Refresh Pittsburgh

It’s a new year, and time to kick off Refresh Pittsburgh for 2010!

Please join us on Tuesday, January 26th at 7:00 pm for the next Refresh Pittsburgh meet-up.

This month well be back at one of our favorite locations, at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. AIP is located downtown at 420 Boulevard of the Allies. We’ll be in room 740. Take the gold elevator up to the seventh floor. Take your first right and the room will be a few doors down on the left. There may be a security guy at the door – if there is just let him know you are there for the Refresh Pittsburgh meetup.

A HUGE thank-you goes out to our friend Norm Huelsman for offering to host a Refresh meeting at AIP.

Presentations

We’ll be focusing on CMS’s for this meetup – and will be specifically highlighting Drupal, a popular open source CMS and Expression Engine, a non-open source CMS that is really picking up steam lately.

To start the evening, Joshua Powell will be presenting “Drupal: a Content Management Framework”

Josh’s presentation will cover:

• What Drupal Is & What It Isn’t
• Advantages & Disadvantages to Using Drupal
• How to Get Started Using Drupal

Joshua Powell is the designer, developer, and information architect for Developed Simple and is also a senior partner of Billions Now Living.

Next, Patrick Fulton will present “Better Know a CMS: ExpressionEngine”

Pat’s presentation will be a quick intro to ExpressionEngine, a PHP-powered CMS. He’ll discuss some of the positives and the negatives of it as well as why he’s chosen EE over other content management systems for specific projects.

Patrick Fulton is a front-end web developer at Elliance.

Join us this Thursday, September 17th at 7:00 pm for a joint meet-up of Refresh Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Adobe Flash User’s Group.

This month’s meet-up will be at Alphalab – located at 2325 East Carson St. in the Southside. (About a block away from the Doublewide Grill.) Check out some detailed directions.

This month, we’ll be hosting a panel discussion entitled “Flash, What is it Good For? – Where Does Flash fit on the Web?”.

Recently there has been a lot of buzz about the role of Flash online. With some well known Flash shops — like Big Spaceship — opting for a site that’s more blog than Flash and HTML 5 on the horizon there seem to be more and more speculation as to what will be the next Flash killer.  Have the times changed?  Has the Flash microsite been killed by blogs and social media?  What role does Flash play on the web now – especially when dealing with web standards.  Where might it fit in the future?  These are the kinds of questions we’ll be discussing on the panel.

So far, our panelists include:

• Josh Sager, Pittsburgh Technical Institute, joshsagermedia.com
• Jeremy Shank, Artist/Illustrator and Multimedia Designer at Atlas Design Group. jeremyshank.com
• Wayne Lincoln, Interactive Art Director, New Perspective, Adjunct Professor, CMU
• Nathan Peretic, Developer, Full Stop Interactive
• Geoff Barnes, Information Architect at Elliance, Inc.

We may have an additional panelist or two added before the meeting. We’re doing our best to put together a panel with many different opinions in order to have a good discussion.

Val Head, Senior Designer/Developer, New Perspective, Manager, PITTMFUG will be moderating the panel.

Like our last panel discussion, it will help to have some questions in advance. If you would like to submit any questions in advance of the meeting, send them to us at info@refreshpittsburgh.org. It would be a huge help to have a nice pool of questions to pull from in advance.

Feel free to forward this invite to a friend.

As always, please RSVP by sending an email to info@refreshpittsburgh.org or just let us know you are coming on the Facebook event page so we can plan accordingly!

Our next meetup will be Thursday, August 27th at 6:30pm. We’ll be meeting in Room 439 at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. AIP is located downtown at 420 Boulevard of the Allies. We’ll be in room 439. To get there, just take the gold elevator up to the 4th floor. Take your first right and the room will be a few doors down. When you enter the building, there will be a man at the security desk – just let him know you are there for the Refresh Pittsburgh meet-up. A huge thank you goes out to Norm Huelsman at AIP for hosting us!

We have a great evening planned!

Priya Narasimhan, president of Yinzcam will be giving showing off their awesome technology and giving us an in-depth look at what went into producing the Yinzcam!

