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2013 June meeting
Event posted on May 15 by MarkDuBois
Date and Time: June 11, 2013 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM

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May 2013 meeting
Entry posted on May 15 by MarkDuBois , tagged Design,Development,Event

Our May meeting was held on May 14 in room TC 317 on the ICC East Peoria campus. We had one new member (welcome David) who joined our group because he saw oour listing on Meetup.com.

I began the meeting with a video of the new camera module just released for the Raspberry Pi. We briefly discussed that technology.

I next gave an overview of the AdobeMAX keynote and focused on Projects Mighty and Napoleon. I also briefly discussed the Opera mobile emulator. Those who missed the meeting can find my slides here (as a PDF file).

After some discussion, I also gave a presentaiton on responsive web design with Dreamweaver. Since I could not speak and take notes, I provide a link to those slides as well (as a PDf file).

Jonathan Worent then discussed the planning part of website development. These are my notes from his discussion.

Have Google Analytics installed on a website and let it run for a few months to identify how site is being used.

What is important to the user on the website? Figuring out what users want is often difficult. Look at business goals. What does business want to achieve? Take about 8 hours to layout a new basic site map (perhaps 3 or 4 different ones). Prioritize content.

What are content types on a site? CMS is a possibility.

May use index cards and take out headings for each and place as topic. Which content is related to what? Helps to physically shift content around. This takes a lot of time. Take basic site map and tape cards to a wall on the site map.

Up to this point have ignored the home page. This is jumping off point for important things. Then wireframe home page.

What are parts of site that user wants to get to quickly. Low fidelity wireframes of each of these.

Copy over to designer for design concept. This part is devoid of content, but has color, fonts and so forth. Style tiles and moodboards. Site map and information architecture as wireframe. Designer is creating moodbaord at the same time. Here is photo, words, etc. related to schools or zoo or whatever.

Help designer and client get on same page as to what style will be. Once have moodbaord, then develop a few style tiles. Consistent way of presenting desin concept. Create specific tone to design.

Tim Bloompott then discussed an idea he is working on for an online quote calculator for lighting.

We had a lot of interesting discussion as part of the meeting.

Before the meeting ended, I distributed a lot of Adobe swag. People who have been speakers received a t-shirt. Everyone who was present received a pen, pencil and other miscellaneous items.

We also agreed our next meeting would be June 11.



April 2013 meeting
Entry posted on Apr 10 by MarkDuBois , tagged Event,Development,Design

Our April, 2013 meeting was held on April 9 in room Tc 317 on the ICC East Peoria campus. The following notes were taken by Mark during the meeting. Forgive the lack of editing. This is a very busy week.

Jonathan Worent - Cloud computing - PaaS - Platform as a Service

Reviewed shared hosting environments (like HostGator and GoDaddy). eMail, apps and so forth. cPanel overview.

Cloud hosting - don't purchase space on a server. They have cloud farm and you can never access a server. No SSH access. Application is load balanced across multiple servers.

Most set up through GIT. Set up private/ public key encryption Ruby GEM that adds a lot of commands to command line. Set up remote for cloud host. Distributed - load balancing.

Heroku and PaggodaBox are two that Jonathan prefers.

Can scale up very quickly. You pay for what you use. Shared hosting is a set fee. These services pay for what you use.

https://pagodabox.com/

https://www.heroku.com/

Configuration options are different for each of these environments

PagodaBox case study - 5M+ page views once a year. Black Friday deals - peak for a few days. Most solutions - tough to handle this sort of scalability.

Issues when move to cloud host - no access to writable storage. If have WordPress and admin lets you upload files - what do you do? Only way to put files on server is to commit to GIT and load them up. Can use external service like Amazon S3 - cloud hosting for file storage. Can be really cheap or really expensive. DOwnload plugin for various systems and tell cloud service to put files over there when they are uploaded. User created files are not a part of GIT repository, Also, don't have email. Need to use external service. For example contact form on site - Mandrill by MailChimp is an excellent choice. Don't have inbox, but application can now send out email.

Most of these also have a free tier - can test and develop for clients without paying a lot.

Spin up a PagodaBox instance, send off code, set up a MailChimp account, include credentials. PagodaBox has automatic link to Amazon S3 storage if need writable storage. Use their Box file.

Get subdomain for your application - like inspiredbytes.pagadoboc.com can set up staging as needed. Can have as many different environments as needed.

DNS - typical configure A record to point to IP address of server.

Cloud hosting, no single IP address. Infrastructure distributed across various parts of country. Use CName record - points to your domain name they give you for their DNS server. They take care of load balancing.

Heroku great for Node.js or Ruby on Rails. Polyglot system. Can run a number of applications. Heroku has a tie in with Facebook.

PagodaBox is solely for PHP. May have Node.js soon

EngineYard is alternative. Less functionality.

SendGrid is alternative to Mandrill - it is more expensive.

Larry Ball - Status of Illinois WOW website - added function for footer menu created child functions file, added pagination, upgraded jQuery but it complained (many plugins). Also did related posts.

Rename themes if steal or copy a theme and modify.

Load various scripts - modernizr, html5shim and so forth.

Mark covered using Edge Animate to animate parts of an existing web page. He demonstrated how to accomplish this and reviewed the resulting code generated.

The meeting concluded with some additional discussion and agreement to meet on May 14 in TC 317 for our next meeting.



