Group Discount for SXSWi
Last year I reached out to the SXSW people and was able to establish a group discount for the #RefreshCA group for South by Southwest Interactive. The only catch was that we needed to get 20 people together to qualify for this group discount and we came up a little short on that part. This year with a little planning I feel like we can wrangle 20 people together if we start early enough. If you are interested in attending, drop a comment below to let us know if you are interested and we will see what we can do.
25% Barcamp Jonesboro Discount
![barcampjonesboro[1]](http://www.cottonrohrscheib.com/blog/wp-content/2010/06/barcampjonesboro1.jpg "barcampjonesboro[1]")
If you haven’t registered yet for Barcamp Jonesboro it’s not too late. The event is scheduled for September 25th and will be held on the campus of ASU. There is a 25% discount for all Central Arkansas Refresh members that can be used for all tickets, including corporate. To register, just visit their eventbrite page to signup and enter the following coupon code: “REFRESHCA” to claim your discount.
Also, if you are planning on attending, bring your presentations with you and post them to the board for the group to vote on. I know of several presentations that I have seen from within the group that would go over very well with this crowd and engage a ton of awesome conversation.
Need Input on #RefreshCA
I have been extremely busy the past few months and haven’t had a lot of spare time to dedicate to #RefreshCA. From what I have gathered several of you guys in the community have been pretty busy yourselves. Last month I put out a feeler to see if anyone had anything they wanted to hear about or present at the monthly meeting and didn’t get a lot of response. I figure with Summer coming up this is probably to be expected. Our next scheduled meeting is the last Tuesday of the month, the 29th. Between now and then I would love to hear from anyone that has anything they want to discuss or present. We are wide open so any contributions you might have in terms of subject matter would be appreciated.
Drop me a comment and let me know what your thoughts are. I feel like #RefreshCA is a great asset to our industry and our community in Central Arkansas and definitely worthy of keeping alive, just need some ideas to help us keep it flowing smoothly. Also, anyone else interested in helping plan the meetings, coordinate w/ presenters and the Saucer would be a huge help, as I mentioned earlier, I have had a lot on my plate the past 2 months as have some of the others that help keep things running and I don’t see that changing the next few months.
Once we get back into the swing of things I am going to reach out to some of our corporate sponsors to see about getting more software licenses, t-shirts, books, and miscellaneous swag donated so we can start all of that up again. I also have a couple of nationally known speakers that I have communicated with that are interested in coming in for presentations, I think we can cover their expenses through local sponsorships, just need to get everyone together and decide on which ones we want to bring in. So, drop me your thoughts in the comments and let’s get a discussion going. Thanks.
#RefreshCA – Tuesday, April 27th
![refreshlogo[1]](http://www.cottonrohrscheib.com/blog/wp-content/2010/04/refreshlogo1.jpg "refreshlogo[1]")
Tomorrow night I will be speaking at the Central Arkansas Refresh monthly meetup alongside Robert Blake on a topic that everyone of us in the industry can relate to, How to Deal with Clients. The meeting is open to the public and starts at 6pm at The Flying Saucer in downtown Little Rock. You can RSVP on Facebook if you want or just show up unannounced, entirely up to you. Bring a friend a co-worker with you, it should be a good time.
If you aren’t familiar with the #RefreshCA group, we are a group of developers, designers, bloggers, and IT professionals that meet once a month to discuss topics and emerging technologies related to our industry. You can learn more on our website, http://refreshcentralarkansas.org and by joining our Facebook Group. There will also be some assorted swag given away as well as pony rides for the kids. (just kidding about the pony rides…)
Projects: #RefreshCA Website
Recently I upgraded the Central Arkansas Refresh website to run MU, or BuddyPress as it is now called. I also added some additional plugins to the site such as Disqus commenting platform, Feedburner Feedsmith, Kieran’s Calendar, and of course a BuddyPress Forum. My hopes are that the website, which we currently don’t utilize, can become a tool or “social network” among our community.
