amongst the Refresh Austin community of late.

Details

RSVP at Eventbrite
Date: September 29 – October 1
Cost: $750
Location: Austin, TX – MCC Building, 3925 West Braker Ln at MOPAC Highway

Agenda

The class will meet from 9:00AM to 5:00PM each day at the MCC Building, in the Alamo Room.

Day 1: Plone 3 Features, Development Tools and Data Types
Day 2: Plone 3 Buildout, Generic Setup and Theming
Day 3: Plone 3 Theming continued and Additional Topics

Tags: cms, event, plone, training, web development

Join us at our next meeting!

August 12th at 7 p.m.

PLEASE NOTE THE VENUE CHANGE

This month only, we’ll meet at the Blue Fish Development Group Offices
701 Brazos, Suite 700
Austin Centre building (the business half of the Omni Hotel). Theirs is the first office on the left on the 7th floor.
The business elevators are on the West side of the building near the security desk (the hotel elevators are on the East side next to the hotel check-in).

Refresh Austin’s August meeting will include two presentations:

Find it on upcoming.org.

Writing for the Web Presented by Sheila Scarborough

• How to let your own voice come through your writing.
• How to use an editorial calendar to organize your blogging and avoid writer’s block.
• How to present material on the Web so that it’s easy to read and absorb.
• How to interact with commentators on your blog, and how to get more of them.
• Discussion topic – when is a blogger a journalist, and when is he/she not? Are there fundamental tenets of print journalism that we should bring online?

Notes from Sheila’s Presentation

Books on writing:

• Anne Lamott, “Bird by Bird – Some Instructions on Writing and Life“
• Stephen King, “On Writing“

Blogs about writing great Web content:

• www.skelliewag.org
• www.copyblogger.com
• www.successful-blog.com

Blogs with good conversational writing:

• Heather Armstrong’s dooce
• Penelope Trunk’s blog (separate from her Brazen Careerist site)
• Leif Pettersen’s Killing Batteries

I’m @SheilaS on Twitter and am always open to further questions….

Introduction to Django Presented by Jon Loyens

Django is one of the more recent crop of lightweight web frameworks designed to help people create dynamic web applications while avoiding the redundancy and tedium often associated with the task. The Python-based Django has recently gained a lot of momentum within the web community for it’s ease of use and clean, maintainable code and is currently the only framework supported by the Google AppEngine. Being born out of a newspaper publishing environment, Django is particularly well suited to creating content driven applications (though, as the co-creators are quick to point out, Django itself is not a CMS, though a very good platform to build a CMS on). Django is billed by it’s co-creators Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Adrian Holovaty as “the Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines”.

Notes from Jon’s Presentation

• Django Notes
• Django Presentation (PowerPoint)
• Code from the Django Presentation

Update: Links and files from each presentation are now included above.

Tags: django, meeting, python, web development, writing

Access U, Knowbility’s annual IT accessibility training institute kicks off this coming Tuesday May 6th. St. Edward’s University hosts two days of classes, many of them hands-on, offered by world-renowned accessibility experts. From the basics to the bleeding edge, Access U will provide the resources you need.

Among this year’s highlights:

• Step by step guide through new WCAG 2.0 guidelines and emerging 508 standards
• Acsessibility
• Multi media accessibility
• and dozens more accessibility classes for technologists, content providers, and policy makers

Plus, there’s an optional post-conference session in AJAX Accessibility by Derek Featherstone.

Networking events include the opening dedication to Dr. John Slatin, presentation to Jim Thatcher of the annual “Making A Difference Award” from ACM, the leading international association of computer science professionals, and an audio described movie and dinner at the Alamo Drafthouse.

Registration is online at www.knowbility.org/conference
For more information, contact Teenya Franklin
Office: 512 305-0310 or teenya [at] knowbility.org

Tags: accessibility, event, web development

Syncopated Systems, an Austin-based computer engineering firm, this week announced the creation and sponsorship of a new annual award for the best W3C-compliant Web site developers in the greater Austin area.

By offering the Greater Austin Web Developer of the Year (”GAWDY”) award, Syncopated seeks to increase awareness of and compliance with industrial standards while promoting friendly competition among local Web site developers.

This competition will greatly also benefit potential clients by honoring those developers who maximize the reach of Web-based advertising by creating clean markup, which today comprise less than 10% of commercial developers.

The first annual award is tentatively scheduled to be given in late June 2008, pending the nomination of sufficient qualified candidates.

For full rules and to make nominations, see http://www.oddgods.com/webawards.

Tags: Austin, awards, design, development, markup, W3C, web development

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

Presenter: Justin Perkins
I will be discussing the trend of making the web more modular. We, as website creators, have many great applications available at our disposal and through the right means, we can seamlessly integrate various modules into our websites. This allows us to create websites with no real internal content, only content stored in external web applications.

View the Presentation

Tags: web applications, web development