March 2013 meeting
Entry posted on Mar 13 by MarkDuBois , tagged Event,Development,Design

Our March meeting was held on March 12, 2013 in room TC 317 on the ICC East Peoria campus. We had a new member join our group - Jason Rambeck. He noticed our Meetup. Welcome Jason. We had a number of interesting presentations at this meeting. Here are my (Mark's) notes from the meeting.

Bob Hohimer reviewed his use of DotNetNuke. He started on this project as part of internship. With DotNetNuke CMS there is a one click install.
Community edition - used for project (professional edition is a bit pricey). All features needed for project were in community edition.
Wassai Group - http://wassigroup.com/dotnetnuke1/Home.aspx - created subdomain and installed software
All of changes made directly on the site. Planning to upgrade to version 7 soon. Video overviews at DotNetNuke site.
Admin panel once logged in. Layout mode reviewed first. All content done with modules. Place modules where need them. View mode (as site appears to visitor). Can add modules that exist on other pages. Can copy module with content and will get separate instance. Otherwise, if change module on one page, it will change on others. Manage and edit each module.
Container represents styling for module. All available (skins).
Working on project portfolio for company now.
Online store - can buy modules or skins - http://store.dotnetnuke.com/. Some are pricey, others are not. Some cost $20 or $30 and will work on community edition. Extension forge has a number. Many have limited descriptions so you need to check out and test locally. Store has better descriptions.
Each year DotNetNuke skin design contest - these are then available as free downloads.
Bob had no experience with Windows based content management systems. Wanted people to be aware. Many thanks to Bob for sharing this information. A number of people have already commented on how useful thsi was.
Larry Ball discussed changes he has made to the local Web Professionals website - http://illinoiswow.org/blog/
Discussed use of child themes on site (based on WordPress). Import parent stylesheet if going to over ride. Responsive design. If parent theme updated, child theme remains intact. Progressive enhancement for Internet Explorer also included.
Function to print out footer link and copyright information. Setting date dynamically so don't have to update it.
Planning to include search bar in header
Considering horizontal drop down (with jQuery) instead of default vertical drop down as is typical.
MyCalendar plugin being used for now - Event Expresso.
Contact form 7 for contact information.
Pull to refresh Hook.js capabilities on mobile view
MatchMedia.js - use media queries in JavaScript
Everyone introduced themselves. We are growing and I really appreciated everyone participating on such a cold and snowy March evening.
Jonathan Worent discussed SquidMan - GUI on top of Squid proxy - runs in command line (Mac, but also Windows version)
Have to make configuration changes when first run - allow manager on localhost (passthrough to allow anyone accessing proxy to access local files on your computer). Also had to point to location of host files.
If running XAMP, Mamp or Wamp, you will need to change to appropriate location.
Use PagodaBox for hosting. ssh tunnel into live database Makes development a lot easier when multiple people working.
SquidMan - client tab is where do most of action
Email - run as static website for email. Need to use file:/// protocol. Links can easily break. Python has own built in simple web server.
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8800 in terminal to start server in a given folder
Can now see root of domain for testing file locations in email message
Meetup.com - we reviewed our efforts through MeetUp and asked those attending to sign up. Many did.
Mark DuBois discussed Adobe Edge Reflow and how it can be used to create prototype responsive designs. He showed how to view the result in the Chrome browser and covered both the layout and style panels.
Mark also covered the latest release of Adobe Brackets (sprint 21). He covered the fundamentals of using it and how to install extensions. For both of these products, he referenced his weblog posts for more information.

Mark mentioned that he (and others) will be giving a series of webinars on various Adobe products in conjunction with Adobe and Web Professionals. If you would like to sign up for this series (held on Tuesdyas at noon central time), please visit Web Professional Educator Webinar Series.

We also discussed our next meeting - April 9 - and agreed to initial topics for that meeting.

Lastly, Mark forgot to mention, but he has two open ended web design and development jobs available. Both individuals indicated they are willing to pay (not that much on one case). If you are interested in either job (one for a local church to vastly improve their website currently hosted through Yahoo and the other to deal with RSS feeds from craig's List), please contact Mark directly.



February, 2013 meeting
Entry posted on Feb 13 by MarkDuBois , tagged Design,Development,Event

Our February meeting was held on Feb. 12, 2013 in room TC 317 on the ICC East Peoria campus. We had a solid turnout of members. We began the meeting with a discussion about attracting more members and decided to establish a Meetup account for a few months. http://www.meetup.com/Central-Illinois-Web-Professionals-and-Adobe-User-Group/ is the URL.

Jonathan Woretn provided a review of some JavaScript/ jQuery approaches he prototyped to solve a business problem. He showed how hundreds of lines of JavaScript and jQuery code were required to solve this problem. He also discussed content management issues as well. Jonathan covered some of the issues he encountered with jQuery animations (when multiple animations need to run at the same time).

As part of his presentaiton, Jonathan discussed the use of a Python web server for local testing. He also briefly covered Platform as a Service sites such as http://www.heroku.com/ (for Ruby on Rails sites) and http://pagodabox.com/ (for PHP based sites).

Mark DuBois discussed CSS using LESS. He covered several of the more popular tools which can be used on Windows or Mac computers. He provided some LESS code examples and showed the resulting CSS which was generated using the LESS variables and bult in functions and math. He referenced the weblog post he created on this same topic (for those who want the code snippets).

Lots of questions were asked and we discussed additional projects members were working on. We agreed that our next meeting would be on March 12.



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