Details: Tuesday February 16, 2010 at BBC Taproom downtown from 7pm until whenever. Mission Data will be sponsoring February’s Refresh Louisville and providing some snacks and drinks as well!

I’m sure there are any number of other things going on that night but working around people’s schedules is part of the reason that we took such a long break from organizing meetings. So, 3rd Tuesday of the month it is. If you can’t make it because of other engagements, we’ll miss you. I will say however if enough people request changing to say some other consistent day/date, I’d be okay adjusting in that regard. I just want to keep things consistent so less work is required each and every month to “run” this thing.

We’re really looking forward to catching up with everyone, talking about what happened in 2009, what’s on the horizon for 2010 and hopefully some focused discussions about at least a few topics that the community is interested in. Hope to see you in 2 weeks!

PS, make sure you Follow us on the Twitters, join the facebook group and generally spread some love for the group to your friends and coworkers. kthxbye.

Sent from my iPad

We mix it up this month at Refresh Louisville with 2 presentations, each having nothing to do with the other. That’s how we roll. First up is yours truly speaking and presenting about version control, specifically Subversion. Followed by David Yeiser with a discussion about Processing.js, an open programming language to program images, animation, and interactions for the web without using Flash or Java applets.

I’m very excited to also announce that the kind folks from AdaptiveBlue have provided us with some swag to give away at this month’s meeting! AdaptiveBlue are the talented folks behind Glue, the free browser plugin that helps you automatically find books, music, and movies through your friends as you browse popular sites. I’ll give a very brief demo of the software to show our appreciation for our sponsor. Stickers provided for everyone (first come first serve) and we have 3 Tees to be randomly awarded to attendees. Be sure to wear your lucky dungarees!

This month we’ll be sharing information and presentations at the Buffalo Wild Wings at Springhurst on Tuesday July 28th at 7pm. Following the presentations we’ll have followup discussions, Q&A, and general discussions about all things web. We look forward to hopefully seeing some new faces and growing our group. Follow us on Twitter, join the facebook group, visit the forums and generally spread the word.

At the last Refresh Meeting on June 30th I talked pretty extensively to a small handful of people at the BBC Taproom downtown about my journeys to An Event Apart in Boston in late June and also a tiny bit about Facebook Connect. It was really nice and I want to extend a thanks to all those who attended and suffered through my unprepared ramblings.

For those who did attend, there were some sites, concepts, technologies, presenters and presentations that I mentioned that people had not heard of previously. Here are some links to the topics I covered:

An Event Apart Presenters

Jared Spool

• Find Jared on Twitter & on the web
• Presentation: Revealing Design Treasures From The Amazon. View Slideshare Presentation. Listen Online.

Scott Thomas {aka Simplescott}

• Find Scott on Twitter & on the web
• Presentation: Change the World (Wide Web). Scott did not post his presentation to Slideshare like some of the other presenters, if you’re interested in seeing his presentation, DM me on Twitter.

Whitney Hess

• Find Whitney on Twitter & on the web
• Presentation: DIY UX: Give Your Users an Upgrade (without calling in a pro). View Slideshare Presentation.

Web-based Software

• Harvest: Simple Online Time Tracking, Timesheet and Reporting Software
• Userfly: Web usability testing made easy
• Huffduffer: Create your own podcast
• Google Website Optimizer: Create multiple versions of a page to test how different users interact with each (as used by makers of Harvest)
• Crazy Egg: Visualize Your Visitors

Miscellaneous Mentions

• Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz
• Book by Joshua Porter: Designing for the Social Web (Voices That Matter)
• Voyager Golden Record

If you’re looking for some in depth coverage of An Event Apart Boston 2009, check out these LiveBlogging notes from Jeremy Keith and this recap blog post from Nick Sergeant.

Don’t forget, the most important lesson we all learned, 3.5″ floppy disks were made that size to fit in a man’s shirt pocket. See you in July!

