The ATX Web Show!

Episode 20: The 20th Episode

davatron5000 — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 15:00:14 +0000

We’ve hit another milestone and we’re back with a brand new theme song! We talk about Gowalla Highlights, the new Apple Products, and listen to some messages from our phone number 409-BEEF-CAR.

Show Notes

Friend of the show, Steve Stedman calls in to let us know that in 2 weeks he’ll be speaking at the next Refresh Austin on the topic of Textmate-Fu.
Christopher Schmitt calls in to let us know about the Accessibility Summit that Environment for Humans is putting on.
Gowalla Corner: Gowalla announces their new Highlights feature.
Reagan Ray creates a Lo-Fi iTunes Icon
Vote for Paravel and other Austin businesses in The Net Awards

Exciting guests coming up! Get excited!

Informal Web Classes this September in Austin

davatron5000 — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:12:46 +0000

Jealous of all the college kids starting classes? Lamenting the loss of the UT’s Informal Classes? Here’s a 2 interesting “webucation” classes happening around town.

Intro to Behavior Driven Development

Sept 2nd ~ Sept 23rd :: 7PM-9:30PM :: 4 Thursdays Register Online

Budding Rubyists, heads up! Fed up with developers with poor test suites or no test suites at all, Keith Gaddis of IdeaFoundry is on a mission to teach about the joys of Behavior Driven Development. Here’s an excerpt:

This class is designed to give the beginning Rails developer (or an intermediate Rails developer who’s light on testing experience) a chance to get their feet wet with Behavior Driven Development (BDD). BDD is an evolution of Test Driven Development, using outiside-in testing techniques that focus on the user experience.

I’ll be attending this class! So let’s be best friends, and when we graduate you can sign my T-shirt.

Getting the Most out of WordPress

Sept 18th ~ Oct 9th :: 12PM to 5PM :: 4 Saturdays More Information

The organizers of the Austin WordPress Meetup are organizing WordPress classes. The first of these focuses on getting setup and learning the ins-and-outs of WordPress. Here’s part of the full description:

We focus on you, the user in this series of classes. The traditional business owner, the web-based small enterprise or the stay-at-home blogger can benefit from learning how to get the most from WordPress. This is a course designed to take you from beginner status up to that of a power user. We’ll stop just short of training you to become a developer, though after this course, you’ll be a better client for them.

If you’re getting started with WordPress or are WP-curious, this sounds like a great opportunity.

Vote Austin in the .Net Magazine Awards

davatron5000 — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:35:25 +0000

While you’re sitting around and just waiting for the next episode, we have some very exciting news. The voting card for the 2010 .Net Magazine Awards has been released and some Austinites are on the ballot. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the local talent up for a nomination:

Video Podcast of the Year: yayQuery

If you flashback to Episode 5, we were joined by Alex Sexton, 1/4th of the yayQuery podcast, and talked about yayQuery and the new jQuery hotness. The yayQuery team also organized the TXJS conference earlier this year, which was great! So vote for them.

Design Agency of the Year: Paravel

Yes, Paravel -as in your lovable hosts of the ATX Web Show, Paravel- are up for Design Agency of the Year. We’re pretty amazed and flattered to be on this list of 25 amazing agencies. We’d love to bring this award home to Austin. so if you have the time, please go vote. If you’ve already voted, thanks a lot. We really appreciate it.

Redesign of the Year & Mobile App of the Year: Gowalla

A favorite of the show, Gowalla, is up for 2 nominations: one for their redesign and one mobile app of the year. If you’re like me, then Gowalla is a part of your everyday life. I know that the folks over at Gowalla are nice as heck, hustle like a mofo, and just downright deserve it. They were one of Time’s 50 Best Websites of 2010, clearly they need another award or two!

Go to http://thenetawards.com and vote.

If I missed anybody or anything please let us know fast!

Next Week… A very special ATX Web Show

davatron5000 — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:20:38 +0000

Episode 19: Featured on TechCrunch with @paravelinc

davatron5000 — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:09:34 +0000

This week is a bit of a Potpourri episode and we’re joined once again by Trent and Reagan from Paravel! We discuss a wide variety of topics including but not limited to: The Many Faces Of… The Goonies (with iPad Game), Dave and Brian Hoff made Rebbbounds (a Dribbble API Tracking Blog) in 24 hours and 6 days later it was featured (as a link) on TechCrunch. We also discuss The 6 Commandments of Gowalla in King James English, the City of Austin Web Portal redesign, Alamo Rolling Roadshow posters, The Incident, and Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate. As you can tell, there’s quite a bit to talk about so we hope you enjoy.

Show Notes

The Many Faces Of… The Goonies with an iPad Board Game
Dave’s mini side project, Rebbbounds with Brian Hoff of The Design Cubicle got on TECHCRUNCH! (see the hyperlink text “covering new apps”).
Be sure to check out DDDDRIBBBLED! by Mattt Thompson
Gowalla announces their Checkin API and got featured on TechCrunch because of their 6 Commandments of the Gowalla API
2 HomeAway Announcements
- HomeAway iPhone App featured on TechCrunch
- HomeAway deploys the Gulf Coast Response Center http://oilspillhomeaway.ning.com
Mario with your Eyes http://www.waterloolabs.com/
Sneaky Games raised $325k for their Facebook game Fantasy Kingdoms
WPEngine launches http://wpengine.com/

THE MAIN EVENT

Austin Wants Your Feedback On Their Home Page Concepts (via The Austinist). Judge for yourself:
SXSW Panel Picker opened up! If you’re local and have a panel submitted, leave a comment.
Alamo Rolling Roadshow posters on http://apple.com/trailers

NON-LOCAL STUFF

The Incident
HTML5 Boilerplate by Paul Irish

Thanks for listening and we’ll see you again real soon! Oh. and if you want to sponsor the show, we want to buy new microphones, so let’s talk!

