Holland, MI - Web designers and developers looking for resources on learning ExpressionEngine 2 have a new resource available: Building an ExpressionEngine 2 Site - Small Business available now from Train-ee.com.

Train-ee.com was founded in early 2008 with the sole purpose of helping people learn ExpressionEngine fast.  Building an ExpressionEngine 2 Site - Small Business is a revised and expanded version of Train-ee’s first ExpressionEngine book offering.

In addition to showing a step-by-step process for building a complete small business website, the revised version of the book adds chapters on 404 management, improving site performance, configuring for client access, and extending ExpressionEngine with 3rd-party add-ons.

Initial reviews of the book have been favorable:
“Love the book! Like the first edition, it’s realistic, easy to follow and a supremely useful resource for EE developers new and seasoned. Super rad!”
Jenn Lukas, Happy Cog

“A terrific resource - there were a number of times I stopped and said “no s**t”.”
Paul Burton, 16toads Design

“I was really impressed with what you covered and how practical it is.”
Emily Lewis, Emily Lewis Design

The 362 page book is complimented by over 140 screen captures and organized into 28 chapters.  Building an ExpressionEngine 2 Site - Small Business is available immediately from Train-ee.com as a PDF, with a print version available through Lulu.com.  A ePub versions is in development.

Within a few minutes of listening it became very apparent that beyond “not half bad” they were actually really remarkable. What a treat! Ordered a steak and sank in, letting the music (and mojito) flow over me. A half hour later a lady from one of the front tables got up to sing with the band — which isn’t always a good thing. They started on The Man I Love and it was sublime. The song started out as a ballad but then they kicked it up to a fast afro-Cuban beat, and the singer scatted over the beats for a good 4-5 minutes. It turns out it was Janis Siegel of the Manhattan Transfer! I felt particularly fortunate as I had been bummed to miss the Manhattan Transfer show at the Montréal Jazz Festival in June, but here, of all the most random places, was one of my favorite members performing at a small family joint in Midtown West.

Janis sat down after one song but a string of similarly talented musicians came in and out of the band until the restaurant started to close down. I didn’t recognize any of them but the music was so good.

There was a recording device above the band that was collected by a fellow who I caught up with outside the restaurant as he was hailing a taxi. His name was Paul Siegel and he’s the co-president of Hudson Music which is a music education group (with a website powered by WordPress). I learned the percussionist leader of the house band was Pedro Martínez and Paul follows and records him several times a week at different venues. Apparently Guantanamera is a long-time musician hang-out where even folks like Eric Clapton sat in with the band.

Only in New York.

The new Kindle has a lot going for it. It’s inexpensive compared to a full-featured tablet computer like the iPad; you can slip it in your back pocket, where it’s more comfortable than an old-style paperback; and it includes a Webkit browser. This last point is where folks like us start to give a hoot, whether we’re fans of epub reading or not.

The flavor of Kindle’s browser concerns us because it affords us the ability to optimize the mobile viewing experience with a single line of markup. You can see this in action in the photo at the head of this article (published and discussed on Flickr).

I made no tweaks for Kindle per se; the Kindle is simply responding to a line of markup I’ve been putting into my web pages since 2007—namely, the viewport meta element, which controls the width of the viewport, thus enabling mobile devices with a limited number of pixels to focus all available pixels on your site’s core content (instead of, for instance, wasting part of the small screen on a background color, image, or gradient). The technique is as simple as web design gets:

meta name="viewport" content="width=770"

(Obviously, the value of “width” should be adjusted to match your site’s layout.)

I learned this little trick from Craig Hockenberry’s Put Your Content in My Pocket (A List Apart, August 28, 2007), which I naturally recommend to any designer who hasn’t seen it.

EllisLab, “Phil, how was the first CICON?”

Phil, “There was a bit of a rocky start with some technical difficulties, but even with those obstacles, we had a great, productive first day. Kevin Prince and Joel Gasgoine gave brilliant talks that everyone enjoyed, and Elliot Haughin had everyone laughing for his entire talk with his extreme clip-art usage and randomness.”

EllisLab, “Were there a lot of beginners, or mostly experienced CodeIgniter guys?”

Phil, “We had a lot of experienced developers. There was a Q&A session where attendees could ask ANYTHING about CodeIgniter. With Dean and I together, we gave answers to loads of questions where I think everyone learned a lot of new tips, tricks, methods and practices.”

EllisLab, “What type of experienced users are you hoping come to future events?”

Phil, “The first conference was aimed purely at the existing community to get people together. We’ve had lots of feedback from people saying they now feel like part of the community when they hadn’t before. That’s brilliant and we want to keep that going for the next community but we also want to aim higher. The next round of conferences will contain two tracks. Beginners and Advanced. We may need to work on the names for these but the basic idea is we run talks and masterclasses for people new to CodeIgniter who want to learn how to use it, and for the experienced users we can show them how to do some crazy stuff that will help in their day-to-day usage of CodeIgniter.”

