Josh Sager Media: Creative Technologies Blog

I’ve got only one word to explain the experience.  WOW!

What is Pittsburgh Web Design Day?

Pittsburgh Web Design was a one day conference organized by Jason and Val Head of Refresh Pittsburgh and On The Fridge.

My Impressions

This was a top notch one day conference. Jason and Val really out did themselves. The speakers were fantastic, the space was wonderful, and Franktuary + perogies = awesome!

The Speakers featured local and regional web guru’s with some sort of tie to Pittsburgh. I was really amazed at how each session referenced, echoed, and built on prior sessions reinforcing concepts, philosophies, and techniques. It was like a symphony of awesome information.

I am truly honored to have been apart of it. The speakers were Geoff Barnes, Chris Cashdollar, Val Head, Whitney Hess, Jason Robb, myself, and Samantha Warren.

The entire day was chalked full of great conversations, new friendships, stimulating debates, and all around good times. Did I mention Happy Cog was there (Chris and Kevin Hoffman)

The Story of a Web Project

I was floored by the positive reaction to my session. When I was putting it together I had my doubts. Thank you all for your positive feedback, suggestions, and conversations.

As promised I’m posting my slides accompanied with a few other documents to help you establish your own processes.

I am releasing all of the following documents under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

Slides
Client Questionnaire
The Why of Web Design
Process Chart

Once again I want to thank all everyone for the great time and especially Jason and Val for the opportunity.

Where: Left Field
When: Saturday April 4th 8:30am - 4:30pm
Cost: $40
Limited Registration

There’s a great one day Web Conference going on in just a few weeks called Pittsburgh Web Design Day. The name says it all.  One day of really cool web stuff in Pittsburgh, kind of like a geek holiday. It’s brought to you by the great people at Refresh Pittsburgh, so you knows it’s going to awesome.

I’m especially psyched because I’ve been invited to talk about my processes.  My session is called ”The Story of a Web Project: Process and Best Practices” and basically it’s best practices of identifing good clients/projects, how to cost out a project, avoiding some commong pittfalls, and how to finish a project.

The speaker line up is jammed packed with fantastic people like Val Head, Samantha Warren, Geoff Barnes, and Chris Cashdollar. Spots are going fast so make sure to register early.

Last Thursday I had a chance to speak at the Pittsburgh’s Flash Users Group along with Val Head. Seriously if you haven’t gone yet you should.  It’s FREE and everybody that does any cool with Flash is always there.

Anyway, Val gave an excellent presentation on Phidgets.  Basically you can buy a board that understands RFID stips and using an AS 3.0 framework you can program scanning applications.  Very Slick. She demoed an app she wrote that scanned her microbes and other various items from her desk. It only costs about $75 to get started and some of the kits come with motors.

My presentation was about Red5 server.  I’ve started a group on campus where I work called the Grid and we’re experimenting with alternative interaction devices for computers and the web. In order to use some of the devices to interact with the flash player a media server is necessary.  That’s where Red5 Server comes into play.

I’m not an expert, but I showed how easy it was to get the server installed (on a mac) and up and running with some streaming apps.There are a lot of resources that come with the download, one of which is the Iron Man trailor in FLV format.  Nice!  There’s also fla’s the demonstrate how to itneract with the server. Unfortuneatly all the demo files are written in AS 2.0, so for fun I threw together a quick AS 3.0 streaming player. It wasn’t too hard

In case you missed the meeting here are my slides.  Hope to see you all at the next one.