With the new revisions, anyone interested can stop by and setup their own account and customize their profile information such as avatar, bio, and login information. Registered users may also interact in the Forums on the website. Since I find myself busy a lot just about the time of the month that we are supposed to send out RSVP’s for the next month’s meeting, hopefully I can setup a few more people from within the group as admins to help manage the website. Click on the screenshot below to visit the website…
#RefreshCA – Tuesday, March 30th
This have been so hectic for me this past month that I haven’t even sent out the Facebook reminders to the Central Arkansas Refresh group about our meeting tomorrow night, Tuesday, March 30th at 6pm. We will be meeting in our usual location, downstairs at The Flying Saucer in downtown Little Rock. For directions, please see the map below…
This month Justin Wright from Mainstream Technologies will be sharing some of the high points from the SXSWi conference in Austin, Texas earlier this month. This should be a very informative meeting, as many of you who work within the industry are probably already aware, many of the apps and technologies we use today were born at SXSWi in previous years.
#RefreshCA – GeoSocial Showdown
Be sure to join the Central Arkansas Refresh on February 23rd for our GeoSocial Showdown to discuss several of today’s top applications. After a lot of discussion we have decided to have a little bit different format for this month’s meeting. As opposed to having one speaker offer a presentation and then have group questions, we are going to have a moderator and 5 representatives from within the group to represent the top 5 services. Each presenter will give a short overview of the app they represent (approximately 3 minutes long) and then the group will be invited to interact with the panel and ask questions. It should be an awesome time. The volunteer representatives and applications represented will be:
- BrightKite – Anthony Valley
- Foursquare – Amy Bradley Hole
- Loopt – Bryan Jones
- Gowalla – Khara Cavaness
- Waze – Keith Crawford
If you have never attended one of our meetings, we invite you to attend this one. Our meetings are held in the basement of The Flying Saucer in downtown Little Rock at 6:00pm on the last Tuesday of each month. For additional information please join our Facebook Group and follow @RefreshCA on Twitter. Our meetings are open to the public and free! Below you will find a map to The Flying Saucer…
View Larger Map
#RefreshCA GeoSocial Showdown (Update)
Recently I did a blog post asking for feedback regarding the format for our upcoming February Central Arkansas Refresh meeting on GeoSocial Applications. I think for the most part we all agreed that there needs to be some sort of “intro” to each of the applications we are going to showcase.
Daniel Spillers brought up a good point in the comments from my last post that these presentations need to be pretty brief and concise laying out the specifics and differences between each app. Keith Crawford also agreed that he thought a short overview for each application regarding their implications and differentiations would be wise. My thoughts all along have been that this meeting in particular might have the same kind of response from the community that our Google Wave meeting had back in November where we had a lot of people attend that usually don’t attend. Based on our November meeting attendance I walked away thinking that we had actually given something back to the community, which was pretty cool. That’s not to say that our meetings where it’s just us nerds aren’t fun, because they are!
One thing that we accomplished in my initial blog post was setting up our panel of representatives for this meeting as well as the apps that we are going to discuss, here’s how things have shaped up:
- BrightKite – Anthony Valley
- Foursquare – Amy Bradley Hole
- Loopt – Bryan Jones
- Gowalla – Khara Cavaness
- Waze – Keith Crawford
I will probably act as the moderator for the meeting to kind of kick things off and introduce each panelist. Each panelist will have about 2-3 minutes to give a brief rundown of their application and tell how it’s different from the others and it’s implications.
