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Help Stop SOPA/PIPA

I work there once a week—usually on Friday—and love the quite, productive atmosphere, fast WiFi, and the ability to connect with like-minded individuals (learn more about coworking). It’s also within walking distance of three areas: Downtown, 4th Avenue, and University Boulevard, all of which offer great choices for lunch or a post-work happy hour.

You should come try it out if you live in the area. Your first visit is free!

Spoke6 also hosts Tucson Digital Arts Community events, including the Tucson WordPress Meetup which I host once a month.

• Introduction to HTML5 on May 19th, 2010
• WordPress Meetup on May 25th, 2010

I’m particularly excited about the “Introduction to HTML5” talk since it’s my first time co-presenting with long-time friend and former coworker Aaron Wagner. I will cover new features in HTML5 and CSS3 while Aaron will talk about the new JavaScript APIs and browser extensions. Plus, he’ll give us a demo of an HTML5 application called “Times Up” that he built for his church. Can’t wait!

Join me and the Tucson Digital Arts Community for an evening of WordPress discussion.

In a nutshell: we’re inviting civic-minded coders, designers, and others interested in using their skills to make Tucson a more livable community to come together to create apps that can make a difference.

I would encourage you to come to the kick-off meeting. There are a variety of apps that could be built as part of the hackathon, so there should be a chance for everyone to get involved.

I know some of you have asked—I know I have—for more technical meetups and “hack days” in Tucson. This is the perfect chance to be a part of something that will satisfy your itch to hack on a project together. And, more importantly, it is a great chance to get involved in improving your local community.

• Full details
• RSVP for the event

Hope to see you there!

(Via TDAC.)

Local web ninja Jared McFarland summed it up nicely in Capitalizing on the Tucson Tech Community.

We, as a community, can work together to educate and inspire one another. We can enjoy the same benefits as the people in major tech centers simply by knowing each other and inventing ways to work together. It isn’t about vast numbers of people, but small passionate groups. The web brings like minds together globally, but we can now use the web to find each other and act locally. We can turn Tucson into something intentional, and beautiful, for ourselves and the city.

The larger Tucson community is also bubbling with social events like Ignite Tucson and the myriad of Twitter meetups (“Tweetups”). Just search Twitter for #tweetup #tucson to be amazed. These events cover a much broader range of topics than web design and development but they all share a common goal: to mingle, network, and share with others.

This is how I think it breaks down: socially, the larger community wants to meet itself and technologically, web designers and developers are joining together to improve the tech community. All of this energy and enthusiasm is contagious!

In contrast, I want to share the story of the Tucson Geek Meet¹, a group I was personally involved with for four years. Started as the Tucson Web Standards Group in 2003 by Molly Holzschlag, the Geek Meet slowly lost momentum over time. Instead of growing and expanding, it stayed a small core of five or six people.

Don’t get me wrong, because of those meetups the five or six of us are now steadfast friends, and several of us have had the opportunity to work together. Now that we are friends we can socialize anytime—we don’t need to call it anything. The idea of the Geek Meet isn’t going away, it’s just being replaced by ad hoc Tweetups and other social happenings around town.

What I want to encourage, and I think Jared hit on this, is not just the social aspects of meeting together but the educational and inspirational benefits of sharing code, experiences, and real-life examples of our work. TDAC is spearheading the effort by organizing workshops and collaborative coding days to get people together to educate, inspire, network, and improve. I’ve been a part of TDAC for six months now, and the tech community in Tucson isn’t just soaking it up, it’s clamoring for more.

We’re hoping soon to have a Refresh Tucson—our neighbors in The Valley have had a strong Refresh presence for three years—we can do the same here in the Old Pueblo. So please participate: join up, tweet up, meet up, share, and pass the word to your colleagues and friends.

Let’s do it, Tucson.

How to get involved

Tucson networks to join and participate in

• Tucson Digital Arts Community
• Further Tucson
• Refresh Tucson

  (Coming soon… For now join the TDAC Refresh Tucson group to give your input.)

• Search Twitter for #tweetup #tucson and come join the fun.

Are you on Meetup.com? Tell your Meetup.com cronies to join the fine sites listed above, especially if you are on the Meetup.com Web Standards “waiting list”. Wait no more!

Notes

¹ The Tucson Geek Meet is no more, it’s pushing up the daisies, it’s kicked the bucket. This meetup is not pining for the fjords, it’s gone to meet it’s maker. It’s… OK, enough of the Monty Python!

For posterity, here is a brief history of the Tucson Geek Meet:

2003(?): Started by Molly Holzschlag.

2005: Tucson Web Standards Meetup moved to Upcoming by Lance (from Meetup.com). We met at B-Line and Famous Sam’s. See Molly’s 2005 post and my 2005 post as well as the Upcoming group page.

2006: Met monthly at the Old Chicago patio. A few Flickr photos from 2006 events: Great Discussion at Tucson Web Standards Meeting, Geoff in Action.

2007: Changed the name to Geek Meet.

2008: The infamous Hooter’s incident. D’oh! (Yes, Molly gave us a good lashing for that, and it was deserved.)

2009: Called it quits in favor of other local groups and Twitter meetups.

