Photo by rasone from Flickr

I apologize for the late official posting on this, I’m currently traveling and was without Internet for the morning. And, since I will not be there, I expect everyone to have a rad ass time and make me feel bad for missing out on the fun.

BIG thanks to Vidoop for sponsoring the last 3 Beer and Blog sessions! It has been a pleasure to meet everyone from this hot new firm and buying beers has certainly made you all more welcome

You can RSVP on Upcoming, but let’s be honest, it’s only 3 hours away.

When you host an event at a specific place for several months and you decide to move it, you should give people ample notice. But, somehow it got to be Friday and I’m just now posting about tonight’s Beer and Blog. We’re going to try a new venue out because we’ve out grown the Green Dragon. They have been good to us, but people can’t hear and if any more showed up, we couldn’t accommodate them. So, let’s try Plan B (formerly Acme).

This is the 2nd of 3 waves of Vidoop employees coming through town and they will be sponsoring tonight’s session. Michael Richardson (@mtrichardson) will be sharing a special announcement from Vidoop that was originally described to me as:

“Vidoop will be launching and seeking feedback on a new product that enhances usability of OpenID”

I was able to get a little more info from them last night and I think their announcement will spark much discussion about the next generation of the social web on which we all blog currently. You won’t want to miss out on this opportunity to geek out on this fascinating topic. Especially when the first round is on Vidoop.

RSVP on Upcoming

This meet up marks the first of 3 Beer and Blogs that will be sponsored by Vidoop. They are sponsoring these sessions because they have a grip of Vidoop employees coming to Portland over the next few weeks and would like to show them a good time. How rad is that?

It is only fitting then that we’ll have two Vidoopers, Scott Kveton (@kveton) and Michael Richardson (@mtrichardson), leading the first of these sessions in a talk about DiSo. If you’re not familiar with DiSo, that’s ok because that is what this talk will be about. It is a distributed social project that seeks to replicate the functionality of social networks in an open, distributed manner.

Here are a couple of links to get you going:

• Chris Messina’s announcement of the collaboration effort with Steve Ivy
• Steve Ivy’s announcement of DiSo intentions
• DiSo project home page
• DiSo Google Code site

For your reference, Chris Messina (@factoryjoe) went to work for Vidoop in order to work on his DiSo project full time. So, we should be getting some rad information for the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Not that Scott or Michael have horse mouthes. I’m going to stop typing now.

RSVP on Upcoming

There are many reasons to optimize your blog and make it load as fast as possible. You’ll use less bandwidth, save money, and make your readers happier.

But there is yet another reason to make sure you site loads as fast as possible. It is one of the easiest things you can do to reduce the energy your site uses. Unfortunately, most web sites don’t do the basic things that would make them run faster and use fewer resources.

So this week at Beer and Blog we’ll shave seconds off an example blog using simple techniques and do our little part to make our blogs greener.

I’m totally interested in how to speed up my blog, especially since I know now that it helps the environment too! Come join us to learn some ninja tricks. Also, we’ll be making a cool announcement about a sponsor that is going to pay for the first round of the next 3 Beer and Blogs after this one.

Rad shit is happening.

Ok, if you’ll be there, RSVP on Upcoming por favor.

Since this is RailsConf, there will be some smart out-of-towners joining us. Help me make a quality representation of PDXers at the Green Dragon tomorrow from 4-6pm. If you’ll be there, an RSVP on Upcoming would be kindly appreciated.

Just like the good ‘ol days of Beer and Blog, tonight we’re going to have a work session. I know I’ve been wanting to launch my new blog for some time now, so I plan to be working on it. If you have some updates, plugins, or design work that you’d like some help with, bring it down to the Green Dragon! If you’d like to let peopl know you’re coming, then RSVP on Upcoming.

Since summer has decided to show up before spring, we’re going to celebrate the glowing orb in the sky by having a BBQ in the park. @brampitoyo and his Saturday creative group are joining us at Alberta Park today. I’ll bring a grill and some charcoal, you bring something to put on it. I’ll also have some ketchup, mustard, and mayo as well as paper plates and cups. In case we are all feeling it, I’ll have a Wiffle ball and bat as well as a Frisbee at the ready for some good ‘ol fashion brand-name plastic fun in the sun.

The party starts at 12pm, and I plan to be there until 3pm. If you’ll be there and want to let your light shine, you can RSVP on Upcoming.

Most of us probably check on our traffic stats for our blogs. But, how many of us actually know how to drill down on our stats to find the valuable information that could direct our blogging activities? This session is going to explore techniques for mining your traffic stats on Google Analytics, MyBlogLog, Feedburner, and maybe some more. Learn how to discover new relationship opportunities, find out what has caused bumps in your traffic, what you should post more about, and more. We’ll also talk about patterns in traffic and how you can maximize the output of your pattern.

We’ll be at the Green Dragon from 4-6pm, and as always, you can RSVP on Upcoming.