Strange Folk Festival describes themselves:

Strange Folk is the Heartland’s largest outdoor indie arts and crafts show. We are featuring 125 vendors from across the country along with plenty of eco-freindly craft activities, exhibits, live bands, and local cuisine under a canopy of beautiful trees! Over 10,000 folks attended last year, and Strange Folk was declared “BEST OF 2008″ in the craft show category by The Riverfront Times.

Our vendors offer merchandise with aesthetics ranging from retro, pretty, punk, urban, and everything in between. All in price ranges that make it possible for anyone to afford a one-of-a-kind handmade creation. Besides our talented artisans, we strive for a variety of food and drink options, including coffee and vegetarian fare.

There are oodles of crafty activities for children and adults. As well as live music, and free Wi-Fi access available throughout the park. O’Fallon is just 15 minutes from downtown St. Louis, and easily accessible from both sides of the Mississippi.

Your family and friends will find the food, crafts and even the crafters interesting and fun. Knowing some of them personally, I can guarantee you’ll find something you can’t resist taking home.

Click the image above to go to the Strange Folk Festival site.

See you there!

The third annual St. Louis Brewers Heritage Festival is coming up. Across from the Missouri History Museum in Forest Park, the festival will run on June 5th and 6th with three sessions.

St. Louis is Beer Capital USA and this event will show case that history and heritage. Over 60 styles of beer will be available to sample along with foods from several of the areas most unique restaurants.

Beyond raising awareness of St. Louis’s brewing culture, the event doubles as a fundraiser for Lift For Life.

To tie this in with the theme of my blog, I’d like to talk about the Heritage Festival site regarding how it works. The site is well designed with no broken features or tricky behaviors. On the flip side, there is no real interactive side to the site.

Information is presented in straightforward text and images with no level of interaction other than navigating between the screens of information. In a few cases there are links that are not underlined, bolded or otherwise noted.

Unfortunately a good bit of the text is not presented as text but as part of an image. This prevents copying or deep linking, thus minimizing the easy of blogging about it or passing tidbits on.

As a follow up comment to that, there is no plain text version of the site for those that would prefer not to deal with the fancy graphics.

My conclusion is that the site is beautiful and works for what it is. However, a wee bit of interaction would greatly increase the draw to return visitors and increase the time users spend on the site.

All that aside, this is my type of event. See you there.

Todd
@tojosan on Twitter

Just a quick post to let you know about the social aggregation site for Inter:play at Playfest:STL 2008.

The site is hosted by ToastedRav and is found here – http://toastedrav.com/event/interplay2008.

You can also check out my Interplay pictures. I’m only adding about five at a time to begin.

Also, if you haven’t done so, please check out the St. Louis Bloggers Guild site for more about the festival.