The best WordPress Twitter 1.1 solution I have seen so far is this little gem: Twitget by Boštjan Cigan.
Its free, installs easy, and there is a silent yet effective YouTube video to help guide you on your way through the Twitter applet creator.

The widget allows you to add custom html to let you revise the css in ways that actually wern’t possible in any of the tools I saw in 1.0 so kudos to Bostjan for expanding the features and making this problem into an opportunity.

I’m currently using this plugin on another site of mine: http://www.TEDxBushnellPark.com
Hope this help.

My notes are as follows:

Obstacles Large Organizations Face:

• HR Considerations:
  • Allocations – Resources must have 100% load to be considered efficient
  • Roles – People are rigidly defined in a role
  • Incentives – Personal incentives  given primarily for personal goals
  • Regulatory Constraints:
    • Finance, Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals
    • Incremental Delivery – Must release all at the same time
    • Scale – “Agile cannot be used on large projects”
    • Distributed Teams – “Agile has to be done on site”

• Documentation Requirements – Real or Imaginary
  • Who reads the documentation and write the required amount of documentation.
• Architecture Requirements
  • Key people have to commit for the origination of the project or the project will suffer as a result.

3D Adoption: Agile Adoption of Agile

• Roll out practices with business value
• Paves way for futre agile advancement
• Introduce more concepts over time
• Address corporate and culture concerns early
• Conduct leadership / platform level retrospective

Where can you compromise?

• Create a fully agile team
  • Slowly introduce these practices to other areas
  • Add Primary and Secondary roles to resources instead of additional projects
    • Create ‘Generalized Specialists”

• Documentation Requirements:
  • Ask to change the format and product only what what has a clearly defined “consumer”
  • The tests for your project can generally be used to document what it something should do and how it would work. Perhaps use Epic stories or Use cases to describe a function.

• Architecture Requirements
  • Set up “Platforms” or “turfs” allowing designers and architects to specialize in broader areas and allow for cross pollination.
  • Key roles must commit to project during start up.

Where CANT you compromise?

• Stories written from business perspective must deliver business value on each iteration

Companies can benefit from:

• Agile coaches + Mentoring
• 3 projects before people really get it

Success Stories:

• IBM: Websphere – They were eventually producing software faster than their customers could consume it.
• Michael Mah
• Merask Shiplines

Read: Jefferson and the Art of Power
Scott Ander, or Ellen Goldensteiner

Key resources at this point are the Mailing List, Blog, and Forum.
Eventually I would like to see meetup and class schedules, list of equipment / wishlist, member or project bios and other fun content, but first I suppose we should finish setting up the space.

The tech & entrepreneurial communities within Hartford have grown considerably in the last few years and I think a Critical Mass has been struck. Now, we need a space.

The goal of this venture will be to create an “open” technology working space for the downtown area of Hartford. This space will rent out private work stations and offer many of the amenities of working within a larger community such as office resources and hardware, meeting spaces and technical support, receptive community members, classes and events, and of course, gourmet coffee.

A facebook group has been created:  http://www.facebook.com/groups/429751137090798/
Other documents will be made available as they are ready for public consumption.

The rest is still in the works as the speaker list is still developing and the location is TBA. However, I’ve been meeting potential speakers and am in talks with several venues. I’d like this event to showcase the innovative work that Hartford is doing to improve not only itself, but also the world as a whole.

There will be more announcements in the future and work has already started on the website and social media pages.
Anyone interested in contributing to this effort is welcome to contact me. Please include your reason for taking interest, what you think you can help with, and your favorite TED video.

Currently looking for:

A/V Tech(s)
Event Coordinator
Grant writer
Interns

I’ll be showing pieces from my newest series “Primal Colors” and expect to have between 15 – 20 pieces for sale.

The opening segment was a group activity to build a tower from marshmallows, pasta, tape and string. This was an awesome idea. It immediately woke people up and forced them to start interacting with one another.

The conference room lighting was dark, but with cool red flood lighting on either side of the stage.
There were 2 Camera people and 4 Cameras

Digital Learning for All Now: Jonathan Costa at TEDxLitchfieldED
Are there differences between college and workforce ready?
How are they different?

“If you ask the wrong question, you will get the wrong answer”

Quote from Deming:
Common causes (Systemic, predictable, controllable)
Special causes (Random and unpredictable and beyond control)

As you prepare for special causes, we inevitably do it at the expense of the commons

To get kids ready for a digital future, we need to show them how to use new technology.

We used to think that kids using technology would lead them to sit in a room by themselves. Now, teachers are finding that most of what these kids do with technology is communicate with one another.

What happens to learning when everyone can get anything from anywhere? IE: Wikipedia.
Its impossible for teachers to teach 21 century skills if they dont possess them themselves.
If we limit access, we limit ability.