It’s been a busy month and some of the resources that have been helping me organize have been out of commission this month and so here we stand. It’s now June 29th and I still don’t have a venue to meet at to give any kind of presentation and most people aren’t even aware that we’re still meeting this month. Sincere apologies. I’ll work harder and plan better for July, promise.

For June, I propose this: we meet at The BBC Taproom on 636 E. Main St. Louisville, KY 40202 tomorrow, June 30th, at 7pm for drinks and discussion. I recently attended An Event Apart in Boston, and would be happy to discuss some things I learned, review some of the presentations, discuss the conference in general for those who’ve not attended, etc. So, I’m not forcing the discussion down this path but offering up the opportunity as a conciliation if anyone is interested.

So, join us on Tuesday June 30th at the BBC Taproom Downtown at 7pm if you can. Look forward to hopefully seeing some new faces and growing our group. Follow us on Twitter, join the facebook group, visit the forums and generally spread some love for the group to your friends, foes, coworkers, brothers & sisters, grandparents, local legislators, etc. Cheers.

Part of the purpose of this group is to socialize, network and discuss the things we love and hate about working on the web. This month, we’ll open things up for a strictly social gathering over the drink of your choice at the BBC Taproom, downtown.

Presenters are certainly welcome with at least 24 hour notice, but none have been scheduled at the time of this posting. If you’re interested, please add a post in the May Meeting forum topic for discussion by the group.

I would also like to take this opportunity to throw out a big thanks to Bryan Volz for his generous donation on behalf of Louisville Web Group. We’re always looking for sponsors to chip in to help keep our events going. Thank Bryan if you see him. Also, big thanks to the BBC Taproom for putting up with us again this month. Be sure to tip your bartender Rob well, he’s a good man, and thorough.

So, join us on Wednesday May 27th at the BBC Taproom downtown at 7pm. Look forward to meeting more folks and catching some familiar faces. Follow us on Twitter, join the facebook group and generally spread some love for the group to your friends and coworkers. Yes, this is the same paragraph from the last meeting post, and I intend to use it over and over again. k?thx.

Those of us who design and develop on the web typically have a deep hatred for browsers that don’t follow or respect web standards. For many of us today, the most common culprit is Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6 and even version 7. Many discussions have been had over this very topic, and how we as web professionals work with or against such issues that plague our work.

Dennis Sheridan did the initial build of the Refresh Louisville website. It is a masterpiece of XHTML, CSS and DOM Scripting, as all of his work is. Dennis applied the proper CSS techniques and tricks to tackle non-standards compliant browsers to ensure that the design I created was intact on those browsers that were inferior as well, as is common practice. Thanks for all the hard work Dennis.

Now comes the exciting but painful low blow where I say that I have ignored all the work that Dennis put into these tasks and completely removed styling for Internet Explorer, versions 6 & 7 on refreshlouisville.org. At this point, I’m giving IE8 the benefit of the doubt, but ultimately, I just haven’t done enough research on the state of IE8 and compliance to make a call. Although, development efforts like this don’t leave me hopeful.

It is likely hard if not impossible for most of us in our work lives, personal sites or anywhere else to make such a shift, however Refresh aims to educate and deliver on our promises and goals, so I’ve made this small step in an effort to back that up. For those of you not in the previous discussion, it’s worth mentioning the idea came from a blog post from Dan Cederholm a few months ago.

For those interested, here is the code used to achieve the stylesheet switch:

<!--[if gte IE 8]><!-->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<!--<![endif]-->


For those folks visiting the site with one of the offending browsers, they get a polite but direct message about our position:

<?php
if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE 6.0') || strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE 7.0')!== FALSE) {
echo '<div id="notice"><br />We at Refresh &hearts; Standards-Compliant Web Browsers like <a href="http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/">Firefox</a>, <a href="http://www.apple.com/safari/">Safari</a>, <a href="http://caminobrowser.org/">Camino</a> and <a href="http://www.opera.com/">Opera</a>. To view this site as the designer intended, please upgrade your web browser won't you?</div>';
}
?>


So here’s to small steps and the ability to educate those around us.
*Raises glass*

Update: In response to Andy Clarke’s solution to this “problem”, I’ve implemented the Universal IE6 CSS found at Google Code. I think this is a great enhancement of the previous solution.

