Refresh Pittsburgh

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.

Flashpitt is a one-day conference for multimedia designers, developers, and artists.  It will be held on Friday, October 10th, 2008.

It’s the first event of it’s kind in the Pittsburgh area.  National and international industry leaders will be present to share inside tips, new technologies and behind the scenes looks to Flashpitt’s attendees.  This event is not just for Flash developers; we have sessions for Designers, Web Developers and Students just starting out in the industry, too.

Usually, events like this are held in other cities, such as Chicago, New York, Boston, DC and other places.  Flashpitt is a conference based in Pittsburgh and hopes to become an annual event.  An impressive list of speakers are lined up and the schedule has something for everyone and consists of two tracks of sessions which will run from 9am until about 6pm.  (We’re particularly excited to see Dan Mall from Happy Cog!)

For more information and to purchase a ticket, please visit flashpitt.com.  We’re really looking forward to the conference and are very excited to help put on an event of this calabre here in Pittsburgh.  Please check out the schedule and join us on October 10th!

Norm Huelsman was kind enough to send me a link to a video of Jonathan Brodsky’s “live coding” demonstration from the last Refresh Pittsburgh meet-up.

For those who were unable to make the meet-up, “live coding” is about exposing the audience to the mechanics of a computer based performance.  Jon served up a small example of this at the last meet-up which you can in Norm’s video:

On a side note – I need to get one of these Flip-Cams!  It would be great to add more videos like this to the site in the future!

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.

Tonight, we debuted the Refresh Pittsburgh  Job Board.

We’re partnered with Jobamatic to offer our users a comprehensive listing of web design and development related position in the Western Pennsylvania area.

If you are a company looking to hire, the Refresh Pittsburgh job board will give you access to the largest web development users group in the area – and you’ll be reaching some of the most talented people in the Western Pennsylvania.

Job listings are only $25 for 30 days.

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.

Our next meeting will at 7:00 pm on Wednesday, October 24th at the Creative Treehouse in Bellevue.

We currently have 2 presentations for the evening:

First, our good pal Josh Sager will be making a presentation titled “Rapid Design Techniques in Fireworks that make PhotoShop Jealous”. Rapidly create mock ups for web content with Fireworks CS3. Learn time saving tips for organizing multi version designs, reusable layout elements, generating web prototypes with only a few clicks, and easy integration with Adobe Flex.

Next, Val Head and Joe Kromer will be making a dual presentation on two new web technologies: “Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight. What are they and why should you care?”.

Joe and Val’s presentation will give you an overview of what each of these technologies are and talk about what impacts they’ve had on our industry so far. Then they will discuss their opinions — and hopefully some of yours as well — as to how these might impact you and your work in the near future.

Also, now that it’s nice and cool, we don’t expect to need nearly as many fans as we had at the last meeting! In fact, I’ll be providing some tasty hot coffee this time!

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.

If you will be attending, please RSVP to info@refreshpittsburgh.org by October 23rd, so we have a good idea of how many attendees to expect. And by all means, please foward this invitation to anyone you like.

A reminder to all our members that this weekend is the 24 Hour Creative Marathon organized by our good buddy Josh Sager.  Some of you may remember Josh when he gave a great presentation on producing a web comic at our first meeting.

The 24 Hour Creative Marathon is a two-part event, beginning with a 24-hour artistic marathon and culminating in a gallery show and sale the following day. Beginning Friday, September 28th, at 8pm, artists will have 24 hours to create a piece of work pertaining to the theme “Lost and Found.” Registration is FREE for marathon participation.

It’s shaping up to be a really cool event for both makers of art and fans of art.  Visit the website for more information on how you can participate.

On a personal note, one of my door-shifts is late Friday night, so feel free to come out and talk about Refresh and maybe, um, bring some coffee!