Education/Workshops
This Thursday (4/10) at 6pm, we’re going to be schmoozing our usual spot but this time with a special guest!
Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of Wordpress and founder of Automattic, will be in Philly for a few days while he accepts an award at Temple University. Congrats Matt, and welcome to our city!
I’ve coordinated with the dudes (and dude-ettes) at National Mechanics to show Matt what our crew is all about: good times with good friends!
There are a LOT of Wordpress fans in our community (if by no other measure, we have enough to have our own track of Wordpress workshops).
I look forward to seeing many of them out, and a fun evening of geekery.
Tags: wordpress
Posted by johnnyb on 03-28-2008 under
Education/WorkshopsNow that the dust has settled from SXSW, workshops at IndyHall are getting back into the groove. SXSW gave most of us such inspiration that it has taken us a little while to get curriculum prepared for these workshops. We hope that we are able to convey the energy and motivation that we obtained in Austin through the upcoming events. We have two for the start of April with more to follow.
Illustrator Workshop
April 8th, 2008, 6:30pm - 9pm
So the Illustrator workshop returns with a 101 lesson in taking a sketch to digital illustration. This workshop will give designers a primer of the tools and techniques needed to trace a drawing so they can bring their sketches to life in the digital medium. Other topics will be coloring, layering, and object management. Laptops are not required but may be useful to those wishing to have a hands on experience.
Wordpress Workshop
Saturday, April 12th, 10am - 1pm morning session. 2pm - 5pm afternoon session.
This month’s Wordpress workshop will be an all day event and be in two parts. The morning session is for total newbies or any user that would like to learn the best practices for setting up the Wordpress environment on their local and remote servers. This session will dive into database set-up, Wordpress configuration, and tools for quick server configuration. Four experienced Wordpress users will be on hand to guide participants through the process, Jason Tremblay, Alex Gilbert, Kelani Edmondson, and Johnny Bilotta.
The afternoon session will be centered around Theming, and Template Tags. We are just getting into basics with the Template Tags, explaining the “Loop” and how to use the tags to build your own theme. We will be providing a basic theme for download at the session which can be used as a base for all themes in the future. Best practices will be discussed at length and user participation is always welcome.
You do not have too attend both sessions if you do not wish too. If the morning session seems to beginner, feel free to come in the afternoon. If the afternoon is to advanced, just come for the morning. All are welcome as always.
Did you miss out on SXSW this year? Feeling like you got left out on all of the…ehm…education? Or did you go and are somehow still motivated to go to conferences any time in 2008? FEAR NOT! I have some fantastic news for you!
Philly Emerging Tech is an enterprise technology conference being organized by Chariot Solutions. I had lunch about a month ago with Tracey Welson-Rossman, the lead organizer for the conference, to talk about some of the shared pain points in the local industry and I promised I’d share this conference with our side of the local scene. Unfortunately, (and I openly apologize here Tracey), this month blew up and it totally fell off my radar. Now it’s fast approaching and I wanted to get one last plug out there just in case anyone has interest!
So this conference is populated by some of the brightest mind in commercial and enterprise software, and my favorite part about the lineup is that it’s got a good portion of LOCAL people headlining. And the people that aren’t local are reasonably large rockstars in their industries. I think this is a huge testament to what our local industry is capable of…not only producing amazing technology leadership, but attracting some of the best leadership from elsewhere.
As I said…I’m not going to be able to go. Being that it’s this Wednesday and Thursday, I cannot be away from IndyHall during the day. BUT if you have some time, and $175 burning a hole in your pocket, I highly suggest checking out the conference and seeing if it’s up your alley. It’d be nice to have some representation from the creative side of things to even out some of the tech-heads.
Check out the registration page at Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise, they’re still taking them and if 4 people register together, the price drops (or one gets it for free, depending on how your version of the math works).
Thanks to the magic of uStream and the playback of Viddler, we’re allowing you to watch ALMOST the whole presentation from last night! For some reason the first 10 minutes or so got chopped…but things kick off around the Pen Tool anyway so you don’t miss much.
Big thanks to the dozen or so who came out for the whole 2 hours last night, and nearly 15 people who watched the remote feed from the website. If you missed any bit, now’s your chance to catch up!
And finally, thanks Johnny for putting together and leading this session.
Feel free to comment on the video or comment below! We’re also looking for feedback for the next and future workshops so let us know what you liked and didnt like!
Note: New links/embeds as of 6:35PM EST PLEASE REFRESH!
Watch as we broadcast tonight’s event! We’re working to increase audio and video quality in the future, the more viewers we have the more likely we can invest in better broadcast equipment.
Watch:
Stream Over!
Don’t forget you can also leave video comments below thanks to Viddler’s new Video Companion plugin!
Posted by johnnyb on 02-05-2008 under
Education/Workshops
Adobe Illustrator is one of the most powerful tools used in the design community, so it is not a surprise that it can be a little intimidating.
Not to worry!
For the February Illustrator workshop we are going to take the app. head on and do a whole session on Tools and Palettes. This session will explore the details around each tool and palette in depth. We will look at best practices, productivity, tips and tricks, shortcuts, etc. We will also be demonstrating the use of Adobe Kuler and ColourLovers and how to create and integrate swatches from these services into your projects and templates.
This workshop is modeled for all skill levels and we are hoping all will come away with a better understanding of Illustrator and it’s capabilities. The workshop will be held at Independents Hall, Wednesday, February, 13th 2008 at 6:30pm. Laptops are not required but can be brought if you would like to participate more interactively. If you have any questions about this or upcoming workshops please post a message to the IndyHall mailing list regarding “illustrator Workshop”. Please RSVP here Hope to see you all there
Last night’s wordpress workshop Kickoff was a success! We had 20 people at IndyHall, as well as another 8-10 watching and listening on our uStream feed, which we recorded for playback convenience. Our hope is to record more sessions in the future, and properly mic the audio so that our remote listeners can enjoy the presentation more. We’ll get the kinks worked out over time.
For those who attended, I promised a summary of plugins/tools that we spoke about.
Wordpress.com - Free, hosted Wordpress. Not as customizable
Wordpress.org - Where you download Wordpress to install yourself
Wordpress Auto-Update Plugin - This bad boy automatically backs up and upgrades your wordress solution (plugin updates are on your own).
CForms II -A very robust form/survey plugin. Even lets you allow users to upload files!
Firebug - A SUPER useful firefox plugin for if you do any template work, wordpress or otherwise. Lets you “inspect” other people’s XHTML/CSS.
Slideshow Pro - a great (and cheap) flash slideshow for displaying photos from flickr streams or your own uploads. Very flexible and customizable, and you don’t need to know any flash
If I missed anything we talked about, feel free to ask in the comments.
As far as events moving forward, we learned a lot about the diversity and needs of the community. Our goal is to design a program that allows the current experts to help the novices get up to speed, and then as we have more background behind everyone, move on to more advanced topics. Some of the proposed topics were:
- Multi-user/multi-blog installations
- Advanced/custom theming (as opposed to “hacking” or tweaking existing themes)
- WP best practices exchange
- Plugin/tool demos
- Boilerplate code exchanges
- Wordpress for “sites” instead of blogs
We’re excited to see the interest in the new educational track, and are looking for people to volunteer to lead and organize topics moving forward. If you have anything, please contact us and we’ll do our best to help arrange it!
Thanks to the attendees and Johnny and Jason for putting the presentation together!
