Local web ninja Jared McFarland summed it up nicely in Capitalizing on the Tucson Tech Community.

We, as a community, can work together to educate and inspire one another. We can enjoy the same benefits as the people in major tech centers simply by knowing each other and inventing ways to work together. It isn’t about vast numbers of people, but small passionate groups. The web brings like minds together globally, but we can now use the web to find each other and act locally. We can turn Tucson into something intentional, and beautiful, for ourselves and the city.

The larger Tucson community is also bubbling with social events like Ignite Tucson and the myriad of Twitter meetups (“Tweetups”). Just search Twitter for #tweetup #tucson to be amazed. These events cover a much broader range of topics than web design and development but they all share a common goal: to mingle, network, and share with others.

This is how I think it breaks down: socially, the larger community wants to meet itself and technologically, web designers and developers are joining together to improve the tech community. All of this energy and enthusiasm is contagious!

In contrast, I want to share the story of the Tucson Geek Meet¹, a group I was personally involved with for four years. Started as the Tucson Web Standards Group in 2003 by Molly Holzschlag, the Geek Meet slowly lost momentum over time. Instead of growing and expanding, it stayed a small core of five or six people.

Don’t get me wrong, because of those meetups the five or six of us are now steadfast friends, and several of us have had the opportunity to work together. Now that we are friends we can socialize anytime—we don’t need to call it anything. The idea of the Geek Meet isn’t going away, it’s just being replaced by ad hoc Tweetups and other social happenings around town.

What I want to encourage, and I think Jared hit on this, is not just the social aspects of meeting together but the educational and inspirational benefits of sharing code, experiences, and real-life examples of our work. TDAC is spearheading the effort by organizing workshops and collaborative coding days to get people together to educate, inspire, network, and improve. I’ve been a part of TDAC for six months now, and the tech community in Tucson isn’t just soaking it up, it’s clamoring for more.

We’re hoping soon to have a Refresh Tucson—our neighbors in The Valley have had a strong Refresh presence for three years—we can do the same here in the Old Pueblo. So please participate: join up, tweet up, meet up, share, and pass the word to your colleagues and friends.

Let’s do it, Tucson.

How to get involved

Tucson networks to join and participate in

• Tucson Digital Arts Community
• Further Tucson
• Refresh Tucson
  (Coming soon… For now join the TDAC Refresh Tucson group to give your input.)
• Search Twitter for #tweetup #tucson and come join the fun.

Are you on Meetup.com? Tell your Meetup.com cronies to join the fine sites listed above, especially if you are on the Meetup.com Web Standards “waiting list”. Wait no more!

Notes

¹ The Tucson Geek Meet is no more, it’s pushing up the daisies, it’s kicked the bucket. This meetup is not pining for the fjords, it’s gone to meet it’s maker. It’s… OK, enough of the Monty Python!

For posterity, here is a brief history of the Tucson Geek Meet:

2003(?): Started by Molly Holzschlag.

2005: Tucson Web Standards Meetup moved to Upcoming by Lance (from Meetup.com). We met at B-Line and Famous Sam’s. See Molly’s 2005 post and my 2005 post as well as the Upcoming group page.

2006: Met monthly at the Old Chicago patio. A few Flickr photos from 2006 events: Great Discussion at Tucson Web Standards Meeting, Geoff in Action.

2007: Changed the name to Geek Meet.

2008: The infamous Hooter’s incident. D’oh! (Yes, Molly gave us a good lashing for that, and it was deserved.)

2009: Called it quits in favor of other local groups and Twitter meetups.

This post was originally titled “Rest in Peace, Tucson Geek Meet” but I decided that it was just a small part of the burgeoning Tucson web design and development scene.

If you keep your head down and stay out of the shouting matches, often ignoring them simply because you don’t have the time or energy, you are labeled as complacent.

The middle ground, if there is one, is to be pragmatic. Embrace standards and strive to meet them as much as possible, but know when to give in and just get the job done. Or better yet, build something the right way, and lead by example.

I’m ashamed it’s taken me all these years to come to this realization, but hey—better late than never.

AZ-Birding.com, a free service of WINGS, launched in February 2009. I have worked with WINGS since 2005, and this latest project is exciting since it brings focus to Arizona (as compared to WINGS worldwide presence) and enables anyone to hire a local birding expert to explore the state’s wonderful birding specialties.

The site’s main focus is taking reservations, so the majority of the work revolved around managing calendars, the reservation process, and the guides’ availability with a custom CakePHP web application. The CakePHP app has two parts: public-facing pages with reservation forms and guide information and an administrative area for WINGS to manage all the details.