This post was originally titled “Rest in Peace, Tucson Geek Meet” but I decided that it was just a small part of the burgeoning Tucson web design and development scene.

I have one (1) registration for SXSW Interactive 2009 available for sale at a discounted rate. Since I purchased it early (last September) the face value is $375, which saves you $75 over the rate if you register before February 13, 2009—and $120 over the walk-up rate.

By SXSW rules I can transfer it to another person, so please contact me if you are interested.

(Why is it for sale? I planned on going this year, but am now unable to attend.)

Conference themes included social media, user-generated content, and user-centered design. The most consistent message I heard during the day is that marketing is about improving communication, “It’s about people, not technology”.

The content was a great mix of theoretical discussion, “What are the leading minds in marketing thinking about?” and practical advice, “What can I do today to improve my communications?” The best example of the latter, in my opinion, came from the talk titled “Email Marketing Boot Camp” by Joe Colopy. I’ll be posting my notes from that talk in a later post.

Below I’ll share the thoughts and notes I jotted down throughout the day that were particularly pertinent to my web design business. There were many other ideas presented, but this is what stuck with me.

Usability

If marketing is about communication, usability is about making your communications easy to use.

Usability is achieved by adapting the system to the person, not by building a system that requires the person to adapt and learn it. Usability is 80% information architecture (IA): labels, categories, and good organization. Good IA bridges the gap between visual display and content—in other words, between the “user” and the “system.”

Start with conventions of human behavior (don’t reinvent the wheel), then define your audience-specific elements. What is a convention, you ask? If over 50% of people are doing something a certain way, it is considered a convention. Unconventional functionality will require lots of testing.

Be sure to keep in mind universal cognitive behaviors: images trump text, group like items together (good organization is a big deal), and remember that humans scan big to small, dark to light, irregular to regular, and saturated to less saturated.

Write well: people scan websites—they don’t read. Use headings, put the conclusion/summary at the top, and be concise. Put elements in conventional places: home link at the top left, help and shopping cart at the top right, and navigation along top or sides (on the left is the most common).

Relevant Ads

Display ads when it is opportune to do so. “Pull, not push,” meaning you should wait to hear what a person wants before you send ads their way. After your customer accomplishes a goal on your website, you can then provide relevant ads to them. Don’t display ads that aren’t appropriate to the task at hand. If it doesn’t relate, it will be (1) ignored or (2) be very annoying.

Being relevant means solving a problem people don’t even know they have. For example, Amazon suggests items that other people purchased; this type of relevancy can be very powerful.

If your ads are relevant, they can actually boost your customer’s trust in your communications.

Social Media and User-Generated Content

Danielle Ferguson, speaking at the conference, said, “User-generated content means conversations are happening between you and your customers as well as conversations between your customers without your intervention.”

These customer conversations (without your intervention) can have positive side effects: it can drive up search engine rankings, provide company transparency, and engender loyalty and trust.

The big trends in social media marketing include video, mobile, and conversation-builders like blogs and forums. Several of the sessions were about social media specifically (which I did not attend), but every single session I attended mentioned it at least once.

Marketing With Limited Resources

Choose low-hanging fruit to get immediate results:

1. Define your goal: what action do you want people to take?
2. Make priorities, tackle the highest first, and say no to the rest.
3. Digital marketing can be done low-cost (website, blogs and other social media).
4. Use free tools like Google’s Website Optimizer to perform basic tests for your campaigns and landing pages.

Buzzwords and Industry Jargon

I am not immersed in the marketing industry, so it was interesting to hear industry jargon and accronyms, some of which I knew and some of which were firsts for me. Here are several of oft-mentioned terms: B2B (business to business), B2C (business to consumer), SMB (small- and medium- businesses), ERP (enterprise resource planning), ECM (enterprise content management), “user gen” (short for user-generated content), and CRM (customer relationship management).

Thanksfully, most presenters did a great job of staying away from the hype and buzzwords such as “leverage”, “Web 2.0”, and “synergy.” Overall the message was: if you communicate your brand and products clearly, meet your customers’ needs, and maintain a trusting relationship with your customers, you will be well on your way to success.

Note: I found about the conference through the Digital Web events feed.

We would like to invite you to CakeFest, February 6-8 2008 in Orlando, FL. CakeFest is the first gathering dedicated to CakePHP. The festivities will include three days of talks and collaboration related to PHP and CakePHP, especially the latest developments in the 1.2 version.

Count me in—hopefully I can make it to this gathering. Especially if I can talk Sam into going, too.

Via CakeFest: 2008-02-06, Orlando FL | The Bakery, Everything CakePHP : Articles.

UPDATE: The official CakeFest site launched and has more details.

See details and get directions at the Upcoming event page.

Come out for food, drink, and good conversation with your fellow computer nerds and web geeks.

UPDATE: Thanks to Jeff, Jim, Geoff, Sam, and Face for coming out — we had a great conversation. It was a gorgeous night out on the patio with the rain!

Some things we talked about at the November Geek Meet:

• Keepass Password Safe
• Amazon’s S3 Storage
• TechSoup — a non-profit resource for non-profits
• External hard drives
• Dobro, the Backup Robot
• MarsEdit
• Nice, clean WordPress themes (by pearsonified.com)

If I missed anything, throw a link in the comments.