Every time we spend an annual budget on books and analog tasks we fail to turn ourselves into a digital school system which can leverage the advances of technology and create a more productive learning environment.

If you could afford to do it, would you do it?
When the right thing to do becomes the least expensive thing to do – there are fewer barriers to doing it. We are quickly getting to that point in education.

Wrong Question: Are we getting kids ready for the workforce, or are we getting them ready for college? And is getting them ready for college different than the workforce?

By pouring complete faith into testing we are pushing a special cause (a perceived weakness in reading writing and math) onto everyone and limiting kids from learning about everything else. It’s a model that doesn’t allow for creativity… and what if we’re wrong?

1. Everyone is a designer
“Rats. My client thinks he is a designer. “
He is a designer, just an extremely bad one.Good designers are the only mentors for bad designers

2. You have no power
If you have little territory, fortifying it buys you nothing

Power can be:
A. Granted
B. Earned
C. Claimed

Whoever uses the most jargon has the least confidence in their ideas
In room power: The power to change ideas during a meeting
Out of room power: The power to change ideas after the meeting

3. The generalists are in charge
If there are more than 5 people in the room, you have less power than you think

Be the first to the whiteboard to frame the issues and take the power.

4. We work in sales (regardless of your job title)
Everyone has to pitch ideas

Surprise: these are sales tasks
• Prototyping
• Pitching
• Evangelizing
• Going to meetings run by someone else
• Asking for resources
• Giving presentations
• Growing influence

If people think you are smart and useful your job title is irrelevant
If people think you are dumb and useless your job title is also irrelevant

5. Creativity is Risk

Who will:
- Ask the tough question
- Do the extra work
- Be willing to fail, and learn
- Put their reputation on the line
- Commit to a big crazy idea

Content can be the design problem:
Our designs are often hostile to content
The content users want can be hidden away under promos, titles, ads, images, and generally lost in the layout of a page
Designers may no longer control the visual experience
Maybe they never really did (They make mockups, developers build it. This makes the final product at best an interpretation of the original vision and then further abstracted because of the browser.)

Bypassing your design is no longer a minority activity.
Driven by user’s need for content.

So what is the designer’s job?
To serve the customer. To connect the right user with the right content at the right time.

Design that does not serve people does not serve business.
Good web design starts with content.

Content precedes design.
Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.

Small screen means content first.
What’s good for mobile may be good for all.

Patterns
Everything uses patterns and its not lazy

We learn by:
Imitation
Repetition
Innovation

Microformats:
Solve a specific problem
Start as simple as possible
Design for humans first, machines second
Reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
Modularity / embeddability

Solve Small Problems
Placeholder HTML5 attribute can mock javascript hide and show
jQuery poly-fill can be used to mock place holder attributes in nonsupported browsers

Aria landmark roles
Role attribute can be used to help screen readers know which semantic element is the correct one.
Example: there are w <nav> on a page, but only one has <nav role=navigation”>

Use of nth child [advanced selectors] on non critical enhancements, even though its not supported in all cases.
Don’t rely on advanced selectors for layout, which may not have across the board support
HTML5 allows for block level elements inside of A tags.

DIY Frameworks
SASS / LESS / Pre-processors  – Allows for rendering and computations inside of CSS code. Install SASS 3.2
Use tools to plug holes that don’t alter your craft
Test out Scout / Code Kit – to see what it does

WHAT IS SASS?
Sass is a meta-language on top of CSS that’s used to describe the style of a document cleanly and structurally, with more power than flat CSS allows.

Allows you to use variables and do computations as part of CSS sheet generation.
WICKED WICKED WICKED COOL!!!

Mixins allow you to use functions and variables within your CSS code
Mixins allow you to pass peramaters into the function and allow for multiple arguments to be passed.

Also allows you nest media queries (including variables px widths) inside of a class or ID so you can track the ID through various media queries

DRY
Dont
Repeat
Yourself

Adaptive version:
Start with a single breakpoint (~500px)
Solve small problems
Let content dictate breakpoints
Simplify elements and remember why visitors are there in the first place to see your content)

 Multi-column-count: 2
A css property to set ul tags into multiple cols

Use Media Queries to send correct BG images to Retina Deiplays

Example of background-size:
@media only screen and (max-width: 500px)
! and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2) {
#logo a {
background: url(logo-retina.png) no-repeat 0 0;
-webkit-background-size: 75px 19px;
-moz-background-size: 75px 19px;
background-size: 75px 19px;
}
h4#pixels-total {
background: url(ball-retina.png) no-repeat 0 0;
-webkit-background-size: 46px 56px;
-moz-background-size: 46px 56px;
background-size: 46px 56px;
}
}