Iowa JavaScript Meetup in Iowa City at MetaCommunications (Creative Corridor JS meetup)
This month’s Iowa JavaScript again took place at the headquarters of MetaCommunications at 201 E Washington St in Iowa City. Our event host Nathan L. Smith (Twitter, GitHub) got us started with a going around the room “tell us a bit about yourself.” Then Sam Beran (GitHub) talked about a javascript library that he found called Nativefier. Nativefier is a command line tool that allows you to easily create a desktop application for any web site!
Fun with RUM (ClojureScript language)
Clojure
Next up Uday Verma (GitHub) talks about RUM (made by Nikita Prokopov) a library for ClojureScript language that compiles to JavaScript. He uses figwheel to build the ClojureScript code and hot loads it into the browser as you are coding!
Angular 2 by Nathan L. Smith
Our fearless leader Nathan L. Smith then delves into Angular 2. I found the Syntax with the use of multiple types of brackets impressive! It makes sense that each bracket is used for specific reasons!
Left : Uday Verma and Nathan L Smith is on the right.
As always, thank you to MetaCommunications for the free beer and pizza at this event!
Gravity Forms course at Cedar Rapids WordPress meetup group
I co-organize the Creative Corridor (Cedar Rapids & Iowa City) WordPress Meetup group in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. At this month’s event on Apr 19, 2016, I was able to get (kinda guilt tripped) Andrew Miller the owner of https://www.84em.com/ into giving us a detailed overview of what the plugin Gravity Forms can do for a WordPress admins. Tonight he covered topics like credit card integration, adding posts automatically to your website, integrating into the mySQL database, collecting emails/names/etc and many other powerful features that lots of people didn’t even know could be achieved via this plugin. The developer version expands this plugin’s abilities with multiple add ons plus advanced email routing features. One of Andrew’s most favorite add ons is Zapier (see video at 16:00). Zapier currently offers integration of 400+ apps. Integrate/connect apps you use on the web and easily move data between them is now easy with Zapier & Gravity Forms! A full list of additional Gravity Forms add ons are listed here.
Other topics discussed at WP event
I also shared with the group a website called BuiltWith technology lookup site. It’s design to find out what websites are built with! Use it to find what technologies are used in the creating of any website. The accuracy is quite astonishing!
If you aren’t a member of WordPress Tavern and the multiple discussions that are taking place about new features added to WordPress you are doing something wrong. Simply join using your own WordPress.com credentials. They will keep you abreast of new APIs, WordPress releases, WordCamps and much more!
We talked about Freemius for the WordPress plugin developers. They have created a way to start making revenues from your plugin in minutes, about ten to be exact. I’m not sure this is all that great for the WordPress ecosystem with a potential new flood of “freemium” plugins flooding the market. Most of the website designers I know tend to buy the full license upfront, but we all know how well the rental model has treated Adobe.
Also I recently was working on The Bluebird Dinner’s website, see my blog post about it, and I saw the WP-filebase plugin being used. It is shaping up to be quite powerful but a little bit on the convoluted side of things when you are new to it. It’s about the same as items in WooCommerce’s plugin where you create one item and select it using the WP-Filebase plugin to show it in a specified area. Over all (if there is continued support) it’s quite a viable plugin!
Let’s Encrypt is a new SSL Certificate Authority: It’s free, automated, and open. And it’s now out of beta as of April 12th, 2016. Special note: wordpress.com and all of the subdomains that people are blogging on are now all under this Let’s Encrypt umbrella. So website security just got a bit better for the 22.6 billion pages that wordpress.com hosts for bloggers.
No WP Admins, you were NOT hacked! Yes, your Yoast Google Analytics plugins just changed hands to Monster Insights (see Twitter). This plugin is being developed and managed by Syed Balkhi & Chris Christoff. They admit they didn’t give enough warning to Admins before the drastic change with the addition of the bright green monster in the admin panel. Since then the icon in the WordPress Admin panel has changed and now just reads “Insights” with the monster to the left of it. Read the full write up on .
