VidSF & Gruntled Manufacture

Steve is a freelance web designer and front-end developer, and he finds this whole internet thing fascinating. When he’s not making websites, Steve battles a crippling videogame addiction, occasionally inconveniences his roommate by playing drums, and neglects his personal site at http://stevecochrane.com. You can email him at hq [at] stevecochrane.com.

About the Workshop

In this intensive hands-on 2 day weekend workshop, Shiva, the blog doctor, will teach you how to create, maintain and market your small business or service online using wordpress for content management and blogging.

Keeping with the spirit of Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg’s advice on innovation “Move fast and Break things“, all participants will get their own TEST website / blog powered by wordpress for the duration of the workshop plus a full month afterwards.

So don’t forget to bring your laptops! We have the coffee. The two-day workshop costs $300/person. If you are not happy after the first day, we will refund you!  Email us at office [at] parisoma.com to RSVP for your spot!

About the Instructor

Shiva, the blog doctor, has been blogging and building websites for small businesses since 1999. Of late, Shiva has helped several small business, bloggers and independant professional setup, grow and market their small business, service or professional blog. Shiva is also a Serial Blogger and is the primary author of blogs here, here, here, here and here.

Detailed Workshop Agenda

Saturday, April 10

10:00 to 10:15 – Introduction, Workshop Overview
10:15 to 11:00 – Conception, Setup
11:00 to 12:00 – Customization – Theme, Plugins, Widgets, Webdesign
12:00 to 12:30 – Lunch
12:30 to 1:00 – Customization – Theme, Plugins, Widgets, Webdesign (continued)
1:00 to 2:00 – Content Generation – Blogging. Posts, Pages, Tags, Categories, Feeds. Finding content. Engaging audience. Building Community
2:00 to 2:15 – Suggestions and Questions for Next Day
2:15 to 5:00 – Move fast and Break Things on your test website / blog. Start working on your real website / blog

Sunday, April 11

10:00 to 10:30 – Quick recap of previous day’s learings, and answers to questions from Participants
10:30 to 12:00 – Marketing – Search Engines. SEO. Sitemaps. Webmaster Tools, Analytics
12:00 to 12:30 – Lunch
12:30 to 2:00 – Marketing (beyond Search Engines). Events, Newsletters, Facebook, Twitter
2:00 to 2:15 – Course Wrap-up / Conclusion
2:15 to 5:00 – Sit in Parisoma and build your live website / blog with Shiva, the blog doctor helping you when needed

About the Venue

The pariSoma Innovation Loft is a beautiful, open, and sun-filled coworking loft in the SoMa district of San Francisco. While fully equipped with high-speed WiFi, kitchen, a 135-inch digital projection screen, and a conference room, the pariSoma Innovation Loft does more than just a provide desks and WiFi. We are a community of communities, a place to meet, and a coworking space.

Specifically, Shiva can help you with Wordpress, Tumblr and Blogger blogs as well as websites powered by wordpress (i.e. wordpress as CMS).

The Blog Doctor is offering 30 minute time slots of FREE consulting for free lancers, entrepreneurs, and small businesses on improving and customizing their blogs/websites.  Email us office [at] parisoma.com to reserve your spot now!

About the Instructor

Shiva, the blog doctor, has been blogging and building websites for small businesses since 1999. Of late, Shiva has helped several small business, bloggers and independant professional setup, grow and market their small business, service or professional blog. Shiva is also a Serial Blogger and is the primary author of blogs here, here, here, here and here.

About the Venue

The pariSoma Innovation Loft is a beautiful, open, and sun-filled coworking loft in the SoMa district of San Francisco. While fully equipped with high-speed WiFi, kitchen, a 135-inch digital projection screen, and a conference room, the pariSoma Innovation Loft does more than just a provide desks and WiFi. We are a community of communities, a place to meet, and a coworking space.

RSVP

by emailing office [at] parisoma.com to reserve a time!

This group is open to everyone but geared more towards users, so come check it out!

This month, Austin Chau and Pamela Fox from  Google will present a talk on the new Google Robot API.

