Veteran marketer/designer Allison Rae will present a simple, step-by-step approach for web developers and designers to create stunning, message-driven content that rivals your brilliant code. Allison incorporates marketing strategy into every aspect of her design work and will share tips and tools you can adapt to your own projects right away.

About the speaker

Allison Rae’s career in marketing communications spans nearly three decades. Her clients have included well-known Fortune and Inc. companies as well as private firms and public-sector agencies. She’s passionate about empowering entrepreneurs, executives, professionals and emerging leaders with the services and training needed to create a vibrant, effective presence across all media. You can find her work at AllisonRae.com

About the sponsor

Petroglyph Creative is an independent website developer working in ExpressionEngine and Open Source CMS, right here in Albuquerque.
For more info check out their website, petroglyphcreative.com/

REGISTER HERE FOR THIS EVENT

REGISTER FOR THIS EVENT

Quick reminder for those who don’t frequent the Facebook group: We’ve got an unofficial HTTQ event tonight in conjunction with the New Mexico Tech Council and some other groups. Join us for free food and refreshments at Newton’s Cradle, the coworking space adjoining O’Neill’s on Central, from 5 – 7pm.

To RSVP and learn more, head on over to www.meetup.com/nmtechscene/events/88400092/

If you’re still writing Plain Old CSS, you’re behind the times and slowing yourself down. In recent years, “CSS Preprocessors” like LESS, Stylus and SASS have emerged that make writing and maintaining CSS — particularly fancy CSS3 stuff — faster and easier than ever before.

In this session, Ben will introduce you to his favorite CSS preprocessor, SASS, and the accompanying Compass library that makes writing sophisticated, optimized cross-browser CSS a breeze. After briefly covering how to get SASS+Compass set up in a development environment (e.g. a Mac or Linux server), we’ll go over the basics of SASS syntax and the language structure before diving in to highlight a few of the more convenient and awesome parts of the Compass library.

You’ll be blown away at how easy SASS+Compass make it to keep your CSS organized, write responsive styles, generate easy-to-manage sprites, and output compiled CSS that’s compressed for production. You’ll never want to go back to writing plain old CSS ever again!

About the speaker

Ben Byrne is one of the c0-managers of HTTQ and has presented locally at Webuquerque (HTTQ’s predecessor) and WordCamp. Co-founder of Cornershop Creative, Ben does everything from UX planning to PHP programming, but his sweet spot is really in design and front-end development. SASS has changed his life and he hopes it’ll change yours too.

About the sponsor

The Graphics Station has been in the creative design business before the onslaught of the .com or even the exsistence of Google. Of course with changing technologies comes the adaptatation of business. What once was creative design by hand with traditional tools like acrylic and airbrush, is now typically done with photoshop and other mainstream desktop applications. The good news is you get the best of both worlds at The Graphics Station. Our designers have experience in old school design methodologies as well as the cutting edge design techniques and the tools of today.
For more info check out their website, thegraphicsstation.com/

REGISTER HERE FOR THIS EVENT

Apache HTTP server powers the vast majority of websites in the world, quite probably including yours. It’s a powerful, complex, and extremely configurable piece of software. Apache’s architecture includes several layers of configuration, including the ability for ‘normal’ users (non-system administrators) to configure Apache to do some very cool things; these features are available through ‘.htaccess’ files.

Greg and Elliot will give a basic overview of the Hyptertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), how Apache interacts with HTTP, and how you can configure Apache to do some pretty nifty things like load-balancing using the superpowered magic of regular expressions and mod_rewrite. Continue reading →

As with any new web development, responsive design provides as many headaches as opportunities. For the past year, Aryon Hopkins has been building responsive websites and will share his successes with small scale sites and tools that can be used on any size project.

Aryon’s Responsive Design Process:

1. Start over with an existing framework or WordPress theme.
2. Skin the theme simply for desktop, tablet and mobile.
3. Profit by providing a universal, future proofed, device independent experience.

Continue reading →

Huge thanks to Todd Jacobsen for presenting! Again, we had to split the video into 2 due to Vimeo’s upload restrictions (sorry about that).

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean script kiddies aren’t hacking your site to send spam for a Romanian Viagra merchant.

The Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP stack has become the platform of choice for many web developers. There are many LAMP frameworks and content management systems available – WordPress, Drupal, Expression Engine, Cake PHP, Joomla, Typo3, Ingeniux, Symfony, and CodeIgniter just to name a few – that deploy on a LAMP server in minutes.

While such software is essential, the ease of deployment and use of these tools can come at a cost on the security front. Like it or not, we all have to keep a step ahead of the bad guys.

To this end, we will cover various aspects of securing LAMP websites. While we will be using WordPress as a whipping boy, the topics covered apply to most any software running on Apache/PHP. Topics may include:

• common exploit techniques
• Apache/PHP server configuration (yes – including htaccess files)
• filesystem permissions
• application-level tips
• intrusion detection
• what to do when your site has been compromised
• why your client’s low-traffic site with no interesting data is still a valuable target for hackers

We will also show off some of the (admittedly cool) techniques and tools of the modern hacker.

Please join. Until then, keep your passwords obscure and keep an eye on your log files.

About the speaker

Todd Jacobsen transplanted himself in New Mexico 12 years ago, and does not miss the Midwestern winters. He is an open-source software advocate who believes that technology can make your life better. When Todd is not staring at a computer screen he enjoys rock climbing, falling off slack lines, riding motorcycles, and acrobatic yoga (yes, it’s a thing).

Todd was as a closet geek in middle school, when he spent his free time saving BASIC programs to audio cassette drives and dialing up a 9600 baud modem to connect to the local BBS. He has since studied some CS at the University of Wisconsin and the University of New Mexico.

When the Internet came about Todd did some work for an ill-fated startup, followed by a lot of tech support for some big ISP’s. He then spent a few years as the system administrator for a local ISP where he managed a bunch of Linux & FreeBSD servers, Cisco routers, and feisty techs.

Todd now works as a freelance *nix geek who spends his time coding web applications, tweaking servers, and unhacking web sites.

Sponsored by FosterMilo

We make and build things for the web to bring order to chaos (it can be said). So, what steps can we take, as visual designers, to “ease up” in our quest for pixel perfection? Come see some ways to gracefully transfer your perfected Photoshop mockups to the Web. In the end, you’ll still be friends with your developer!

About the Speaker

Samantha Metheny is a local freelance Web designer and developer who brings order to chaos on a regular basis. She’s been playing on the Web for a decade now, with no end in sight!

Come listen to some of the cool stuff people have been working on. We have 5 presenters this month talking about some recent projects they have been working on. Each presenter will have 5-10 minutes to show off his/her stuff. Our presenters this month are: Mark Casias – ioby.org Michael Herrick – Cascading Data Model Karen Arnold – WordPress Aaron Estrada – Python prototyping Eric Whitmore – Community Events   We will be out at the One Up Elevated Lounge at 7:00pm on June 6th. Go sign up over at june2012httq.eventbrite.com. As always we will be hanging out afterwards for drinks and good times. See you there!