Information about REST API in Des Moines, Iowa
The WordPress Des Moines meetup group is having a talk about REST APIs, how they work and how you can use them with your website. Whether you’re a novice or an expert, Jordan Julson, Arthur M. Smith (Art) and Andy Brudtkuhl will break down how to get started at our next WPDSM Meeting on April 25th. BBQ and beverages provided. Meeting taking place at Gravitate (206 6th Avenue, Des Moines, IA). I’m hoping to get several people together from our Creative Corridor WordPress Meetup group to carpool to this event!
WordPress Meetup Des Moines, Iowa
The after party at Tanners Bar and Grill (CR,IA)
EPXCON 2016 Game Dev (Animation & Game Development at The University of Iowa)
EPXCON 2016 is being held at the University of Iowa’s Art Building West located at 141 N Riverside Drive, Iowa City, IA on both Saturday and Sunday. This event is for people who is interested in game development or, like me, just like to play games when they have a free moment.
Crowd in the Auditorium at EPXCON Game Dev
Eric Neuhaus’s booth at EPXCON Game Dev
You may recognize Eric Neuhaus from one of my other blog posts about game dev. He is showing off several of his new games at this year’s EPXCON. Eric is trying to get his most recent game Crystal Control II on Steam. Like he said, if he was making music he’d want to be on iTunes, seeing that he’s making games and he’s trying to get it on Steam.
Diego Floor’s booth at EPXCON Game Dev
I had a blast playing Diego Floor‘s game. He has been working on this game off and on for 3 years. You can play his addictive game called Apple and Worm: Patching holes in spacetime online now! It’s a fun game that still has some glitches, but definitely one of the several great games at this event.
KintoGames booth at EPXCON Game Dev
Hung out playing bit Dungeon II at the KintoGames booth with the designer and his son. You can buy it online from Steam today.
People at EPXCON Game Dev
Over all, this place was kinda dead. Unfortunately the promotion of this event isn’t what it should be! I, myself, didn’t hear about this event until last minute (thanks Eric Neuhaus). It is the 5th year that the University of Iowa has held this event. I’m hoping the word gets out better next year because the games from local designers were quite impressive. Alone there were conferences being held upstairs for aspiring animators and game developers! It’s a must go for any game dev in Eastern Iowa!
User experience/User Interface Design talk with Jessica Bertling: Fun w/ Web Dev & Pinball
Jessica Bertling, is a front end web developer in eastern Iowa. She and I became friends over Twitter revolving around several of the same interests. We are both heavily into website UI (User Interface Design) to give our users a better UX (User eXperience) and it turns out she also enjoys playing pinball as well!
So we decided to spend a Sunday morning talking shop and playing the silver ball. The great thing about people in the tech industry is that we are open about our experiences and lessons learned. She told me about the work she did for J&P Cycles (originally designed using C# / MVC, now using WebBaker CMS) and why she spent so much time making sure that the user interface worked on every browser that was on the market even the bane of every website designer’s existence. . . Internet Explorer (none of us were sad to see Microsoft kill that browser: let’s hope Microsoft Edge is better). I give you a hint, it was all about the money. Granted the highest percentage of users on J&P’s site were young bikers, but like she said, why would you give up a large chunk of money because of either an outdated browser or because Javascript was turned off?
Jessica now works at Newbo.co in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, as the lead UX/UI designer of multiple projects, including one for testing students. I’m expecting to see great things coming from that brand new company soon.
Art + Life + Tech (ALT) Community Lightning Talks in Iowa City, IA
Anyone can sign up for a 5 minute lightning talk at the A.L.T. (Art + Life + Tech) event held in the creative corridor area. Tonight’s ALT community lighting talks had a wide range of topics: From game development by Eric Neuhaus using Construct 2 which is an app produced by Scirra, to a presentation by Thomas Hansen creating web applications with background processing using backgroundworkers, to hacking an Amazon Echo presented by Wesley Beary.
Download Benjamin Oakes slide presentation about TechCorridor.io
Game Development by Eric Neuhaus:
Background notifications by Thomas Hansen:
Hacking an Amazon Echo by Wesley Beary:
Wesley Beary goes over techcorridor.io upcoming events:
