Refresh the Triangle

Monday, April 28, 2008

006 Meeting Recap

Refresh 006 was a major success. Nathan Huening from OnWired gave a great talk called “Dr. jQuery (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DOM),” and his passion for the material was evident. In a series of increasingly complex examples, Nathan showed off the power and simplicity of the jQuery JavaScript library. He demonstrated that most of jQuery can be reduced to “grab things, do stuff,” starting with simple CSS modifications and moving to AJAX, animation, and custom functionality.

To get a good taste of the presentation, you can use FireBug to run Nathan’s sample code against the demo page he set up. You’ll want to be running FireFox 2, as FF3 Beta 5 gave me a lot of grief while I tried to follow Nathan’s examples.

Big thanks to Nathan and to Duke’s Blackwell Interactive for hosting the event, as well as to everyone who came out; maybe we’ve got you pictured on our Flickr page.

Hope to see you next month.

Friday, March 28, 2008

005 Meeting Recap

The laid back, free-form approach to the meeting was sincerely enjoyable and on spot. Thanks to Ogilvy and specifically to Callie, Noah, Chris, and Kendall for making it all happen. If you missed the meeting but have the chance later, make a reason to head over to Ogilvy for a visit — awesome people, immaculate space, and a ton of engaging work. There was no lack of sharing either — thanks to everyone for being plugged in and willing to speak up. If you’re looking to catch up on what went on, here’s the flow:

• 30 minutes of conversation, seen here
• Noah on Ogilvy Durham, what they’re about, their philosophy, the “Big Ideal”, and a cool project
• Peyton with some smaller points from a larger overview on Mobile Web Book, thoughts on the local Edward Tufte course, and the new Viget site and blogging strategy
• Rolf with a Shoeboxed update and a call for the motivated
• Mike on Carrot2, asides on Clusty and Solr, and some interesting points on clustering
• Clinton on GitHub, a distributed version control system, and his contribution
• David with a live coding demo on REST and Curl
• Nathan on Acid 2 and Acid 3, a cool related milestone, and some live photos
• Adam on the Email Standards Project and the Email Acid Test
• Wayne on looking ahead to BarCamp RDU and a reminder to keep up via Social Carolina
• Jackson with props to MuxTape
• Nick on the very handy Skitch
• Drinks and conversing outdoors at Alivia’s after the meeting

See you next month, and thanks for blogging, tweeting, etc about Refresh the Triangle. The word’s getting out and cool things are happening.