Episode 18: Big Data with @infochimps

davatron5000 — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:18:15 +0000

This week we feature the Infochimps who are one of the largest and most agile data suppliers in the world but located right here in Austin, TX. I sat down with Dhruv Bansal, Flip Kromer, and Jospeh Kelly and got the inside scoop on The Infochimps API, their huge collection of data sets and how they handle huge such massive amounts of information. To round off the interview we chat about the pros and cons of having a startup here in Austin. From our breakfast tacos to our tech community, there really are so many great resources here in town.

Infochimps Links

The Infochimps API
Trst.me – Check your Twitter Trust Rank (built using the Infochimps’ Trst Rank Data)

Links from the Interview

We talked about a lot of companies and products here in town, here are just a few.

Pivotal Labs Tech Talk: Experiment Driven Development Flip mentioned this in the interview
Austin Hadoop/Big Data User Group
Riptano
Capital Factory
Prefinery
IxDA Austin
WP Engine

Also don’t forget to hit up Refresh Austin this week. And you audiophiles, I’ll try better next week

Episode 17: Indie Apps with @coffeeshopped

davatron5000 — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:54:02 +0000

We’re back with another vacation minisode. This time it’s with local Indie Web/iPhone App developer, Chadwick Wood who runs Coffeeshopped, a small one man dev shop. Chadwick balances the line between full time freelance contractor and self-app-generating developer entrepreneur. He’s already got a handful of really cool apps to his credit: an augmented reality geolocation game, a time-tracking app for freelancers, and a couple experimental iPhone games that are math based awesomeness.

Our conversation bounces around topics from his apps, to scratching your own itch, to the big question of what happens when you start charging for your app. It’s a pretty relevant conversation as lots of people in the Austin community are building apps in their spare time and releasing them. Definitely worth a listen!

Show Notes

Coffeeshopped, an Austin-based web/iPhone software company, by Chadwick Wood. Chadwick also has a great blog that’s a really enjoyable read.
Sphericle – A social location-based game for iPhone and iPod Touch
Hour Patch – Proactive Time Tracking for the Self-Employed.
Glory Math – interactive, generative.

Episode 16: CSS with @teleject and @zomigi

davatron5000 — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 22:58:37 +0000

Today we’ve got a mini-episode, or “minisode” if you will, with Christopher Schmitt (@teleject) and Zoe Gillenwater (@zomigi) who are both authors of books on CSS. Christopher is helping host CSS Summit on July 28th, 2010, an online conference based here in Austin, with an impressive lineup of speakers, including Zoe herself. A really great episode with what I found to be a really nice impromptu discussion on CSS3 performance. Have a listen and buy their books!

Show Notes

CSS Summit – July 28th, 2010
Stunning CSS3 – Zoe’s brand new book on CSS3
Zoe’s Blog
Flexible Web Design – Zoe’s old book that still has great principles.
Environments for Humans iPhone iPad Summit – August 25th, 2010

Episode 15: ch@tter with @adonoho

davatron5000 — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:07:51 +0000

In this episode I’m rejoined by the guys from Paravel and we attempt to settle epic disputes with good old fashioned Page Speed Grudge Maches! Which is better, Star Wars or Star Trek? Tune in to find out. I also sat down with Andrew Donoho to talk about his new iPad app ch@tter, a new, effective way to monitor your tweet stream.

Show Notes

Donoho Design Group
ch@tter A new, effective way to monitor your Twitter stream. [iTunes Link]
weLost A social weight loss network where friends help friends lose weight. [iTunes Link]
Gowalla 2.2 for iPhone get this update to update your position!
Are You Watching This? just released a really awesome Chrome extension. Get this before football season starts up.
Refresh Austin July: Tool Roundup – This week Refresh is talking about tools that help you get the job done.
Page Speed Grudge Matches! with Which Loads Faster
Non-Hover Trent’s article on the :hover property

Thanks for listening! And we’ll be back with more brand new content next week!

Episode 14: Cafe Bedouins with @Damon

davatron5000 — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 18:58:18 +0000

This week I joined a special Cafe Bedouins event at Cospace and sat down with Damon Clinkscales. Damon has played a huge role in the web development community by helping start the monthly Austin on Rails ruby user group as well as a roaming weekly coffee shop hack night called Cafe Bedouins. We talked about his work, his side projects and his idea blog.

Show note links for Damon

Damon’s Blog, you must read his ideas posts.
SnapTweet
DoesFollow
Cafe Bedouins
Austin on Rails

Announcements

Lastly, links for the announcements from the beginning of the show.

Austin WordPress are going to talk about WordPress 3.0 on Tuesday night
Wednesday Morning Jason Cohen is going to speak at Cospace Meet Here Morning
Geek Austin PHP Study Group
Christopher Schmitt’s HTML5/CSS Flag
My post on speeding up atxwebshow.com