EllisLab, “What topics are you focusing on?”

Phil, “The two tracks will obviously involve some pretty different content. For the first track we’ll be going through setting up CodeIgniter, integrating third party classes and code, getting things running on different servers and explaining how MVC can help with your applications. The more advanced track will be focusing on things like making content management systems, building API’s, creating multi-lingual systems, building mobile versions of your sites, and more.”

EllisLab, “What kinds of demos are you planning? “

Phil, “We’ll be running some demos of some of the top commercial CodeIgniter applications out there. Like this year we’ll be running a MojoMotor demo with some hands on sessions along with demos of some new applications like Pancake (http://pancakeapp.com/), iClassEngine (http://iclassengine.com/) and others).”

EllisLab, “So you are planning many more conferences like this?”

Phil, “Yes! We’re going to make this a global event. There will be three conferences, Holland, UK and Philadelphia in the States. We’ve learned a lot from our first go and with all the community feedback, we’re planning an amazing upcoming group of master-classes, talks, code share and more. We’re really excited about the upcoming year!”

Legendary art director Roger Black guests on tomorrow’s episode of The Big Web Show, co-hosted by Dan Benjamin and taped in front of a live internet audience.

Roger co-founded the following new companies: Webtype, creators of high-end fonts for online typography; Treesaver, a platform that uses CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and the principles of responsive design to publish beautifully formatted content on any device with a web browser; Ready-Media, which designs templates for newspaper and magazine publishers (and attracts controversy); and Nomad Editions, a series of digital weeklies designed directly for mobile devices.

Roger is also a founding partner in Danilo Black, an international design agency he co-founded with Eduardo Danilo, and The Font Bureau, a leading type foundry he co-founded with David Berlow.

“He pioneered the use of computers in design, cut the best deals, and made himself synonymous with the modern magazine,” wrote Michael Wolff in a New York Magazine profile of Roger back in the 1990s, when Roger was the best-known magazine art director in the world. (Among many others, he designed Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, The New Republic, Fast Company, Advertising Age, and Esquire.)

He also co-founded Interactive Bureau, one of the biggest and most successful web design agencies of the dot-com era.

In his free time, Roger putters around in his award-winning West Texas vacation home made of recycled shipping containers.

Roger Black is an astoundingly prolific creative force; we hope you can join us for this Episode of the show.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) is taped live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of taping, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web.

Photo of Roger Black at Happy Cog by Jeffrey Zeldman.

Legendary art director Roger Black guests on tomorrow’s episode of The Big Web Show, co-hosted by Dan Benjamin and taped in front of a live internet audience.

Roger co-founded the following new companies: Webtype, creators of high-end fonts for online typography; Treesaver, a platform that uses CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and the principles of responsive design to publish beautifully formatted content on any device with a web browser; Ready-Media, which designs templates for newspaper and magazine publishers (and attracts controversy); and Nomad Editions, a series of digital weeklies designed directly for mobile devices.

Roger is also a founding partner in Danilo Black, an international design agency he co-founded with Eduardo Danilo, and The Font Bureau, a leading type foundry he co-founded with David Berlow.

“He pioneered the use of computers in design, cut the best deals, and made himself synonymous with the modern magazine,” wrote Michael Wolff in a New York Magazine profile of Roger back in the 1990s, when Roger was the best-known magazine art director in the world. (Among many others, he designed Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, The New Republic, Fast Company, Advertising Age, and Esquire.)

He also co-founded Interactive Bureau, one of the biggest and most successful web design agencies of the dot-com era.

In his free time, Roger putters around in his award-winning West Texas vacation home made of recycled shipping containers.

Roger Black is an astoundingly prolific creative force; we hope you can join us for this Episode of the show.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) is taped live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of taping, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web.

Photo of Roger Black at Happy Cog by Jeffrey Zeldman.

We’ve updated the Twitter Timeline plugin so it works seamlessly with Twitter’s new requirements and meets the needs for the majority of the Community. For example, if you are displaying a user or public timeline, and the feed you are using is not private, all the updated plugin needs is a screen name and you’re good to go.

Please note that if you are using the Twitter Timeline plugin, the update is required. The old version will silently stop working.

Happy Tweeting!

Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers is now available as an epub at books.alistapart.com.

If you bought the paperback, watch your inbox for a special discount on the ebook. (To take advantage of this offer, enter the discount code in page 2 of the shopping cart’s checkout process, after you put in your billing information.)

Also, be on the lookout for our second book, CSS3 For Web Designers by Dan Cederholm, forthcoming this Fall. Upcoming A Book Apart topics include progressive enhancement, content strategy, responsive web design, and emotional design by industry-leading authors Aaron Gustafson, Erin Kissane, Ethan Marcotte, and Aarron Walter.