Tonight I attended the first Denver Meetup for jQuery enthusiast. It was a great oppourtunity to meet others who are interested in jQuery and discuss a wide range ideas and solutions. There was no surprise that there was a number of Drupal'ers in the crowd, including myself, considering the amount of jQuery is used in Drupal itself.

Great take aways of the meeting are:

1. jQuery is used on 25% of the websites on the internet
2. Its growing fast, and has become much larger than YUI or Mootools
3. When developing an enterprise site host the jquery.js file locally, else consider using their CDN hosted file which I belive is "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js" more info on this.
4. ThemeRoller is badass and I will be checking into it further
5. Builtwith.com is a great site to see what other sites are built on
6. Performance: jQuery is faster at selecting #IDs then .classes

Links to the meetup:

• jQuery meetup site (more official)
• Meetup.com

 If you live in the Denver metro area or like to drive long distances, you should stop by DOM (700 Kalamath St Denver, CO) the 3rd thursday of each month.

Edited (01-23-2010)

At work we soft-launched the Video Testimonial Widget this week. In summary its a way for customers to leave video recorded feedback for companies to watch and learn from as-well-as to share with other customers. Tell me about your monkeys.

Hooray, I have started on the wireframes!
Immediately, I have realized that I might be over complicating the RSVP. I will explore this further and try to find a useful straight-forward solution. In end the RSVP needs to accomplish two major goals, let the visitor register and directly use this content as a printable Master-list.

I should probably take a step back and do some Information Architecture diagrams to follow the flow of information.

One thing I am pretty sure of is that I want to release this site in two phases, a "Registration Phase" and an "After-party Phase".

On a side topic, I did set up a quick little splash page for visitors who might come to our site in response to our Christmas letter.

Link: dannyandandrea.com OR danoandandrea.com

Over the next couple weeks I'm going to work through the process of building our wedding website. 

To start things off I would like to state the purpose, features, and define what content that is required.

Purpose:
The main purpose of the website is to share with our family and friends information that is important for our wedding.

Features (Most to least important):

1. RSVP
2. Contact Us Form
3. Mailinglist / Blog Subscription - to communicate events and when things are happening
4. Video and/or Photo Album
5. Music Poll (What would you like to hear?)
6. Countdown Clock
7. Registry

Content:

1. Events, When and Where
2. Hotel Location and Maps
3. General Information
4. Story of how we meet
5. Thank you page

Technology to be used:

1. Illustrator - Wireframes
2. Photoshop - Mockups
3. CMS  - Drupal
4. CSS - Style
5. jQuery - UI/UX

In the spirit of Jonathan Ive I have bolded the essentials, in-other-words,  what is actually necessary.

Next Step, Wireframes. I will also be explorating throughout the entire website building process.