Refresh the Triangle

Refresh 003 — Lightning Sessions

Durham, NC — Thurs, Jan 24, 2008, 6:30-8:00PM

Starting in 2008, we’ll be using the first monthly meeting of each quarter for “lightning sessions”. Think of this meeting type as a 1.5 hour BarCamp or similar event where members shape the outcome, and the approach toward sharing and discussing is rapid fire. The meeting will consist of 5 predetermined presenters each facilitating a 10 minute lightning session on a predetermined topic. Topics will be a mix of web design, dev, and technology. So for the January meeting, we’re looking for 5 topics and 5 presenters. Please share comments on topic ideas and/or express your willingness to lead a session.

As popular topics become apparent through the comments and presenters attach themselves to topics, finalized presenters and topics will be added here:
1) Twitter for Fun and Profit, Wayne Sutton
2) How’s Haml?, Patrick Reagan
3) Simple Gimp, Joshua Vickery
4) Google Map API Tutorial Primer, Peyton Crump
5) Evaluating Drupal, Julia Kulla-Mader

Location:

Bronto Software, Inc.
Washington Building
324 Blackwell Street
Suite 410
Durham, NC 27701

Integrating with Facebook/myspace/social networking site of the day might be a good one. Not that I’m fit to be the one discussing it.

adam

"Twitter for Fun and Profit”—Wayne Sutton chatted with myself and James Burka about this after the last RFTT and somehow managed to convince me to sign up for Twitter (sssh, don’t tell anyone).

“Haml—Development tool for Rails Designers?”—I don’t know about this one, but Haml (http://haml.hamptoncatlin.com/) is a pretty cool way to write HTML, it sure beats any other form of hand coding that I’ve seen.  How many web designers write HTML?  Is Haml a better way?  Can it work out for non-Ruby development?

I like the direction for the upcoming Refresh 003 meeting. Suggested topics:

“Customizing Wordpress for building a community”

“Online Tools for Video conversion and blogging”

Welcome to the Twitter party Josh, add me www.twitter.com/waynesutton, lol

I like the idea of having a session on using Twitter and other tools for fun and profit.

If you are interested in going the CMS to build communities direction, it might be cool to have a CMS faceoff. You could have someone speak about Expression Engine, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla and a customized Rails approach. I volunteer for the Drupal part.

I’ll do a session or sessions on:

“Twitter for Fun and Profit”

“Customizing Wordpress for building a community using openid & social commenting sites”

Let’s do “Online Tools for Video conversion and blogging” another time but it’s up to the attendees

Looking foward to the meetup.

Wayne

Even though I’m a non-local, and was only there the first time, here are some thoughts I have for things I could talk about and/or would like to see ten minutes on:

- 10 things you need to know to take your site mobile.
- Why your users hate your forms (cognitive load-oriented stuff)
- Finding Design Inspiration
- What is a Widget? Do people really use them?
- What is Django?
- Intro to Open ID
- Machine Tags on Flickr
- Microformats
- Curing the ramp-up problem: leveraging social networks
- Avoiding WYSIWYG Editors: Markdown and other markup shortcuts

I’ll post more if I think of them.

Cheers,
Jackson

Overview of some of the Google Maps API tutorials that are available or diving in deeper to a single tutorial.

Having sessions on Google Map API tutorials sounds great.

Making web buttons and logos with the gimp?

Linux geeks, non-designers and cheapskates don’t always have a copy of Photoshop at their disposal yet often feel the need to create web graphics.

Falling squarely into all three of the above categories I’ve turned to the gimp for some of my web graphic needs and have been pleasantly surprised.

I’m no expert, but I would be happy to share on simple topics like basic gimp navigation, making things shiny, adding shadows, drawing things and slicing backgrounds.

Enjoyed Refresh tonight, if you missed it the live stream can be viewed here:

http://ustream.tv/recorded/E9eze8GPGmq4fXXe4NHHucY9pAe0ypdI

Wayne, thanks for recording that. And thanks to everyone else for showing up. We had great turn out; from my quick count it was about 35 people. Great presentations all around as well!

What a fun night, my hat is off to the other presenters!

My slides from the night are up at http://vickeryj.com/rftt_gimp/.

Thanks to all the presenters for such a great tips and Viget/Bronto for organizing such a well-run event!

My slides can be found at:
http://tinyurl.com/3dt49p

I’m working on turning the first draft of my presentation, an overview of how to create a Google map mashup with Drupal, into a tutorial and will post a link here when I’m done.

My presentation on twitter for fun and profit can be seen here: http://www.slideshare.net/waynesutton/wayne-sutton-twitter-for-fun-and-profit

The ‘Google Maps API Tutorial Primer’ can be found here.