Events
From FarMcCon on The Hacktory’s Blog:
There is a lot of tech community growing in Philadelphia, and it’s awesome to see. But frankly, we all are a bit too serious at times. Educational events, planning and networking, oh-my! Sometimes it’s too much.
To keep us from going sane due to all this productivity, Geekadelphia, TheHacktory, and IndyHall (also known as G,H&I Party Planners) are teaming up to do a Battlestar Galactica party on May 10th, starting at 5PM.
At 5PM stop in for some LAN party action, and try out the Offical BSG game and the fan-made (and award winning) Beyoned The Red Line game. Both set in the BSG Universe. We might have a spare machine on hand, but please bring your own PC if you can! Meanwhile we’ll play episodes and hang out between rounds.
At 7:30PM we will stop the gaming for a while to watch the Best of BSG. We will pick the 3 best episodes on the spot to watch. If you haven’t been watching the show, this is your chance to see what everyone is raving about.
And while you are watching, you can chew on Cyclon raider cookies and Battlestar shaped cake. I kid you not!! Out food-scientists are hard at work planning every detail of this modern meal monstrosity. Of course the I’m sure the party will continue even after the ‘Best Of has been watched, and the ships have been consumed Glacticus style.
If you plan on snacking, we suggest you either bring some BSG themed food, or bring along $5 to chip in for pizza, drinks, and other snacks. If you want to game, please bring your own PC. If you want to help make this happen, please e-mail FarMcKon@gmail.com, with the subject BSG Party Planning. We’d love the help. Cyclon Raider cookies don’t bake themselves!
Tags: battlestar galactica,geekadelphia,hacktory,lan party
Posted by
Alex Hillman on 04-15-2008 under
Announcements,
EventsShortest post out of me, ever:
We’ve recently rekindled our relationship with Philly Car Share, and will soon be resuming our movie night event that we had a blast holding last fall. Unfortunately, the date we set on our calendar for the first one this spring snuck up on us and we haven’t done a very good job putting all of the pieces together in time. For now, the event that was supposed to be this upcoming saturday will be postponed for a Saturday in the very near future.
This summer, when PCS resumes it’s Drive-In Movie event, we hope to get a big group of IndyHallers to attend together. Be sure to stay tuned for that.
Thanks for understanding!
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
. . . or more appropriately, cleans Philly.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: Location changed to 5th and Cambridge this Saturday (evidently they have too many people coming to Penn Treaty Park)
This Saturday April 5th at 10am join Indy Hall and 10,000 other enthusiastic Philadelphians as we work side by side with Mayor Nutter in giving our city some well deserved TLC
The Challenge: “During my 2007 mayoral campaign I pledged to clean up Philadelphia. As your Mayor, I am going to fulfill this promise by reducing the amount of litter and trash that plague our city’s neighborhoods, streets, parks and recreation centers. I have made litter reduction a priority in my administration and am committed to making Philadelphia one of the cleanest cities in America.” - Mayor Michael Nutter.
The Oppurtunity: We need to give our city a good Spring Cleaning! On April 5th, join thousands of your fellow citizens in neighborhoods across the city as we try to make Philadelphia a more beautiful place.
The Plan: A group of Indy Hallers and friends will meet at Penn Treaty Park, under the statue, 5th and Cambridge, at 10am to get their delicate coding/design/writing/typing hands dirty making Philly cleaner. Stay as long as you can, wear your Indy Hall T-shirts and follow @davespeers on twitter for news and updates through out the day.
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).
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 bartmroz on 02-02-2008 under
EventsThank you for everyone that came out last night to the Philly Seesmic Meetup. And we would like to thank “Bear” for organizing the whole thing.
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!
Purple Cow Brainstorming Circle - Tuesday 1/22 6:00pm
From the monthly Purple Cow mailing list:
PURPOSE
To pitch your idea, get feedback, exchange resources, and help others manifest their ideas as well.
WHO SHOULD PARTICIPATE?
Anyone who has an idea to pitch and/or who would like to listen and share advice/resources. Starting your own business, non-profit or community organization? Interested in transforming your brand? Looking to launch an exciting initiative or project? Have an idea that’s so “out there” you just don’t know how to categorize it yet? Come Join Us!!
This Circle’s intention for its members is to:
- Engage us in a supportive open forum for the incubation of ideas , including those that are unorthodox, non-traditional, and transformational;
- Help us to network & collaborate with fellow creative change agents, gaining access to and learning about resources that may help us to manifest our ideas through ethical, socially / financially profitable, values-based (business) practices;
- Foster ideas that will positively impact the community and environment
Wordpress Workshop - Wednesday 1/23 6:30pm
Check out the details at the previous post. This discovery meeting will be critical to deciding curriculm for the future.
PANMA January Social - Triumph Brewery
This is where we’ll be after the Wordpress workshop (though the actual PANMA event kicks off at 6pm). Triumph is RIGHT around the corner from IndyHall, so before, during, or after the Wordpress workshop you should consider stopping by to meet with the PANMA peeps. There’s an RSVP on the PANMA website.
Hacktory Events!
I recently spoke with Vanja Buvac, one of the bright minds behind Make:Philly and The Hacktory, and learned that things are coming along nicely! They have a couple of events coming up in early February that you should mark off. A geeky “valentine heart” project session will take place on February 2nd, and a repeat of their popular Arduino course on February 9th.
If you’re in to hands on “geek-craft”, the make meetings and Hacktory classes are not to be missed!
It’s no secret that blogging is important. You’re reading a blog right now. Everyone has their blogging platform of choice, and a lot of us here at IndyHall have chosen Wordpress as our go-to utility…not just for blogging, but for lots of managed content sites.
Much like our recent Illustrator workshop, we’re going to be discovering the varying experience and interest levels of developing sites powered by Wordpress. Jason Tremblay and Johnny Bilotta will be leading this series of events together, and I’ll likely chime in a bit with my own experiences with building Wordpress sites that don’t look like blogs.
Whether you are a seasoned Wordpress developer or you are a newbie trying to get your feet wet, come and discuss your experiences and find out how to step up your development and creativity. Future workshops (which will be longer, and probably on the weekends) will center on Wordpress set-up, plug-in use, plug-in development, theme development, best practices, and much more. So come join us at 6:30pm Wednesday Jan. 23rd at IndyHall.
Also that night is a PANMA social meetup at Triumph Brewery, just around the corner. After the workshop (7:30-8:00) we’ll roll over to Triumph for some frosty brews.
Tags: wordpress, blogging, managed content, workshop, jason tremblay, johnny bilotta, indyhall, independents hall, PANMA, triumph, social
