Podcasting On A Shoestring

Thursday, Febrauary 2, 2006, 11:30am - 1pm
(Networking 11:30-noon; Program noon - 1pm)
St. Vincents' Bruno Conference Center
Free for IPSA members and guests
RSVP Now!

While Podcasting has been around for quite a few years, the recent addition of Podcasts to Apple's iTunes Music Store have made it more popular than ever. But how do you go about creating and distributing a podcast? Tollie Williams will join us to talk about some of the tools he has used for the various Podcasts that he has created and distributed. For anyone that listened to Chase and Sam's TechTalk segment on 101.1FM, Tollie Williams is a familiar name. He often joined the guys in the booth and, in some cases, filled in for them.

Lunch will also be provided by Jason's Deli for an additional cost. You may order a lunch from Jason's Deli for $10 or bring your own. You may also pre-purchase a parking token for $2. Reserve your spot now!

Online payment made possible by PayPal. A PayPal account is not required to make your payment.

Web 2.0: Bubble or Not, Here It Comes

Thursday, January 12, 2006, 11:30am - 1pm
(Networking 11:30-noon; Program noon - 1pm)
St. Vincents' Bruno Conference Center
Free for IPSA members and guests
RSVP Now!

Web 2.0 has garnered a lot of buzz recently, but can it live up to the hype? Dimitri Glazkov, CTO of Gandalf Development will identify what defines Web 2.0, who the "rockstars" of the movement are, the technologies they are using, and the rules of the road for the Web 2.0 landscape.

Lunch will also be provided by Jason's Deli for an additional cost. You may order a lunch from Jason's Deli for $10 or bring your own. Reserve your spot now!

Online payment made possible by PayPal. A PayPal account is not required to make your payment.

Programming Survey

Bringing high-quality programs to our members and guests is the #1 goal of IPSA. We would like to hear from you about what you are interested in.

Are there program topics from the past that you would like to see again? Would you like to see more "how-to" topics? Maybe more web design topics or programming topics? How about more presentations from companies like Macromedia, Apple, or local companies talking about their products and services?

Please fill out this survey with your programming ideas and interests and we will see what we can do to accomodate them.

2006 IPSA Board

The 2006 Board of the Internet Professionals Society will officially take over on January 1. This board is a mix of familiar and new faces. The Board is as follows:

• Ed Noles, President (president@ipsaonline.org)
• Andy Harp, Past President (pastpresident@ipsaonline.org)
• Jeremy Flint, Programs/Communication (programs@ipsaonline.org)
• Anthony Oni, Membership (membership@ipsaonline.org)
• Dan Reynolds, Treasurer (treasurer@ipsaonline.org)

If you have any questions concerning IPSA, please feel free to e-mail the appropriate board member at the addresses above.

November Meeting: Blogging Discussion Panel

Thursday, November 3, 2005, 11:30am - 1pm
(Networking 11:30-noon; Program noon - 1pm)
St. Vincents' Bruno Conference Center
Free for IPSA members and guests
Lunch Available for $10
RSVP Now!
Bruno Conference Center is a WiFi hotpsot.

Your RSVP is requested to obtain an accurate attendance estimate.

Blogs have exploded onto the mainstream with the advent of easy-to-use tools and thousands of would-be journalists and average folks willing to post their daily observances on the web. Meet some of Birmingham's most prolific bloggers to learn how (and why) they do what they do.

• Ashley Umbach writes "Tales from My Tiny Kingdom," which will soon be hosted by iVilage.com


• Terry Oglesby, author of PossumBlog, one of Birmingham's most trafficked web logs


• Dmitri Glazkov, of Estrada fame, has been blogging development tips since December 2003 on his personal blog, http://glazkov.com/blog/


• Matt Cuthbert, al.com's Senior Editorial Producer, writes about nightlife and things to do on his al.com Entertainment blog and his life as a new dad on his personal blog, Impending Distractions


• Jeremy Flint, publisher of Red Hot and Daily and Senior Web Designer for Kinetic Communications will be our moderator and tour guide.