This talk will discuss YinzCam, an experiential in-stadium technology that was deployed for 40 Pittsburgh Penguins home games for the 2008-9 regular season, the 2009 NHL playoffs and the Stanley Cup Finals. The YinzCam Mobile solution allows fans, right from their seats during the game, to create/view their own instant replays (by rewinding live video — think Tivo on your phone), catch the action from different camera angles (think Crosby-Cam, Malkin-Cam and Bench-Cam for the Penguins), get automated instant replays seconds after a play has happened (from all the different camera angles), and get stats, game rules, roster, etc., all on their own wifi-enabled cellphones, and all without violating broadcast rights. They also provide personalized digital keepsakes for fans on their cellphones, that they can purchase high-resolution prints of (e.g., think of a digital picture keepsake or cellphone wallpaper that shows a fan seeming to appear on the jumbotron). More information is available at yinzcam.com

Priya Narasimhan is the President of YinzCam, Inc. She joined Carnegie Mellon University in 2001, and is currently an Associate Professor of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and Director of Carnegie Mellon’s Mobility Research Center. She has extensive experience in distributed systems, reliability and mobile systems. She was previously the CTO and Vice-President of Engineering at Eternal Systems, Inc., where she was responsible for the company’s overall product strategy and product releases. She has received an Alfred Sloan fellowship, a Carnegie Science Award for Emerging Female Scientist, an NSF CAREER Award, two IBM Faculty Partnership Awards, a Raytheon Company Best Paper Award, an Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teaching Award, amongst other honors. She received her Ph.D. in 1999 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. More information can be found at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~priya.

Next, Jay Fanelli (The Designer) and Nathan Peretic (The Developer), of Full Stop Interactive will present “Quit Your Job: How Two Pittsburgh Web Workers Used Unwavering Principles, Boundless Frustration, and NERF Basketball To Form Their Own Business.”

Jay is the creative muscle behind Full Stop, as well as the primary client and project manager. He’s had success with every flavor of client during his 8 years in the Pittsburgh web industry, from local businesses and private schools to Fortune 500s and major conference universities. Superpowers include: elegant web designs, serious knife skills, and a near encyclopedic knowledge of modern architecture.

Nate is a budding polymath whose day job encompasses advocating for phenomenal user experiences and obsessing over perfectly crafted code. He cites influences ranging from Elliot to McCluhan to Rutledge and intends to use that foundation to make you a better website. Vices include but are not limited to: obscure book references, an unhealthy love of The Office, and Mt. Dew addiction.

Last, but not least, one lucky Refresher will be leaving with 1 ticket of the user’s choosing to this years Flashpitt conference! If you already have a ticket, that’s ok – you can choose a free workshop instead!

As always, please RSVP by sending an email to info@refreshpittsburgh.org or just let us know you are coming on the Facebook event page so we can plan accordingly!

The next Refresh Pittsburgh Meet-up will be on Thursday, February 26th at 7:00 pm. We’ll be at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

AIP is located downtown at 420 Boulevard of the Allies. We’ll be in room 740. Note that this is a different room than our usual one! There may be a security guy at the door – if there is just let him know you are there for the Refresh Pittsburgh meetup.

We’ll be trying a different format for this meeting – we’ll be having our first panel discussion. The topic will be “Surviving a Recession as a Web Professional” it will be moderated by our good pal Geoff Barnes from Elliance.

We are asking that you help us out by submiting questions in advance by emailing me at gjhead@refreshpittsburgh.org. We expect the discussion to take a life of it’s own, but anything questions in advance will help us plan!

We have a good mix of people on the panel:

Lauren DeMichiei is a Project Manager & Designer for her own Orionvega, LLC. Her company is a video, web and print design production house focusing on creative ideas and innovative media to attract and target the desired market. There are 4 partners in the company and 2 part-time employees.

Joshua Powell is the lead senior web developer at PixelTalent. He has been designing and developing websites since 2005. Over the past several years he has worked for and collaborated with architectural & construction companies, automotive organizations, schools, universities, health organizations, pharmaceutical companies, artists, design firms, advertising agencies and photographers. He is proficient in designing and developing solutions in a range of software packages and platforms. Joshua works primarily with open source packages like Drupal and WordPress. He has also create many specialized solutions based on PHP, MySQL, jQuery, XML, Flash, ActionScript and AJAX often combining several of these technologies to fit specific needs.