This month we’ll be discussing content management systems at Refresh Louisville. Most of us have come in contact with, if not interface every day with CMSs in one form or another. There are countless solutions out there for nearly every type of project. Many of us have become intimate, yes intimate, with at least a few and some of us have even built these types of systems before. We’ll touch on a few solutions and discuss anything relevant to the world of content management systems.

Aaron Boeving, Creative Director for Clear Function will be discussing and providing a demo of their CMS, Reflect. We’ll continue with more informal discussion around the general topic and whatever else comes up after Aaron’s presentation.

If anyone would like to present or have specific topics they’d like to discuss please speak up. All are welcome to participate and no presentations or multimedia are required, just bring your thoughts if you’d like.

Join us on Thursday April 16th at the BBC Taproom downtown at 7pm. Look forward to hopefully seeing everyone who turned out the past 2 months and growing our group. Follow us on Twitter, join the facebook group and generally spread some love for the group to your friends and coworkers.

Our second “Fresh-up” is centered around the process that goes into building a website. Process is near impossible to perfect as it likely changes with every new experience. The tried and the true often only stay that way for short amounts of time as we are enlightened to new ideas and better ways of thinking.

A few local professionals will be speaking about their design and development process in hopes of us all learning a few new techniques and ideas. David Yeiser will be speaking about his process when he embarks on a website design. I will be covering some of the web-based tools we use in our process in hopes of exposing a few new products on people, many of them free or in Beta. Thommy Browne will be speaking some about the process that goes into web design and production at PCUSA which is likely to be a very unique exposure to the way design happens inside internal companies.

If anyone would like to present or discuss please speak up. All are welcome to participate and no presentations or multimedia are required, just bring your thoughts if you’d like.

Join us on Tuesday March 24th at the Buffalo Wild Wings @ Springhurst at 7pm. Look forward to hopefully seeing everyone who turned out last month and growing our group. Follow us on Twitter, join the facebook group and generally spread some love for the group to your friends and coworkers.

We are a different breed. Every day we use the internet to communicate to people in unique and ever changing ways. What yesterday offered us, tomorrow will use to rethink, rebuild, re-engineer and refresh what we know. In this regard, it’s time we had a place to gather and discuss the industry of web design and development exclusively.

Refresh Louisville is seated to help us grow as a community and as individuals in this field. We will come together to discuss our work, our views, as well as our hopes and fears. The Refresh idea has been adopted for Louisville and our surrounding areas by way of the Refreshing Cities movement.

We (Deanna Mitchell, Dennis Sheridan and Todd Budnikas) started this project in June of 2007 after becoming aware of the Refresh concept. It was intriguing in that there was no one person to carry the weight of the group, but also no fees, nor guidelines to follow. The group sustains itself on passion for what we do every day, not because we need to get our money’s worth.

As I’ve been telling people, the beauty of Refresh is that there is no rule book. There is no governing body and the members of the community help define the group more than any administrator or facilitator. That means we need participation. Much of the focus of this community will be around monthly gatherings, the first of which will be on Tuesday February 17th at 7:00pm. We’ll gather at the BBC Taproom on 636 E. Main St. Louisville, KY 40202. Please RSVP for the event if you plan to come.

In the meantime have a quick look around the site. Visit the forums, join our Facebook group, create an account for the site, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to the feed and generally spread the word that we’re here, and we’re ready to party. As we grow in number, the more networking, information, ideas and fun we can have here locally, without always turning to virtual communities the better.

I’m proud to be a part of this and I hope you will join us.