The next #bsktweetup will be the 18th Basingstoke Tweetup, which equates to a year and a half of the monthly meets having been organised.

In that time, we’ve also had 18 people with Twitter accounts come to at least one event, with another two or three as guests for the evening. There’s also been several people who have made contact and said they are interested in coming to a meet (either through @bsktweetup or through our Facebook page) but have yet to show up. Organiser Gary Jones would love to see more people there.

“We’re always encouraging new users to attend, to just come along and try the event out. We’re in the same place on the second Thursday of each month, so there’s no confusion about turning up to find no-one else there.” said Gary. “Our twitter account currently has 159 followers, so even allowing for some non-human and non-local followers, that’s still about 100 people who have considered coming along or otherwise interested in what we do.”

The first event was covered by the local newspaper, and attendance for the early events was around 12 people. Gary would like to see the number of core attendees rise back up to those numbers.

“The more people who attend the better the evening goes. It’s more social, with more people to chat to and more conversations going on at the same time.” insisted Gary. “Conversation topic are wide ranging as we focus on being a social group of friends and not limit ourselves to any one area.”

The next tweetup will be on the 9th September 2010, at the Red Lion Hotel in Basingstoke town centre. You can find event details and RSVP on the invite.

Original image copyright: Daisy Bliss.

The 14th #bsktweetup event will be on the 13th May, at 8pm at the Red Lion Hotel in Basingstoke town centre.

New and old faces are welcome to come along!

If you want to add all of the upcoming bsktweetup events to your calendar, then you can use the shared iCal calendar from Google, via then you can use the following link:

Basingstoke Tweetups Calendar

This will download a basic.ics file which you can import into your iCal-enabled program.

Alternatively, use the same url (http://gmj.to/bskical) as the source of a live shared calendar.

The 13th #bsktweetup event will be on the 8th April, at 8pm at the Red Lion Hotel in Basingstoke town centre.

It would be great to see some previous attendees who have only got to one or two previous events.

Equally, it was also be fantastic to get some new people to come along. So, even if you’re not a big Twitter fan, come along anyway just for the social aspect! We don’t bite!

The new site had been given a temporary design for a while, so it was time to call in a designer and developer who knew what they were doing. Enter graphic designer Darcy from Graphically Designing and Gary from Gamajo Tech, a web development company from Basingstoke.

Darcy, based in Iowa in the US, was given free reign on the design, with the only conditions being that the logo was to stay as it was, and that the Twtvite invite was to stay in the sidebar.

Rather than go backwards and forwards trying to perfect a design in Photoshop, Darcy and Gary worked collaboratively on the live site evolving it as they went along. This approach to designing in the browser was new to Darcy, but provided instant feedback on the design in it’s native environment.

Working with Gary on this design was a lot of fun. Since they already had a logo and color palette in place, my job was to pull it all together. Since this site is based on Twitter, we wanted to echo Twitter’s rounded, bubbly style. Using a font face similar to Twitter, a bit of web 2.0, and the same radiant curves, we were able to tie in the inspiration for the site into the site itself.

I hope the design provides the perfect backdrop for the true shining star around here – the chance to get to meet local people.Darcy

There weren’t too many technical challenges on this project. The site and base theme were already in place, so my main task was to implement the design elements that Darcy provided.

The tweetroll was an added extra – instead of using the native WordPress widget for links, I decided to write my own function to achieve the same. This then allows changing the format of the links in one single place in the code, rather than having to edit each link individually.

Grabbing the Twitter avatar for each user was also interesting. I took the code implemented and described at Twivatar and created a copy on my own so that we weren’t relying on an site outside of our control.Gary

Though this was the first project Darcy and Gary had worked on together, future projects may be in the pipeline.