Joshua worked for Actual Size Creative in Pittsburgh, PA, before striking out on his own forming DevelopedSimple and joining PixelTalent.

Nicholas Zographos is the President of Nezen Creation, LLC. Nezen Creation specializes in custom web application development, including ecommerce, content management systems and online applications using PHP and MySQL. They are also a full service web consultancy, providing web design, marketing, and consulting services to businesses of all sizes.

John R. Carman is a Communication Designer/CEO & Founder of AJAX Street, Inc. John serves as a communication designer and social media consultant for my consulting firm, Avenue Design Studios, as well as co-founder of AJAX Street, a software startup at AlphaLab.

S. Scott Connelly, Freelance Software Engineer/CTO & Founder of AJAX Street, Inc is a freelance software engineer and co-founder of AJAX Street, a software startup at AlphaLab.

As always, please RSVP to gjhead@refreshpittsburgh.orgso we can get a good idea of our headcount! We look forward to seeing you on Thursday!

I’m happy to announce the next Refresh Pittsburgh meet-up is scheduled for Thursday, November 13th at 7:00pm. We have a really awesome lineup and a fantastic speaker from out of town. We’re really proud of the night we have lined up.

This month’s meet-up will be hosted by our friends at AlphaLab. AlphaLab is located at AlphaLab is located at 2325 East Carson Street in the historic Southside neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Click here for a map and directions.

AlphaLab is a catalyst for launching the next generation of software, entertainment technology and Internet-related companies. Created by Innovation Works, one of the nation’s most active seed-stage investors, AlphaLab provides funding, hands-on business assistance, access to a network of entrepreneurs and expert advisors, and free office space as part of an intensive 20-week program in Pittsburgh. AlphaLab helps companies rapidly develop their technology, gain user feedback from early product releases, develop go-to-market strategies, and move toward successful commercial launch.

Presentations

Val Head is a Senior Designer/Developer at New Perspective and is also the brains behind the FlashPitt conference. She’ll be presenting “Observations on Client Relationships and How We Deal with Them”. She’s also provided us with one of the most colorful topic descriptions: The relationship between the designer, or developer, and client can be complicated. They can make you want to dance in the streets, or stab yourself in the eye. Val will talk about some common relationship patterns and how we to make the best of them.

You can read more about Val at her blog thisisportable.com.

Next, we’re really happy to be joined by Samantha Warren. Samantha is a web designer and typophile at Viget Labs, an all inclusive web agency outside of Washington, DC. In addition to being a board member of the Art Directors Club of Washington, DC she also teaches part time at Boston University’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts DC campus. In her spare time she updates her blog BadAssIdeas.com.

Samantha will present “Typography is the Foundation of Good Web Design”. She will illustrate how typographic legibility, hierarchy, and expression contribute to the success of a design through a step by step web-site redesign.

You can find out more about Samantha and the cool work she does at her blog BadAssIdeas.com as well as the Viget Inspire blog.

Please RSVP!!

As usual, please RSVP to info@refreshpittsburgh.org so that we have a good idea of our headcount. It’s especially important for this meet-up as I need to get a headcount to AlphaLab a day in advance.

Hi everyone! I’m happy to announce the next Refresh Pittsburgh meet-up is scheduled for Wednesday, October 8th at 7:00pm. Like our last meet-up, This month’s meeting will be downtown at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

AIP is located downtown at 420 Boulevard of the Allies. We’ll be in room 440. Take the gold elevator up to the fourth floor. Take your first right and the room will be a few doors down on the left. There may be a security guy at the door – if there is just let him know you are there for the Refresh Pittsburgh meetup.

A HUGE thank-you goes out to our friend Norm Huelsman for offering to host a Refresh meeting at AIP.

Presentations

We have three presentation on tap for this one:

Michael Fulk is a an interactive developer at Wall to Wall and also does freelance work as Future Designs. He’ll be presenting “Bending the Pipes” – which will give us a crash course on making mashups, feeds and recombining web content with Yahoo Pipes and Dapper.

