This should be a ton of fun and will go a long way to building community. Not every event has to be lectures, after all. I hope to see everyone out and having a good time next week!

Martin Ringlein writes:

It was such an amazing experience to be surrounded by such passionate and like-minded designers and developers. Events like this really make you remember what drives this community; passion.

Martin hits the nail on the head. Late into the evening of BarCamp, there were still conversations going on about community. Alex Giron and Doug March came up with several great ideas for community-building. Expect good things out of those two.

Samantha Warren, on the Ogilvy PR blog, and Alisa Schadt and Jenna Marino, on the AIM Product Design Group blog also have excellent perspectives on the event.

Also worthy of note is Ross Karchner’s DC Tech Events Weekly. Ross provides a week-by-week rundown of all tech-related events happening in and around Washington, DC. Glancing at the list, you’ll see there are a ton of groups out there. Go find one that suits your passion.

Our setup in the photo was Cindy’s MacBook Pro using the built-in iSight, Skype, and Kevin’s Verizon EVDO card. Oh yeah, and a VW Beetle cruising along in the neighborhood of 90mph.

• Derek’s The Real Story of JPG Magazine
• Heather’s blog post

There’s been a pretty strong reaction on Flickr and I’ll soon be adding myself to the list after I get my refund for my subscription. Upsetting that I had just subscribed to the magazine and was really looking forward to it.

You can still find the pre-revisionist issues of JPG Magazine on LuLu.

Stewart repeatedly points out here that he is not, in fact, a journalist, but merely a comedian. Fans of the show, including Moyers, will likely disagree with Stewart’s assessment of his relevance, but there is no denying that a growing number of people are getting their news and viewpoints from Comedy Central. The interview covers a number of topics, but Stewart is at his best here, as on his show, at distilling the problems of U.S. foreign policy.

From the interview:

But war that hasn’t affected us here, in the way that you would imagine a five-year war would affect a country. I think that’s why they’re so really — here’s the disconnect. It’s sort of this odd and I’ve always had this problem with the rationality of it. That the President says, “We are in the fight for a way of life. This is the greatest battle of our generation, and of the generations to come. And, so what I’m going to do is you know, Iraq has to be won, or our way of life ends, and our children and our children’s children all suffer. So, what I’m gonna do is send 10,000 more troops to Baghdad.”

So, there’s a disconnect there between — you’re telling me this is fight of our generation, and you’re going to increase troops by 10 percent? And that’s gonna do it? I’m sure what he would like to do is send 400,000 more troops there, but he can’t, because he doesn’t have them. And the way to get that would be to institute a draft. And the minute you do that, suddenly the country’s not so damn busy anymore. And then they really fight back, and then the whole thing falls apart. So, they have a really delicate balance to walk between keeping us relatively fearful, but not so fearful that we stop what we’re doing and really examine how it is that they’ve been waging this.

I highly recommend you watch the full interview on PBS’ site.

Ficlets was developed internally at AOL over the course of four months and is largely the brain-child of Kevin Lawver. Other guilty parties include Cindy Li, Jenna Marino, Ari Kushimoto, and of course, myself. We had help along the way from other designers, Ops team members, etc., but the core of the project was the five of us.

We ran Ficlets like a startup. There were no requirements documents, no technical documents, no long-winded meetings about this or that. I can count on one hand the number of meetings we had. The rest was getting down to business, building working demos, and hammering out things we didn’t like or didn’t work. We Got Real, iterated through UI and design, dropped features, built less. The goal was to get a product out to the public, see how they use it, and adapt as necessary.

Our process really flies in the face of a lot of the “established practices” at a large corporation. Our launch-day press release was a message on Twitter to about 100 of our friends. We had a couple hundred dollars for printing up some shirts, stickers, and buttons. Our promotional blitz was hanging out with folks at SXSW and chatting up what we’d done. Small. Simple. Easy.

I’ll talk more about SXSW in another post (once my brain gets back to functional state), but for now, a few more “technical” facts about Ficlets:

• It’s built using Ruby on Rails. Ficlets is AOL’s first Ruby on Rails app to be launched publicly. At the onset, neither Kevin nor I knew RoR – we built the entire site while learning the language and framework. I’d say that speaks to the exceptional job the creators of the framework did. We had a little help along the way from Chad Fowler and some other RoR folks, so my hat goes off to you guys and girls.
• We’re using Flickr photos for the Inspiration section. Everyone on Team Ficlets is a huge Flickr geek and we even got people from Yahoo! excited about the project.
• All Ficlets are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. This is the mechanism by which people can extend and mash-up stories into other works. I was unaware of this until recently, but this is also the first AOL project to use Creative Commons.
• We’re using microformats all over the site. I love microformats and it’s been a ton of fun (geeky fun) using them on this project. Authors bios are marked up as hCard, stories (and lists of stories) are mostly marked up as hAtom, and comments are marked up as hReviews. I think there’s still some cleaning up I can do in some cases, but on the whole, we’ve got microformats out the wazoo.

This post is starting to become a bit long, so I’ll end it there for now. There’s a lot more to tell about Ficlets, but I’ll save it for another post. In the time being, why not check out the Ficlets blog or keep up with what I’m doing on the site at: http://ficlets.com/authors/jgarber.

Refresh DC site relaunch

I’m happy to announce we’ve just relaunched the Refresh DC site. Designed by Martin Ringlein of Maryland Media and built by myself, the new site is a reflection of the changing needs of the group as it has grown.

I’ve been absolutely overwhelmed by the consistently high turnout we’ve had at our monthly meetings and felt it was time to spruce up the site. Martin did an excellent job integrating photos from our Flickr group and incorporating more aspects of the forum.

Check us out at http://refresh-dc.org/.

Ernest Hemingway was once prodded to compose a complete story in six words. His answer, personally felt to be his best prose ever, was “For sale: baby shoes, never used.”

That, to me, is the most beautiful and sad thing I’ve ever read. Time to re-read “The Old Man and the Sea.”

I think I did everything correctly. The Technorati parser and/or iCal isn’t taking the date format very well and I’m not sure if it’s me, the parser, or the calendar program. Dear reader, your thoughts? Check my work.

• Web Designer – DC or NYC at EchoDitto
• Web Developer/Software Architect at EchoDitto
• Strategy Architect – DC or NYC at EchoDitto
• Director of Web Development at NavigationArts
• Junior Web Developer at E-site Marketing

If you’re a talented web developer, designer, or otherwise, give these positions a look. You may just land yourself your dream job!