After months of steady forward progress on Linux and Ruby on Rails as well as a good dose of insecurity about the page design, I’ve released Refresh Portland live.

For now, it’s just a splash/registration page but hopefully it’ll expand into something more later on down the road.

Launching the site was the easy part. The more challenging task is finding a good location for meetings that is amenable to hosting our little soiree.

Although Portland (Oregon) is famous for its abundance of great pubs and watering holes, I’d rather not alienate any young designers and developers that are under 21.

Anyone know of a cool place that might be a good candidate? You can partake in the conversation at the Google Group or send me a message.

One more thing. You may be asking yourself, “Why a cherry?” When I first started toying around with the idea of putting a Refresh together, I noticed that a lot of the other sites (at the time only Dallas and Phoenix) had a fruit motif going. I liked the idea and contiuned the trend. So, why a cherry? Oregon is one of the largest cherry exporters in the world.