Next, Olivia Blonde is a web designer at the University of Pittsburgh and previous worked at the Carnegie Libraries where she was responsible for the redesign of the Carnegie Library website. She’ll present “Design Process in a Nutshell”. Each designer — or design group — develops a method for solving problems, then evolves that method over time. While no one person or group may view a problem from the same perspective, general similarities often appear in their approach. Olivia’s presentation will take us from requirements to concepts to design and to hand off.

Finally, Isaac Gierard, a new media developer at Elliance with be showing off a recent project of his, a “CSS Combiner”. Isaac will give a brief introduction to a recently developed open source CSS preprocessor for combining multiple CSS files into on and it’s benefits for website performance.

Also, we’ll be giving away one free pass to the Flashpitt conference taking place the following Friday!

Please RSVP!!

As usual, please RSVP to info@refreshpittsburgh.org so that we have a good idea of our headcount. I’ll make sure to bring the usual cookies and coffee too.

the next Refresh Pittsburgh meet-up is scheduled for Wednesday, July 16th at 7:00pm. This month’s meeting will be downtown at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

Did you catch that? Let’s make sure you read that again: This month’s meeting is at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh – no Treehouse this month!

AIP is located downtown at 420 Boulevard of the Allies. We’ll be in room 440. Take the gold elevator up to the fourth floor. Take your first right and the room will be a few doors down on the left. There may be a security guy at the door – if there is just let him know you are there for the Refresh Pittsburgh meet-up.

A HUGE thank-you goes out to our friend Norm Huelsman for offering to host a Refresh meeting at AIP.

Presentations

We have a really cool lineup for this month’s meeting. Here is what you can expect:

Nathan Swartz of clicknathan and is one of those freelance web designer-types living and breathing in Pittsburgh, PA. When not indenting <p> tags or cursing IE6, he likes long walks through the city with his son and wife or enjoying summer afternoons at the Harris Grill in Shadyside. On Wednesday night, Nathan will be sharing some of the lesson’s he’s learned from being a full-time freelancer in “How to Work from Your Underwear: Some Freelancing Tips for Web Designers“. You can find out more about Nathan at his blog or a recent feature on freelance switch.

Jonathan Brodsky graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 2005 with a degree in design. He now spends his days working on web development, and nights as a musician and artist. Jon will be showing tools for programmers to improvise live music and visuals using text editors and code as their instruments. This practice, generally referred to as “livecoding”, is about exposing the audience to the mechanics of a computer based performance. He’ll also give a demo of a livecoding tool that he is developing in javascript and openGL. Read more about Jon at his website.

Finally, Geoff Barnes is currently the Senior Information Architect at Elliance, Inc., a Pittsburgh-based e-marketing agency. From 2005-2007, Geoff was the UI Engineer for Collaborative Fusion, a Pittsburgh-based consultancy to state and federal emergency management authorities. Geoff has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Oregon. In 1999, Geoff co-founded San Francisco web firm Trendmedia, Inc., and came to Pittsburgh in 2001 to help create the Media Arts BFA at Robert Morris University, where he served as a full-time faculty member until 2005.

Geoff will present “What Purpose IA?”. What is the purpose of a marketing website? While marketing websites are more application-inclusive than ever, the fundamental marketing task of persuasion is still the purpose nexus of any marketing-driven website. The site’s IA needs to go beyond content organization, and embody the persuasive goals driving the project. The difference between creating systematic order and creating a systematically ordered, compelling argument is often the difference between a me-too site and a persuasion machine. Learn how to protect your client’s marketing objectives with purpose-driven discovery and IA.

Please RSVP!!

We think we have a great lineup for the next meeting and we’re really looking forward to it.

As usual, please RSVP to info@refreshpittsburgh.org so that we have a good idea of our headcount. I’ll make sure to bring the usual cookies and coffee too.

With the Easter holiday arriving a bit early this year, it’s resulting in scheduling the next Refresh Pittsburgh meeting one week later than usual. Our next meeting will at 7:00 pm on Tuesday, April 1st at the Creative Treehouse in Bellevue.

