Jared W. Smith

I’m off to my first South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, TX. I am not quite sure just how prepared I can be for this, the pinnacle of geek events. I can only hope to find enough bandwidth to pump out quick blog posts and tweets. This will be the first opportunity for me to meet my coworkers at ReadWriteWeb, and I’m really excited for that after many months of Skype-only contact. Keep an eye on what panels and parties I will be attending via Plancast, and if you’ll be there, shout out!

I’ll be leading a session about basic HTML and CSS on March 9 as part of the after-hours session series at Charleston Co-Working. My goal is to help attendees get a good grasp of HTML and CSS fundamentals, stressing the need to write clean, functional code that works with browsers past, present, and future. This will be a great session for people who are just starting out with hand-coding Web pages or for those who have picked some stuff up along the way, but want to reinforce those skills. We’re still tweaking the timing, but it will likely be at 6PM at our usual location at Rehava. Looking forward to seeing you there!

If you’ve been meaning to learn more about WordPress and you’re in Charleston, you’re in luck. Ian May, John Turner, and I will be giving a WordPress session at #chscowork tonight at 6 PM. Ian will give a walkthrough about how to get started with WordPress (both WordPress.com-hosted blogs and self-hosted WordPress.org installations); John will brief everybody on the beauty of WordPress MU and the upcoming multisite changes in WordPress 3.0, and I’m going to focus on a few really good plugins that I’ve come to rely on over the years. #chscowork is at the rehava Real Estate Store on International Blvd. See you there!

Please, allow me to be among the last to welcome you to 2010. Here’s hoping that, despite the first six days of the year already having elapsed, that the remaining 359 days are happy and healthy for you and yours.

Recently, I happened upon ImageOptim, a lightweight and incredibly effective image optimizer for PNG, JPEG, and GIF images (runs on Mac OS X only — sorry, Windows friends). It provides a ridiculously simple frontend to several commandline optimization tools. I often find myself dropping image sizes on an average of 20% per file — pretty impressive for already small .pngs that I work with. If you’re a Web designer and have Mac OS X, I consider this tool a must-have for squishing down your images to the last byte.

The Collecta blog has posted a neat case study about the Charleston flooding that happened a couple weeks ago, and how people used Collecta to tie together information from places like TheDigitel and @chswx (the Charleston Weather Twitter account I run) to keep up to date on the situation. I’m a big fan of Collecta, and an even bigger fan of the power of real-time technology to enable community journalism, so this case study is a fantastic. Also, if you haven’t read it already, Christopher Zorn’s account of his usage of Collecta to guide his family through the floods is another great example.

Increasingly, I’m sharing things that fit my definition of “interesting” over on my Posterous blog. If you haven’t tried it yet, Posterous is a neat way to share cool things quickly (as easily as sending an e-mail!). Some folks use it for their full blog, too. It lets you autopost to as many services as you can think of (including blogs that support MetaWeblog API, as WordPress does), so your shares can be broadcast far and wide. I’m currently posting to Tumblr and Facebook from mine; not quite sure I want to open my Twitter stream up to that just yet. Expect a future revision of jaredwsmith.com to include a spot for these shares. Are you using Posterous? Leave a comment — I’d love to see what you’re sharing.

I’ve resisted Google Chrome over the last year, primarily because it hasn’t been extensible. Well, that’s all changed. I’m running the development version of Chrome, Chromium, on my Mac, and starting to add extensions to it. (You can’t add extensions to the “official” Mac beta.) The speed is incredible, and makes the formerly nimble Firefox feel like it’s got a boat anchor attached to it. If you’re frustrated with Firefox, Chrome is an increasingly good option for any platform — Windows, Mac, and Linux. Try it out.

In advance of a doozy of a weather day, I’ve spent a portion of my evening revamping the Charleston Weather blog. I’ve installed the latest P2, Automattic’s excellent real-time WordPress theme, and I’ve also (with any luck) enabled PubSubHubbub for posts to the blog. Weather information is exactly what the real-time web is designed for, I think — tomorrow may be a great test of that. So, especially if you’re in Charleston, follow the blog tomorrow along with the alerts we’ll have on Twitter, Identi.ca, and Facebook. Hopefully things will turn out better than the strongly-worded alerts have been telling the story, but it’s tough to say.

Belated congratulations to Ken Hawkins and his team at TheDigitel for landing their recent investment. TheDigitel is a true asset to the Charleston community, both tech and otherwise; I know that I’ve become better in-tune with my city than ever not only because of the work they do, but because they permit citizens like you and me to directly contribute to the news. If you’re not in Charleston and think this sounds awesome, don’t fret: you can vote on the next city TheDigitel will serve. My best wishes to Ken and his team in this exciting new chapter in their venture!