big ideasSMALLDIGITALARTS

The June Tucson Digital Arts Community meetup will take place at the Dinnerware gallery in downtown Tucson.

Be there around 7pm.

264 e. congress street
Tucson, arizona 85701

We’ll be hosting a screening of the film Helvetica on Thursday, May 22nd.  The meet-up will begin around 7pm at The Screening Room with the film beginning at 7:30pm.  Afterwards join us at Hotel Congress for drinks and discussion.

This screening will be free, however donations to The Screening Room are recommended for the use of their facilities.

The Screening Room is located on the North side of Congress Street just West of 6th Avenue.

Jared McFarland will be giving a presentation covering Ruby on Rails on May 1st, at 6pm at 115 East Broadway Blvd., Tucson, AZ 85701.  Here’s a list of things I’ll be going over:

• What is Ruby?
• What is Rails?
• Setting up a new Rails App
• Scaffolding
• Database Migrations
• IRB
• RJS
• Ruby Console
• Some outside RoR resources that will be helpful

I’m going to do a really common tutorial known as the “15 minute blog tutorial”.  If you’d like to follow along you’ll need a computer with:

• A text editor
• Command line access
• MySQL Database
• Ruby on Rails

You can get Ruby on Rails those by following these links:

Windows: http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RailsOnWindows
Macintosh: http://developer.apple.com/tools/rubyonrails.html

Please visit www.Autopoetic.org for more information about this interdisciplinary event of art + music + performance.

If you’d like to participate in Autopoiesis 2008, please contact: info(at)autopoetic.org or check www.Autopoetic.org.

In May of 2007 visual artists, bands, dj’s, live aerosol artists, a fire performer and many viewer-participants gathered in Tucson, Arizona for a playful night of art, multimedia, performance and music. This convergent event, which embodied the creative spirit of a community, was given the name Autopoiesis. Based on the success of this gathering, organizers of the event realized that it was a process worth repeating. Please join us on the night of June 14th at Splinter Studios for Autopoiesis 2008!

Join us Thursday evening, April 17th, at 7pm.

115 East Broadway Blvd, Tucson, AZ 85701

Please bring drinks and snacks.

This talk will be given by Tim Bowen and go over the WordPress theme and plugins which make up TucsonDigitalArts.com.  We’ll go through basic CSS manipulation, PHP template editing, and plugin implementation.  The following features will also be explained:

• Integrating an Event Calendar (as well as a Google Calendar)
• Building Polls
• Newsletter sign up and management
• Forums
• Contact Forms
• Member Management
• and more!

Please come with snacks, drinks, suggestions and questions.  The talk will start shortly after 6:30 and last about an hour.

Location: 115 East Broadway Blvd., Tucson, AZ 85701

Follow Up:

For those of you at this workshop I’ve uploaded the TDAC WordPress Theme and the Plugins folder to explore.

WordPress Download
http://wordpress.org/download/

WordPress Hosted Version
http://www.wordpress.com
Want to play with wordpress but don’t want to install it, and don’t care if you can’t modify the templates?

WordPress Codex
http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page
This is the official WordPress documentation wiki.

Template Tags
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags
These are the calls you can make from any of your templates. I refer to this more than any other page.

Template Hierarchy
http://codex.wordpress.org/images/1/1d/wp_Template_Hierarchy.png
Which template do you need to edit when you want to make a change? This should help you find out.

WordPress Plugins
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
This is the master repository.

Favorite WordPress Plugins
http://www.blueprintds.com/2008/03/13/top-10-wordpress-cms-plugins/
http://www.creativeslice.com/ideas/wordpress/
Two good lists.

MAMP & XAMPP
Want to install WordPress on your local machine?
http://wordpress.org/download/
http://www.mamp.info/en/download.html (LAMP for Mac)
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html (LAMP for Windows)

Web Developer Toolbar
http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/
Every web developer should have this plugin installed in firefox. Amazing.

Also — WordPress 2.5 is coming out this week (or soon) It may make some of these plugins obsolete.

We’ll go through an entire basic installation of WordPress and also cover some essential template modification tricks. It would be helpful if you take a look at this before then:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

Come with questions based on issues that come up when you’re going through it. Also, bring snacks or beer if you’re so inclined.

After the fact:

• The handout you never received during the talk

We had over 15 people show up for this TDAC Workshop. (photos below)

Monty Edmonds is already holding 3d learning night (see below) but we’re looking to expand what we cover. Instead of just getting together to schmooze, let’s share our skills and raise the bar for the whole design and tech community.

We’ve come up with a preliminary list of ideas for talks — things people can present, and things people want to hear — and you can vote on them below. Even better, come up with your own talk topic and add to the comments below. We have the space, we have a projector, and mid-town is never far away.

Please leave a comment with your suggestions.

The March Tucson Digital Arts Community meet-up will take place this Thursday evening. Please bring your drink of choice and/or snacks.

Thursday, March 20th at 7pm to 10pm
115 East Broadway Blvd., Tucson, AZ 85701

Dress is casual, guests are welcome.

Below you can see some photos of this social event: