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!

Refresh DC was featured this week on two CSS gallery sites: Most Inspired and CSS Mania. As far as I know, none of my work has ever been featured on a gallery site, so this is particularly cool. Big thanks again to Martin for the fantastic design.

Speaking of Martin, he’s joined forces with Alex Giron and John Riviello to form nclud. I’m really looking forward to seeing what those three put out as they’re all extremely talented (and all-around good guys, too!). Best of luck, gents!

In recent months, 200ok has gone from being a quirky name that Jeremy and I used for silly projects to a full-fledged company. We filled out all the paperwork and hooked up with the amazingly talented Justin Babuscio, Cindy Li, and Nguyet Vuong. Never fear, none of us are quitting our day jobs yet, we’re just trying our hand at small business ownership. Working two (and sometimes three or four) jobs at a time has been taxing, but we’re all excited about where this might take us.

South by Southwest is coming up right soon. I fly out tomorrow morning bright and early with Mr. Lawver and a whole litany of other AOL folk. This will be my third trip to Austin for the conference and, once again, it’s going to be amazing. The crowd this year is going to be larger than ever (by all accounts), so I’m interested to see how that goes. There are more events and panels that I’m interested in than I have time to list here, so go check it out for yourself.

Odds are I’ll have another big announcement (hopefully) later today regarding a project I’ve been working on. Some of you may know it as Ape Shirt, but right soon you’ll know it by it’s real name. Stay tuned…

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/.

• Went down south to the Refresh ’06 conference with Cindy and Jeremy. We ran into a few friends and made a lot of new ones. The conference was educational and sparked a few ideas. The post-conference socializing (“networking” if you want to be a nerd about it) was excellent, I had the occasion to meet a lot of really cool people. SXSW is about four months away, but it seems like a long time to not see folks.
• AIM Pages launched. I started on this project way into its development cycle and was responsible for developing several of the interfaces (Quick Edit Mode, Buddy Invites, and Pictures). AIM Pages is a really cool use of a number of technologies and I have high hopes for the products future development.
• Got addicted to Twitter whilst in Orlando. Everyone admits the site is a useless time-wasting vortex. And yet, we can’t turn away.
• Jeremy Keith hits upon an interesting concept he’s dubbed portable social networks. Carbomb and I are working on an interface for this idea that we’re both pretty excited about.
• Several of us are putting together a recap of the Refresh ’06 conference for this month’s Refresh DC meeting. More info can be found on the site or on the event’s upcoming.org page.
• Mir (this band I’m in, you see) holed up in the studio this weekend to record. Twenty six hours later, we have drums/bass on seven songs and guitars on four of those. We’re looking to do vocals this coming weekend. It’s terribly exciting to hear.

So this is a little scatter-brained, but it is getting late.

“I’m going to eschew the typical third-person delivery for a moment because I feel it necessary that everyone knows this is coming from me.

“I want to first thank Alex and Joshua for delivering an outstanding presentation. It touched on so many important aspects of site and community development on the web. Excellent job to you both and best of luck with getting on the bill at SXSW.

“Second, a huge thanks to everyone who made it out to the meeting this month. We counted in the neighborhood of 50 people which easily makes October’s meeting the most attended. From what I heard, a few folks traveled from as far away as Baltimore, which, to me, is incredible.

“Regardless of distance traveled, I hope everyone who attended (particularly you first-timers) enjoyed the presentation and the post-meeting festivities (apologies again for not being able to partake). I’d also like to apologize for not meeting all of you new folks (there were just too many of you!). My hope is you got a good sense of what Refresh DC is about and will be attending future meetings.

“At the risk of being long-winded (too late), I’ll close with another ‘thank you’ to everyone for helping me (and us) grow this little community into a large community of passionate individuals. You have all helped make Refresh DC a success in a few short months.

“So thank you, and I’ll see you all at the next meeting!”

- Jason Garber, Refresh DC facilitator guy

When I started up Refresh DC back in February, I expected maybe a handful of people would show up to the meetings. I never would’ve guessed that in eight months, we’d be pushing 50 people. I really believe the content of the presentation had a lot to do with it. I heard from at least one person who said they’d not attended previous meetings because of the overly-technical nature of the presentations. That makes sense and I think we can use feedback like that to steer the direction of conversation in one way or the other.

Conversely, you’re not going to be all things to all people at all times. One of my goals for Refresh DC is to provide a great variety of content to passionate individuals. I’d say we’re definitely achieving that. I’d be interested in hearing more feedback from everyone to see what attendees are interested in learning about.

I’d write more, but I’m still exhausted from moving and unpacking. Oi, what a pain!

That’s it for now, expect a better recap tomorrow!

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.

• Went down to Atlanta, GA for my buddy Ryan’s wedding. I was honored to be one of Ryan’s groomsmen and I wish him and Nikki well in their new life together. It was a good time and I met some great people whilst down South. In-progress Flickr set.
• Refresh DC is going gangbusters. We’ve got a great meeting set up for tomorrow night on Microformats. I’m looking forward to this one. It’ll be the first presentation I’m not actively participating in, so I get to sit back and soak up the knowledge.
• Cindy Li invited me along to dinner with her, Porter and his wife Laura, and none other than Eric Meyer. Yes, the Eric Meyer. Good food and good company. It was an honor and a privilege to be ribbed by the man who wrote the book on CSS. </namedropping>

There’s one or two other major items that I can’t mention quite yet. Big news coming soon. Sit tight, folks.

• 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!

If you’re a web designer, developer, or otherwise a web professional in the Washington, DC, area, come check out the meeting next Thursday night. More information about the meeting and Refresh DC in general can be found over on the Refresh DC website.