The goal for the administrative aspect of running AZ-Birding as a service was simple: automate the process as much as possible. To do this, the app has built-in functionality that runs automatically to produce reminders, late notices, and feedback requests (sent out to clients after their birding experience is over). This automation reduces the office workload for WINGS while ensuring a high-quality, consistent experience for clients. This hands-off approach safeguards against common situations where an administrator would have to step in and take action, like when a birding guide might be out of the country—or offline for a few days—and cannot respond directly to a reservation request.

The pages that don’t pertain to managing reservations are managed with WordPress. This decision was based on two realities: much more development time and effort would be required to cook up a CakePHP-based CMS, and WINGS is already familiar with the WordPress product and interface as the content editor and producer of the WINGS blog, Wingbeat.

As an added bonus, the site also tracks the latest Arizona bird rarities—meaning WINGS can post alerts when rare or special birds are sighted in Arizona. The home page and the “Latest Rarities” page both feature these alerts (entered into WordPress as blog posts) as well as custom data delivered by eBird, a free service of Cornell Lab or Ornithology. For example, the eBird data feed for “Notable Sightings in Arizona” not only brings more value to the AZ-Birding website as a birding resource, but it also provides potential clients with an idea of what to look for—hopefully enticing them to place a reservation if they see something that excites them. All the bird-related content on AZ-Birding is geared towards providing a reason to book the short-term tour with the service’s expert birding guides.

Two people contributed to this project outside of simpledream, and I owe them thanks. Sam Devore did the heavy lifting on the data modeling and backend CakePHP setup, and also contributed greatly to the project planning efforts, including work on user actions and workflows during the planning stages. The AZ-Birding logo (inspired by the gorgeous Elegant Trogon) was designed by Julie Hecimovich.

See the official announcement from WINGS, view all the screenshots on Flickr, and read more details in the simpledream portfolio.

First, review the recently-released results of the 2008 A List Apart Survey. The responses and accompanying analysis will give you insight into what web professionals charge, what their job titles are, how many hours a week they work, and much, much more. Included are many statistics regarding freelance workers and how their habits and experiences compare with those of more traditional web workers.

On getting paid and how much to charge:

• Coroflot – Setting your rate and getting paid
• Blue Flavor – Pricing A Project
• My take on getting paid on time (from a freelancer’s perspective) – Business Priority: Get Paid on Time

These web professionals address freelancing from both sides—moving from a traditional workplace to freelancing and also giving it up to go back to working for a company.

• Jonathan Snook – Being Square
• Cameron Moll – Farewell to freelancing: Final lessons learned
• Garrett Dimon – Steps to Becoming a Freelance Web Developer
• Matt Brown – The First Four Months of Freelancing
• Jeffrey Veen – Values and client work
• Andy Budd – 7 Habits of a Highly Successful Freelance Web Designer

Since freelancing for me is about doing what you love, I’d like to include two short, inspirational pieces:

• Tim O’Reilly – Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles
• David Heinemeier Hansson – Put a dent in the universe

And finally, as recommended listening, listen to the panel conversation Jeffrey Zeldman moderated as this year’s SXSW Interactive conference: “From Freelance to Agency: Start Small, Stay Small”.

I’ve always done kind of weird, strange things, and that’s what I get hired to do: weird, strange things. The type of work you make is the type of work people will hire you to do.

Joshua Davis inspires me, not because he is a world-class Flash artist that creates complex, 120,000-layer files in Illustrator in five minutes¹, but because he isn’t afraid to be himself. In fact he’s been extremely successful at creating art and websites that are as individual as he is.

One of my goals for 2009 is to find a balance in my work as a web designer/developer with what I find important and valuable in life. If I produce work that isn’t fulfilling, or if I feel like I’m not working towards doing stuff that matters, it isn’t because I’m doomed to serve a particular client or style—but because of the fact that what I’ve done is what people hire me for.

Maybe it’s time to make something a little bit different?

¹ Read about Joshua’s work at Apple Pro Profiles: Joshua Davis.

Alkaline is a new Mac application from Litmus that allows you to “tests your website designs across 17 different Windows browsers right from your Mac desktop.” It works as a standalone app, or with Coda and TextMate using plugins. The free version tests in Firefox and Internet Explorer 7, and if you sign up for a paid Litmus account you can test in all 17 browsers.

Load Impact is an online testing tool to simulate high user loads. There is a free option allowing you to simulate a low load level, and the test results help you see which assets (CSS, images, JavaScript) are slow-loading or problematic as well as how the site performs the more users hit it at once. I don’t see this replacing YSlow for quick and dirty speed tests and load optimization, but it could be an awesome tool for larger websites that need to do “real” stress and load tests.

Of course, it is a bonus when you are your own client—if you use your own product, then you can answer user experience questions from both a professional and a personal perspective.