To start the evening, Pat Collins will present “CakePHP: Rapid Application Development with PHP”.

Why learn a new programming language when you can use your existing PHP skills to become a better coder and increase your productivity? Let Pat show you how to build a blog application in no time, and how you can help!

Then, Val Head will be presenting “A, B, C, D-esign!“

Val’s presentation will be a discussion of the basic building blocks of design as they apply to designing fo the web. She’ll show examples of concepts like colour, typography and hierarchy and talk about how these fit in to a web page design.

As usual, if you would like to show off a recent project or pose a few questions to our group, please let us know and we’ll fit you in.

We’ll make sure to provide a good supply of coffee and cookies and other sweets to get you through the night.

RSVP

Please RSVP to info at refreshpittsburgh dot org, to let us know if you will be joining us. We need to make sure we have enough seats and most importantly, coffee and cookies! And by all means, please pass this invite around.

Directions

To get to the Creative Treehouse, please visit our directions page. It’s a very short drive. If anyone needs a ride or has some extra room in their car, please post on our message board to connect with some other folks.

It’s time to kick off the new year for Refresh Pittsburgh. We’re excited about some of the topics we have lined up, and we’re going to jump right in with our next meet-up.

Our next meeting will at 7:00 pm on Tuesday, February 26 at the Creative Treehouse in Bellevue.

Cynthia Closkey from Big Big Design will be presenting “Google-Friendly Blogging in Five Easy Steps.” She’ll be discussing basic search engine optimization for WordPress — and by extension, other blog tools. There are lots of misconceptions about SEO in the first place, and there are some simple steps one can take to improve one’s search ranking.

Next, Jeff Hunter, organizer of Devhouse Pittsburgh will be presenting introduction to Ruby. Jeff will show us what it is, why you may want to consider using it for your next project. When I asked Jeff if was interesting in presenting, I asked him to explain “What the heck is ruby and why do I keep hearing about it (and why do people yell at me when I confuse ruby and ruby on rails?!?)” So you can expect to get answers to those questions too!

Our friends at O’ Reilly Publishing have provided us with a few Ruby books as giveaways for the night as well.

Finally, if anyone would like to show off a recent project or pose a few questions to our group, please drop me line!

As usual, we should have a good supply of coffee and cookies and other sweets to get you through the night. Depending out what time we wrap up, we can try to take the conversation down to Affagoto’s.

RSVP

Please RSVP to let us know if you will be joining us. I need to make sure we have enough seats and most importantly, coffee!

Our next meeting will at 7:00 pm on Tuesday, December 11th at the Creative Treehouse in Bellevue.

We currently have 2 presentations for the evening:

First, Jason Head will be presenting “10 Ways to Provide Top-Notch SEO Without Doing any Extra Work!”^* Clients are always asking “how can I make it into the search engines”.  I’ll show you how you can get results for your client by following rules of web standards, good design and taking advantage of one or two free tools along the way.

(* Well, maybe a little bit of work…)

Next, Founding Developer and CEO of JoinSources, LLC, Don Charlton will be joining us to show a very impressive project he has been working on here in Pittsburgh: Join Sources. For his presentation, “Let’s JoinSources and Conquer Web Content” Don demos a new Web-based CMS meant to equally empower Web site developers, designers and their clients. They’re also giving away free hosting and CMS usage to 50 JoinSources recruits who develop a site on the beta platform.

I’ve seen a preview of the CMS and it’s a sharp product. While it’s always nice to see a creative and useful product developed in our own community, it’s even better when it’s something that we all may be able to put to great use. If you run a small business or do a good deal of freelance web-site work, you should make an effort to check this one out!

Finally, we would like to add an additional short presentation for the evening. If you would like to present on a topic or show off a recent project, please drop me a line!

As usual, we should have a good supply of coffee and cookies and other sweets to get you through the night. Also, if anyone would like to stick around after the meeting and take the conversation down to Affagoto’s that would be a good deal too!

Please RSVP to let us know if you will be joining us. I need to make sure we have enough seats and most importantly, coffee! And by all means, please pass the word along about our next meeting.