The presentation slides can be found here.

Check out this blog for what’s happening now in Google Wave.

Agenda
630-700pm: Networking

700-800pm: Presentation By Austin and Pamela, Q&A

Pamela Fox loves to teach other developers how to use Google APIs. She spent her first 3 years at Google supporting the Maps API community, and now focuses her time on helping the rapidly growing Wave APIs community. In her free time, she likes to play around with any one of Google’s 60+ APIs, make drawings on her new Android phone, and learn the dance steps from pop music videos.

Austin Chau has been working at Google for three years. The API products that he had supported includes Google Gears, Google Calendar, and now he mainly spends his time surfing the Google Wave. In his spare time, he loves watching basketball and eating out.

800-830pm: Discussion

830-900pm: Networking

Here’s 1 minute about why you should pick locks and what the tools of the trade are!

Come on down and join our vibrant community of Drupal enthusiasts!

This month we have a GREAT case study.

AAA publishes its Via Magazine using Drupal.

http://www.viamagazine.com/

Come down and hear how David Wolfe talk about why AAA built this web site and why they choose Drupal as their solution.

Case studies are a great way to see how other people use Drupal to solve problems and create really cool content portals.

The tech talk will focus on the work and improvements to the Facebook for Drupal Project. Dave’s talk will provide an introduction to Facebook Applications, including Facebook Connect. We’ll talk about how these applications differ from typical web sites, and also how they are similar.

Drupal for Facebook is part of the Knight Drupal Initiative, and sponsored by a grant from the Knight Foundation. The presenter, Dave Cohen, is the project’s primary developer.

So come on down and have a beer and listen to 2 awesome presentations on Drupal.

Check out the Android Makers website here! We have an amazing group project (APEX, underway and almost ready for limited alpha release) our momentum is great. Also, Android as a whole is booming.

It’s really hard to get anything done alone. Sharing technique and knowledge is key in getting to a stable build. Meeting frequently, discussing our projects and presenting what we’ve made can bring the art to another level… We are a group of technologists, designers and hobbyists that support a healthy and empowered culture of collaboration and invention. We hold regular public meetings and maintain online resources for other Android Makers. The group meets in the spirit of the “home brew computer club” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club ) our public events are open to all makers, professionals and hobbyists alike.

Even if you come with little experience, we’re sure you can make meaningful contributions.

This event will focus on catching people up to where the group, and the technology, is now. We have lots to enjoy but we are leaving people behind. Too many people, both developers and users are stuck on Android 1.5 or 1.6. Some users are even trapped on *gasp* Android 1.

So we’re taking a moment to go back to day one of The Android Makers where Sid demonstrated how to unlock and upgrade the G1 and outlined the opportunity that is there for makers to enjoy a massive leap forward in their potential to create new and interesting devices.

Schedule for the night:

Open Handset Architecture: This is an intro to what Firmware is, why the “Radio” is really important, what an SPL does and what is in an Android ROM. This is designed to give you a basic understanding of the “moving parts” of an open handset.

Android Open Source, The Google Experience and The HTC Sense UI: This is a brief explanation on what is legal and what is not. The basic gist is that you can not distribute roms containing paid applications or proprietary code and you definitely can not sell a device which is running a rom that cotains these.

Upgrade Demo: We’ll upgrade a G1 from the locked, stock version of Android 1.5 to Android 2.1 with live wallpapers, voice control, speech to text, and more.

Nandroid Backup/Restore Demo: Here you will learn how to back up and restore the whole device.

Break

Unbricking Demo: This is where we will purposefully break all the rules, in the first section, mess up an upgrade and brick a G1 rendering it completely useless… & then we will magically bring it back to life

Demo Lab: For members who bring their G1, MyTouch, ADP1 or ADP2. This is where you upgrade your phones and myself and some of our members will help you if you run into problems.

The Android Makers: This is a brief intro to the group, a brief history, including why we do what we do and how to get involved.

Nothing is set in stone, and we’ll be working out the flow of the night for the next couple weeks and inviting relevant people and companies to participate.