I want to share with you an example of a non-traditional use for WordPress. As I’m sure you may know, WordPress is the most popular blogging software on the market. It is easy to use and customize, makes web publishing simple—it gets the job done. What you might not know, however, is that it does more than just blogs and simple CMSs.

I’d like to share one specific example of how I use WordPress to collaborate with a remote team. I figure I can kill two birds with one stone: I am going to show you how to use a WordPress custom theme for collaboration in a work environment, and at the same time I hope to encourage you to explore alternative uses of WordPress.

I live in an RV and travel around the country, so most of the time when I’m working with my colleagues, I am working remotely. That means that how I collaborate with a dispersed group of people is extremely important since we don’t have lots of face to face time. Even if you aren’t a stay-at-home or remote worker, you still have to collaborate, right? Even if it means sending an instant message to the guy in the cubicle five feet away from you.

Who’s done that before? I think we all have. My point is that even if you are in a traditional office environment, it doesn’t mean that all your interactions happen face to face.

We all know that good communication is the key to getting things done. And I think my example tonight applies to in-house web design and development teams just as much as it does to freelancers or remote workers like myself that typically use email, instant messaging, and project management software to collaborate; those technologies take the place of the face-to-face interaction.

What I am doing right now?

Collaboration might not be the right word… I’m not going to cover what it means to manage projects with clients and how to collaborate on tasks and timelines. Instead, I want to talk about the simple communication that happens all day long. Answering this question, “What I am doing right now?”

How do you normally share that type of information with your group? And how do you keep tabs on your coworkers’ updates as well? Typically that would be done via email, phone calls, short meetings in the hallway, putting colored cups on top of your cubicle (hey—don’t laugh at that one, it works really well in some situations).

My sister once worked in an office where one way of saying “what am I doing right now” was exactly that: they had a red cup that meant “I’m busy”, and a blue cup that meant “I’m free.”

When these traditional methods don’t work, or if they aren’t practical, we often look to other tools for sending out quick and simple updates. Updates that are sent without much preparation or the need to open software. Updates that are asynchronous—meaning other people don’t have to respond right away—the message will be there for them when they are ready to read it.

Twitter

Lately it seems like there are more and more products being created to handle this type of communication. One great example is Twitter. It’s awesome, right? You get 140 characters to describe what you’re doing or how you’re feeling, or to post a link. Twitter is extremely popular because it gives you that “chatroom” feel of constant conversation. It’s quick and easy to post but can be engaging and effective.

It can be a really great way to simulate being in the same room with someone.

Twitter users share their personal updates with each other by answering the question, “What are you doing right now?” That question is typically a label on the text entry field on the Twitter website, for example. It’s the same action as updating your Facebook status to say you are having a bad day, or what you movie you are going to see that night. You just want to share a quick update without writing an epic saga or opening up your blog software to write a new post.

Twitter has changed how people interact. It’s effective precisely because it’s so simple. No tags or categories, no spellcheck, no formatting, just post it and it’s out there for all the world to see.

But what if you just need to communicate with one small group of people?

About a year ago, right here in Arizona, the makers of WordPress (Automattic) were having their yearly company gathering just north of here, in Oracle. They were thinking this same thing, and there they came up with a theme called Prologue that replicates Twitter-like interactions within a WordPress website.

Just like Twitter, Facebook, and other social web apps promote lifestreaming, Prologue promotes workstreaming for your team. Workstreaming is the publishing of work-related activities and events to your remote colleagues. Some might say that it’s also a way to convince your boss that you’re actually working!

What are you working on right now?

Prologue helps you answer the question, “What are you working on right now?”

My work as a consultant sometimes means being part of a small team—for one team I work with often Prologue has become one of our most-used communication tools. Besides constant updates on what we’re doing, we use Prologue as a scrum tool: every morning we all post our daily goals and roadblocks.

We also use it for sharing links and tips. But the main purpose for using Prologue is to update each other on our status.

Prologue helps you collaborate

How does Prologue help you collaborate better? Prologue is successful because it requires almost no work to post an update. The easier you make it for your team to post, the more they will use it.

• It encourages short updates.
• It allows a quick post on the home page—there is no need to view the admin site.
• It allows comments so you can create a conversation around what you posted.
• You can add tags and categories just like normal blog posts in WordPress, but you don’t have to. Like Twitter, you can just type and post.
• You then use RSS feeds to track your coworkers’ updates. Or if your the boss, you sit there all day and hit Refresh! (Just kidding!)

Prologue is free, and easy to set up and use. All you have to do is download and install the theme, then enable it. It’s that easy. Even easier, you can sign up for a free Wordpress.com account—it’s a default theme there, so you don’t even have to download it.

Here’s how easy it is to start using Prologue with a free WordPress.com account.

1. After you’ve signed up for a free Wordpress.com blog, log in and enable the theme.
2. Then go to the blog home page, and post an update.
3. Invite other users to join by adding them to the account.

