I presented this evening at the Dayton Adobe User Group meeting at SAA in Kettering. The topic was CSS in the Real World. I used Prezi.com to build my slides and have embedded them below for anyone to refer to.

Also, I reference a post on CSS3 Pagination (without images) in the presentation.

I’d love any feedback you have about the presentation. This is the first time I’ve spoken on CSS in this format and am always looking to refine.

• Ben Callahan | Work | Blog | Personal
• Jeff Friend | Work | Personal
• Andy Rossi | Work | Blog
• Mark Wells | Work
• Rob Harr | Work | Blog
• Mike Ward | Work | Personal
• Grant Root | Work | Personal
• Ryan Clark | Work | Blog | Personal
• Ryan Buttrey | Work | Blog

We got started off with a great conversation about how difficult it is to stay current with all the RSS we’re following. Mike and Grant both use Delicious tagging. While most of us are avid fans of Google Reader, we do get behind because of the rapidly changing industry we’re a part of. Shaun Inman has a beautiful little application called Fever that helps with this problem by tracking which articles are popular and bringing these to the top of your reader. Comment below if you have other ideas…

This month Jeff suggested that we each bring something to discuss. Here are a few of the items we discussed:

Andy Rossi did a quick review of Expression Engine, a PHP based content management system released by EllisLab. This is a platform he’s been reviewing and playing with. Things he likes: solid add-ons available, extreme customization ability, you don’t have to hack at PHP to use it.

Jeff Friend brought up a great conversation about designing in the browser. There has been a lot of talk about this lately on some pretty respected sites and even at An Event Apart. We had mixed reviews in the group about this work-flow. Most concerns centered around the difficulty in finding a web-designer who could code to the standard we all strive for. The opposite is also true, it’s not east to find coders that have a solid grasp of design principles.

Ryan Clark gave us a quick overview of Mail Chimp, a newer bulk email management system. It offers a great interface for managing your lists and emails, extreme flexibility in the structure of your lists and some great RSS integration features.

Rob Harr demo’d a super cool jQuery plug-in called AJAX Upload. It handles the selection and upload of an image with jQuery, allowing you to do this without a page refresh. Beautiful. [will add links when I can get Rob to provide them - he's surfing in Florida right now]

Grant actually brought HAND-OUTS and therefore wins the award this month for “Best Dayton Web Guys Presentation”. The article was from his blog, discussing @font-face integration with a site he manages. Some of the guys use other services to help, Font Squirrel and Typekit were two.

I demo’d a web-based design presentation tool I found called Vyoopoint. It allows you to upload images (or movies, swf’s, pdf’s) of designs for submission to your client. The client can then comment on the designs. It also handles versioning of your designs. There is a free account you can use to test the service.

As we were wrapping up, Jeff called out something called Primer CSS, which will parse your mark-up and generate a skeleton CSS file based on ID’s and Classes found in the document. Very interesting idea. We all recognized the difficulty of organizing a large CSS file and pitched around a few ideas for solving these problems. How do you handle CSS confusion as your sites grow? Leave a comment!

Thanks all for a great meeting. Look forward to the next…

• Ben Callahan { @bencallahan, bencallahan.com, forgeideas.com }
• Jeff Friend { @forwardmedia, forwardmediagroup.com }
• Rob Harr { @robertharr, robharr.com, forgeideas.com }
• Andy Rossi { @andrewrocco, iamrocco.net, forgeideas.com }
• Nathan Rambeck { @nrambeck, nathan.rambeck.org, rambeck.com }
• Ryan Clark { @ryanvsclark, ryanvsclark.com, realartusa.com }

Here’s a quick synopsis of some topics we covered:

• quick discussion of squarespace.com
• cool image tool tips at taggify.net
• jQuery tool tips called beauty tips
• bullet proof @font-face syntax from Paul Irish
• discussion on who could present common sense social media for small business
• discussion on the blurred line between personal social media and work social media
• quick review of zen coding
• cool site showing hardware and software of your favorite techy
• discussion about best IDE’s for web dev
  • Komodo
  • Coda
  • Eclipse
  • Dreamweaver
  • TextMate
  • PageSpinner

Great discussion guys. Thanks for attending and contributing. Looking forward to the next one!

{ Last Month’s Meeting Notes }

I had the opportunity this evening to sit down with a few great web guys from the Dayton area. We all have a passion for making the web beautiful and accessible, we all work for or own local, small businesses that provide web design and development services as a primary offering and we all want a group to discuss these things with. Here’s who made the first meeting:

• Mike Ward [Mike Ward Design // @mikeward]
• Jeff Friend [Forward Media Group // @forwardmedia]
• Nathan Rambeck [Rambeck Group // @nrambeck]

We met at The Greene and chatted about CSS, JavaScript, Drupal, all kinds of geeky stuff. I’ve provided a list of links below to some of the cool stuff that came up.

• blueprint css framework
• blueprint css grid generator
• 960 grid system
• apple-style pagination
• cool fixed-top nav bar
• css sticky footer
• using sprites in css to speed up page load
• firebug
• yslow
• typekit
• forge your dot org
• hover intent
• wordpress flutter
• hsla color in css3
• cool retro design
• css3 support in modern browsers

Wow. Looking back at this list, we probably have enough topics to keep us busy for the next six months. I’m also pretty sure I didn’t get everything. Obviously, we didn’t go into depth about all of these topics, but we touched on all of them at some point or another. I’d venture to say that these are the kinds of things we plan to focus on as a group. It’s the stuff we’re dealing with everyday and we’re always learning.

How Do I Get Involved?

If you’re interested in participating, the only requirements are that you work for or own a small business that offers web design or development as a key service and that you’re a nice person. Leave a comment below and a link to your site if you’d like to be considered for invitation. We’re always looking to meet folks who care about web standards.