As I posted today on the Twitter I also feel like there might be a shift coming for Refresh. Would be happy to discuss with people if they are interested. I haven’t yet contacted the Build Guild to see what it takes to become a “chapter” but by our meeting next week hopefully I’ll have more info.

Details: Tuesday July 20, 2010 at BBC Taproom downtown from 7pm until whenever. A huge thanks as always to Mission Data who will once again be our sponsor. If you’re interested in sponsorship please let us know.

Our current scheduling plan is to hold Refresh on the 3rd Tuesday of the month downtown at the BBC Taproom. If you can’t make it because of other engagements or conflicts, we’ll miss you greatly and hope to see you next month.

PS, be sure to Follow us on the Twitters, join the facebook group and generally spread the word to those around you.

We can also talk about the life of a designer and developer working in closed versus open environments and what it means and takes to design for the mobile devices of today. I think it would be cool for everyone who has a smart phone to show a few of their favorite apps for discussion.

Details: Tuesday June 15, 2010 at BBC Taproom downtown from 7pm until whenever. A huge thanks as always to Mission Data who will once again be our sponsor. If you’re interested in sponsorship please let us know.

Our current scheduling plan is to hold Refresh on the 3rd Tuesday of the month downtown at the BBC Taproom. If you can’t make it because of other engagements or conflicts, we’ll miss you greatly and hope to see you next month.

PS, be sure to Follow us on the Twitters, join the facebook group and generally spread the word to those around you.

In addition to some planning and housekeeping we will discuss the concept, implementation and benefits of Transcendent CSS and how you can use the approach to build lean clean markup for your projects.

Details: Tuesday May 18, 2010 at BBC Taproom downtown from 7pm until whenever. A huge thanks as always to Mission Data who will once again be our sponsor. If you’re interested in sponsorship please let us know.

Our current scheduling plan is to hold Refresh on the 3rd Tuesday of the month downtown at the BBC Taproom. If you can’t make it because of other engagements or conflicts, we’ll miss you greatly and hope to see you next month.

PS, be sure to Follow us on the Twitters, join the facebook group and generally spread the word to those around you.

David is also coming back from An Event Apart Seattle after listening to some of the best in the industry speak their mind. Please join me in hounding David for insight on what’s hot on the lips of those who create websites for a living.

Details: Tuesday April 20, 2010 at BBC Taproom downtown from 7pm until whenever. As a reminder David will be sponsoring the event (major thanks) and providing some snacks. Drinks are at the bar people.

Our current scheduling plan is to hold Refresh on the 3rd Tuesday of the month downtown at the BBC Taproom. If you can’t make it because of other engagements or conflicts, we’ll miss you greatly and hope to see you next month.

PS, be sure to Follow us on the Twitters, join the facebook group and generally spread the word to those around you.

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.