That’s it!

Based on the default WordPress privacy settings, your Prologue setup can be public, or password-protected (meaning available only to your group). The password-protection is available with Wordpress.com by default—if you are running your own WordPress site, then you’ll need to implement password protection on your own.

Try it for yourself

View the Auttomatic team’s live Prologue demo, and I’d encourage giving it a test run on your own WordPress site.

The reality of unwanted image downloads is a bit depressing: there is no guaranteed way to protect your images from being taken—the most you can do is discourage it.

First, make sure your copyright notice is clearly posted on each page indicating that downloading or using images without permission is not allowed. In doing so you are legally holding your site visitors accountable if they steal and reuse your content.

If you suspect that image search engines or IE-only users are the culprits, using client- and server-side techniques might help alleviate the problem. But if you are looking for a universal solution, editing the images is your best bet since all these techniques can be circumvented by taking screenshots, using screen scraping tools, or simply viewing the locally cached images.

Client-side techniques

• Disable the right-click menu
• Disable the shortcut menu in Internet Explorer
• Use a transparent image overlay

There are JavaScript solutions for disabling the right-click contextual menu; unfortunately, it will only deter a few people. Anyone that is intent on stealing images can still do so. In older versions of Internet Explorer you can disable the image shortcuts that appear when you hover over an image; again, if that is your target browser (or if you suspect that’s where it’s coming from) then implementing IE-specific techniques might work.

Most right-click disabling scripts rely on browser-specific functionality or JavaScript, making them unreliable in other browsers. The downside is that you risk annoying your real customers by removing expected menus and links.

Another technique—which Flickr employs—is the transparent image overlay. This involves layering a transparent GIF over the top of the image you wish to protect. When the image is right-clicked and saved, the person assumes they are downloading a JPG but instead get the transparent GIF.

From Flickr’s download prevention help text:

Preventing people from downloading something also means that a transparent image will be positioned over the image on the main photo page, which is intended to discourage people from right-clicking to save, or dragging the image on to their desktop. By “discourage” we do mean simply “discourage”. Please understand that if a photo can be viewed in a web browser, it can be downloaded. The transparent image overlaid on the photo will not keep your images safe from theft, and is intended only as a slight hindrance to downloading.

Using Flash to display images is another method to discourage image theft (since Flash right-click menus can be customized), but it isn’t foolproof. Just like these other techniques, people can simply take a screenshot to capture the image.

Server-side techniques

• Block image search engines
• Disable image hotlinking

Image search a popular way to access images. If you notice a lot of traffic from image search engines, try blocking them with a rule in your robots.txt file. See Remove an image from Google Image Search for more details.

I also recommend disabling hotlinking by adding rules to your site’s .htaccess file. Doing so will not only potentially save you bandwidth costs by stopping other sites from reusing your images and content, it will prevent directly linking to your images without your permission.

Image content editing

• Add watermarks
• Use very low quality images

Although altering the image affects how it looks and works on your site, it is quite a bit more effective than simply trying to disable downloading or saving. Again, this is only a means to discourage theft — skilled graphic artists can remove a watermark and still have a usable image.

Using low quality images could also help, but finding a good balance between impressing your customers and deterring theft can be difficult.

Bottom line

If someone really wants the image, they will get it. Using the techniques described above will discourage most people from downloading your images, but remember that posting your images online means you run the risk of anyone downloading and reusing them.

Further reading

• Don’t Disable Right Click!
• How to Protect Your Pictures and Photos on the Internet
• Tips and Techniques to Protect Images on the Internet

My rule of thumb is to use color only as a secondary indicator. This means that an important detail in my user interface should not rely on color alone to indicate meaning.

This type of design decision came up recently in my work on DF Studio. As part of a redesign for version 5 of the software, the design called for colored icons to show status for a photographer’s online portfolio. A green icon for an active portfolio and yellow icon for a disabled one (a disabled portfolio is not accessible to public viewers).

The problem with the icons being only differentiated by color is that a color-blind person that can’t distinguish yellow versus green would not be able to easily know the portfolio’s status.

The solution was simple: add a lock overlay to the disabled yellow icon. You can now easily tell that one is “locked” and one is not.

It is always good to run your design through a color-blind testing tool like Colorblind Color Filter or Vision Simulator. The DigitalFusion development team is fortunate in that the CTO of the company (who is also our product development manager) has a color vision deficiency; since he is constantly looking at the interface we have a way to find color-blindness issues in early stages of development.

If you work on websites or any kind of visual user interface, I would highly recommend reading the Particletree article, including the Additional Reading links. Knowing about the problem is half the battle, and you’ll be able to keep color-blindness in mind when developing and designing your interfaces.