Lunch will also be provided by Jason's Deli for an additional cost. You may order a lunch from Jason's Deli for $10 or bring your own. Reserve your spot now!

Door prizes will be available, including O'Reilly books on Blogging and magazine subscriptions.

Online payment made possible by PayPal. A PayPal account is not required to make your payment.

LiveBlogging Macromedia

Greg Rewis is in town to talk about Studio 8.



They have included Contribute 3 in the Studio package to help designers and developers do maintenance on the site. They have also included Flash Paper 2 as a solution for printing on the web (as opposed to PDF).

Talking about Flash 8 Player now. New video codec that is as good as or better than anything on the web. Added new font display tools, graphic effects, improved performance and under-the-hood features to accelerate adoption of the new player.

The Flash player graphic performance has been tweaked for better playback - up to 30% performance increase. All you have to do is open old flash movies in Flash 8 and re-export them. New player also has Bitmap Caching, which allows vectors to be converted into Bitmaps for caching, which means that they don't have to be redrawn over and over.

Flash Player handles text better by giving you control for adjusting the sharpness and/or thickness of the text, as opposed to letting anti-aliasing handle it.

It is now easier to add graphic effects on the fly, such as light sources and drop shadows on animations. It is all done by adding actionscripts to text, animations, images, and even video.

Flash 8 also has alpha channel support in video.

Flash Player 8 had 10 million downloads in the first day it was released. But how can you get "your mom" to download the new version. Flash Player 8 has detection that is built in and works. Express Install lets users stay on your site and update their player. Soon, they will turn on AutoUpdate to notify you if there is a new version of Flash Player. This is triggered when you visit ANY flash content.

Flash 8 has no interface changes. Object Drawing mode keeps the fill and stroke intact, which helps it to work more like drawing in Freehand and Illustrator.

When you want to load external images in Flash, you can now include not only JPEGs, but you can also load external PNG and GIF files. You can also apply blend modes and drop shadows to items on the stange without changing the symbol in the library.

Editors Note: The meeting is over now so everything from here on is just my recollection of what Greg talked about.

After covering some of the new features of Flash 8 and the Flash 8 Player, Greg dove right into Dreamweaver 8. He started off showing how easy it was to put Flash Video into a website, supporting most, if not all, of the major video formats. You can even do Flash Video without having Flash installed, using the standalone Flash Video Encoder.

Next he showed us some of the new design features in Dreamweaver. They have gone to great lengths to improve on web standards, WCAG, CSS, and XHTML. Dreamweaver is also and XSLT editor now. They have also implemented a lot of new features, including the ability to zoom in (up to 1600%!) on the design and still edit it. Lots of new features to help with writing and editing CSS, including WYSIWYG design modes for creating alternate media stylesheets, such as Print, Handheld, WebTV, etc.

Truthfully, there are just too many new features to cover appropriately here.

Subscribe to our Newsletter

We are soon going to start sending out a monthly newsletter with news and information about IPSA as well as technology related news.

Simply enter your e-mail address in the box on the right side of this blog and you will be taken to a form to subscribe to our e-mail list.

We will also be using this list to send out meeting announcements.

We promise we won't sell your e-mail address to spammers. That's just uncool.

Macromedia Event Updates

Everything is right on track for our October meeting with Macromedia. We are getting a great response and slots are filling up fast. Remeber, attendance is limited to 150, so make sure to get your RSVP in so you will have a spot.

We are still in the process of lining up door prizes, but I thought I would post a partial list of what we will have available.

• Studio 8 Suite (a $999 value)
• Belking Pre-N Wireless Router (a $150 value)
• Books from O'Reilly
• Magazine subscriptions to MacWorld, Maximum PC, Communication Arts and others.

Make sure you RSVP now to reserve your seat for what is sure to be an exciting meeting.