I think the consensus from those that I have heard from was that after the presentations for each app were complete we could then open up the room for discussion, questions, etc. regarding each application. I think that if we all hustle we can knock out the presentations in about 20 minutes or so and leave the remainder of the evening open for discussion. I guess my question is,
How Does This Sound?? Leave a comment if you want to add something or if I forgot anything…
By the way, our meeting is scheduled for February 23, 2010 at 6pm at our normal location, The Flying Saucer. If you are a member of Facebook Group you should get an event notification. Also, be sure to follow @RefreshCA on Twitter for news and updates. If you have never attended a #RefreshCA meeting, here’s a map to The Flying Saucer, we meet in the basement…
Be sure to tell your friends and co-workers about this meeting, I think it has the potential to be one of our best ones yet given the popularity of geosocial apps.
EP:001 – The Cotton Club Podcast
I finally got around to recording my first installment of The Cotton Club Podcast this evening. My guest co-host for the show this evening was Keith Crawford, you may know him as @tsudo on Twitter. This initial podcast was just a test run to see how things work so that when Keith and I get ready to launch another sideline project called The Social Radar in the very near future we can hit the ground running.
Please keep in mind that this is my first go at podcasting, the quality and content should get better over time. Despite the fact that I have invested in an awesome setup from software to microphones, the audio of me talking didn’t turn out very well at all. You can hear Keith great, and that’s probably a good thing since he is a lot cooler to listen to. 
The topics we covered on Episode 001 of The Cotton Club were as follows:
- Geosocial Applications (Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite, Loopt)
- iPhone Applications (Dragon Dictate, Where R U?, Evernote, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Mytown)
- Social Media Predictions for 2010 (Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed)
- Methods for Archiving Thoughts for Blog Posts (Friendfeed, Wordpress, etc.)
- Crazy Story of The Week from Hell
- NASCAR Withdrawels
- Central Arkansas Refresh Meeting – January 26th (Nick Brewer presenting on PODSCMS for Wordpress)
Thanks for tuning into my first show, I promise it’s going to get better over time, so please bear with me. If you want to subscribe to The Cotton Club Podcast, you can do so on iTunes.
Production Note: The audio at the beginning of the recording isn’t very loud, a few minutes into the recording I finally managed to get it adjusted to where you could hear me a little bit better. Please bear w/ me, this is a work in progress.
#RefreshCA Jan. 26th: Nick Brewer on Pods CMS for WP
We are going to be having our first Central Arkansas Refresh meeting of the new year on Tuesday, January 26th at the Flying Saucer in downtown Little Rock. The #RefreshCA group is a group of web developers, bloggers, IT people, and agency personnel that gathers on the last Tuesday of each month to discuss topics of interest within our industry.
This month Nick Brewer from CJRW is going to be presenting on Pods CMS for Wordpress. For those of you not familiar w/ Pods CMS, it’s a CMS framework that sits on top of Wordpress, allowing you to add and display your own content types. Here’s a brief description:
As it is defined, Pods is a content management plugin for WordPress. Many people may wonder why a plugin is needed to make WordPress a content management system, doesn’t it do that already? Absolutely, but out of the box, WordPress specifically caters to a few types of content; Posts, Pages, Media, Comments, and Links. WordPress does a ton more (such as categories, tags, users, etc.), but as far as the average user is concerned, those are the major content types you’re able to work with. Themes bring all that managed content together to share with the world, and plugins build on top of that even more.
Many plugins exist to provide you with a new type of content to manage, most often a specific type of content aimed at achieving a specific goal. That’s awesome, and helps tons of people to make that change they’re looking to update on their site. Pods, however, thinks about things in a different way.
Pods provides a platform on which to build your own content types to manage, all the while providing some really advanced functionality having to do with that content. From the User Guide, a Pod is a group of input fields. You can add and arrange any number of the various available input fields to any number of Pods, essentially creating your own custom CMS for each website you build in WordPress.
The meeting should get started around 6pm and is open to the public. We meet in the basement area of the saucer, just walk into the bar area and then take the stairway down to the basement. For more information about the Central Arkansas Refresh Group, please visit our website: http://refreshcentralarkansas.org or join our group on Facebook. You may also follow the group on Twitter at @RefreshCA.
For directions to the Flying Saucer, see the map below:
View Larger Map
