Refresh

3 Presentations with a Monkey (Ann Arbor, MI, USA)

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 by Dan Cooney

May’s Refresh Detroit meeting will be on the 21st, from 6:30 to 8:30 at the downtown Ann Arbor District library in Ann Arbor. Map to the location.

SPONSORED BY YAHOO SEARCH MONKEY DEVELOPER PREVIEW

TOPIC: There will be a few quick presentations by members of our great group, and general discussion on the latest news, challenges, projects, and ideas that the group members have encountered in their web related occupations/hobbies/activities.

The event like always is free to anyone who is interested.

The current speakers will be:

Nick DeNardis
Designer of the Wayne State University Library and Information Science website. He will discuss the latest release of the website, their goals, process and challenges.

Brian Kerr
Information architecture, user experience, and django development guru. Exact topic details to come…

Paul Tarjan - Yahoo! SearchMonkey
The fine folks at Yahoo! are sponsoring this event and promise to bring lots of swag as well as give a short presentation on their new open source semantic web search in your own applications and websites. This new product they are releasing is called “Search Monkey” and you can read more at:

http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000523.html
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/24/yahoo-open-search-platform-launches-into-private-beta/
http://searchengineland.com/080424-113600.php

Posted in Ann Arbor, MI, USA | Calendar | Local meeting | Refresh
Tags: refresh detroit
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Refresh Pittsburgh Meeting (Pittsburgh, PA)

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 by Michele Marut

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.

Please RSVP 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 forward this invitation to anyone you like.

For detailed information: http://www.refreshpittsburgh.org/

Posted in Calendar | Pittsburgh, PA, USA | Refresh
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Refresh Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA)

Friday, February 15th, 2008 by Michele Marut

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 Closky 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.

Please RSVP to info@refreshpittsburgh.org

Posted in Calendar | Local meeting | Pittsburgh, PA, USA | Refresh
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Live Web Site Evaluations (Livonia, MI, USA)

Friday, January 11th, 2008 by Anthony Viviano

The Michigan Usability Professionals’ Association, Refresh Detroit, and Perficient, Inc. team up for “Live Web Site Evaluations: Branding, Message, Content, and Usability.”

Why is Web site usability important? When have we adequately translated the brand image to a Web site? How clear is the marketing message? Let Dave Mitropoulos-Rundus help you count the ways in an informative and entertaining way. Come and experience live evaluations of a number of web sites that have been submitted by attendees. This session provides you with a rare opportunity to see it live, experience the interactions with the stakeholders and designers, and, time and bandwidth permitting, discuss YOUR site directly with Dave.

Call it ‘extreme UX’… call it what you will. This interactive session will reveal both areas of excellence and opportunities for improvement, and it will focus attendees on what’s important for design or improvement of the web sites they are responsible for. Attendees will walk away with a clear understanding of what constitutes user experience issues and roadblocks. They will immediately learn about redesign options that may fix, improve, or enhance each web site experience.

Dave began conducting these sessions in 2005 and continues to do them several times each year. This session, as all previous ones, will cover a new set of web sites based on attendee submissions.

Giving back to the community: Dave will be focusing this evening session primarily on web sites for non-profit organizations.

See Michigan UPA for more information.

Posted in Calendar | Detroit, MI, USA | Local meeting | Refresh | UPA
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Refresh Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA)

Friday, December 7th, 2007 by Michele Marut

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

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 this 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.

More information about this event is at refreshpittsburgh.org.

Posted in Calendar | Local meeting | Pittsburgh, PA, USA | Refresh
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World Usability Day Seattle 2007

Friday, November 2nd, 2007 by Digital Web Join us in raising awareness of usability around the world in our second annual World Usability Day Seattle. This year the event has grown to include usability lab tours, a networking event, lectures, and a social at the end of the event. All events will be held in the Electrical Engineering Building (EEB) in room 125 unless otherwise specified. Tours of the usability lab are first come first serve and are limited to 10 people per tour. If you wish to take a lab tour please see the URL linked from this event posting to sign up. Special thanks to our sponsors for World Usability Day Seattle 2007; ASIS&T pacific northwest chapter, ASIS&T UW student chapter, Refresh Seattle, Puget Sound SIGCHI, STC Puget Sound chapter, UPA Seattle, UXnet, Anthro-Tech, Blue Flavor, Deaton Interactive Design, Digital Web Magazine, UW’s Technical Communications department, and ZAAZ. Speakers: Emma Rose, Jason Fouts, Nick Finck, Kelly Franznick, Lana Carlene, Gabriel Shirley and more! November 08, 2007 in Seattle, WA @ University of Washington, EE1-125

Posted in Refresh | Seattle, WA, USA
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Refresh Seattle: The Full Stack: Reevaluating the “Layers” of Web Development

Monday, October 29th, 2007 by Nick Finck

Web Standards advocates often talk about the three “layers” of web development: Structure (markup), Presentation (CSS), and Behavior (JavaScript). This view, however, cuts out the backend of things, and may be a bit shortsighted. Is your markup really where your content’s structure comes from? Can markup really be completely separate from presentation? Is CSS really the only method for presentation? And how does context play into all of this?Jeff Croft will discuss what happens to the academic three layers when web development happens in the real world.

See more details at RefreshSeattle.org

Posted in Calendar | Refresh | Seattle, WA, USA
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Refresh the Triangle

Thursday, October 25th, 2007 by abetriux

Refresh the Triangle …

is a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavors in their areas. Promoting design, technology, usability, and standards.

Posted in Raleigh, NC, USA | Refresh
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Welcome to Albuquerque

Sunday, September 9th, 2007 by Keith Instone

Albuquerque, New Mexico is located in central New Mexico in the Southwest U.S. about 8 hours by car from both Denver, Colorado and Phoenix, Arizona. Two national laboratories are located in New Mexico - Sandia National Labs, operated by the Department of Energy and Los Alamos National Labs. There are many companies located in Albuquerque that are building on technology originally conceived of at the national labs.

Over the past two years, I have been building the web community in Albuquerque through events such as BarCamps, Lunch & Learn’s and a series of Web Manager’s Round Table discussions. We are primarily focused on web - both interaction design and user experience design. We have worked with the Albuquerque chapter of the Society for Technical Communication to raise awareness of user experience and trends in design and technology. We have also facilitated a design slam with the University of New Mexico Media Arts Lab. Refresh Albuquerque is also an active UX-related local group.

Christopher Rivard, Albuquerque Local Ambassador
Clearwired

Posted in Albuquerque, NM, USA | Refresh
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