Write that down. At Colorado Mac Users’ monthly meeting at NCAR, taking notes on Mac laptop is optional. Meeting is also streamed to home viewers and podcast. (Photo: Paul Swansen)

There are so many awesome resources for bloggers and website owners around the Boulder area. All are part of the ultra-cool Meetup phenomenon, and attendance at all of the above is free of charge. The following is our list of very useful local Meetups:

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1. Dave Taylor hosts the Front Range Bloggers Meetup every month, with meetings alternating between LoDo Denver and Flatirons Crossing. Being a provincial Boulderite, I’ve only been attending the Flatirons Crossing one. It’s fun! Great meeting room, interesting gang of about 25-ish active bloggers. Since it’s in a private meeting room at the Gordon Biersch Brewery at Flatirons, food and libations available, too. Overhead projection makes it easy to view and critique each other’s blogs. The subject matter ranges from content issues to how to use WordPress successfully. Dave, for the uninitiated, is a very prominent national authority on tech and blogging, who presides over several successful blogs, including Ask Dave Taylor and Dave on Film. As with all Meetups, you can sign up and be kept informed of when and where the next meeting will be.

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2. The Boulder WordPress Meetup is designed, as the name suggests, for people using WordPress. Run by Jayson Cote, it’s been meeting at Slice of Lime, that ultra-cool design firm, on the Pearl Street Mall. It’s met twice so far, and at the latest meeting we broke up into two groups – those just starting out and those who are comfy rooting around inside the WordPress PHP code to to more advanced things. This was all very useful, as I ended up flitting from room to room and learning from both. Jayson has done a great job of bringing this Meetup into existence. It’s also a great place to meet some local designers and developers who might give you a hand with creating or maintaining a WordPress-based blog or website.

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3. Also very new, the Boulder Web Design Meetup has been organized by Michael Sitarzewski and has had one very productive meeting at pingVision’s offices on Walnut Street. The assembled group of about 25 seemed to be mostly fairly to very experienced designers and developers. The meeting, very well handled by Michael, was mostly an information exchange between attendees about semi-technical aspects of running websites. It was not ultra-techie but just techie enough to be useful to someone who’s been laboring in these trenches for a while. I do hope it continues to meet, because it was a fun and informative meeting in very pleasant surroundings with a fun, friendly group.

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4. And, since there’s a good chance that if you’re involved with Web content you’re at Macintosh user, you’ve gotta know about the monthly meetings of the Colorado Macintosh Users Group, held the second Thursdays of the month at NCAR in a really neat meeting room with ultra-highspeed Internet access. Deftly hosted by Jay Nelson, Jeff Gamet and others, its monthly three hours range from Apple gossip to presentations about the latest and best software for the Mac. The Apple-worship can get intense at times (gush!), and sometimes things get pretty technical. But I rarely miss a meeting, since the information presented is that valuable. And, you can make it more valuable by asking questions of very knowledgeable people. If you can’t make the beautiful drive up to NCAR, the meetings are usually available by live streaming video — or even by video podcast after the meeting. These guys don’t mess around! (Although listed on Meetup, the COMUG meeting has actually been around for years, before Meetup was born.)